Full Time is Coming
Friday, July 28th, 2023 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio84F, sunny, and humid, but windy... this Friday morning. We had a couple thunderstorms roll through very early... between 3 and 5AM.
The wifi repeater and the cameras have been doing fine all week!.. even when it got up to 94F the past two days, with a heat index of 100F. They've been running 24/7 without any issues.
Last night, I continued working on graphics for, Coffeehouse Boyfriend, and now I'm almost done. I need one more song illustration, and then the album cover.
--<>--
It's been kind of a head trip, going through all those old drawings and photos this week.
Let's look at some examples of what I came up with...
In the song, Chasing You Away, I sing the line, "You stole my boom box and you headed straight for the door."
And the inset drawing I found explains the significance of the boom box.
That and a hollow body bass guitar were my first recording studio.
I had a lot of songs back then, that I practiced every day, so I could play & sing them through in one take.
But after a while, I started wishing I could do a little more...
This graphic for the song, Idiot, shows the studio that the song itself was recorded on, along with a little diagram from my notebook about repairing a faulty pair of headphones.
"two tape decks with joined, mono-fied ins and outs (married)"
That's what I've referred to in the past as my, "ping-pong" recorder.
Basically, both tape decks had separate left and right microphone input jacks... so I could record the bass on the left and my voice on the right... in a live take.
Then that recording was sent to the other deck, where it became mono... meaning both the bass and voice were on both the right and left.
Then I could take that mono tape, stick it into the first deck, plug a microphone into, say, the right... and sing a harmony.
Or, in the case of the song, Idiot, I think I sung a harmony and played a little bit of extra bass in a higher octave, to complement the first bass.
--<>--
The drawback to a ping pong cassette recorder is that the more tracks you add, the more generation loss you get.
But I used to experiment with this thing, doing rhythm stuff first... with like shakers and little cans for bongos or whatever... then add the backing stuff next... then do the lead vocals and bass last.
That way the generation loss was suffered most by just the rhythm and backing stuff, which didn't matter as much.
After a while, I bought what was being marketed as a karaoke boom box, and added that to the setup.
The new boom box not only gave me some amped speakers, but it had a little EQ on it, and a reverb knob!
So that allowed me to have a little more control of the sound quality, and monitor things in the room, rather than in headphones... and I could add reverb to stuff!
The fourth incarnation of the studio... still ping-pong... included more speakers, a better speaker amp, a full equalizer, and a new bass guitar.
--<>--
All of that was before the cassette four track recorder!.. but now you can get an idea why I was saving up money to buy myself one, by 1996.
Coffeehouse Boyfriend is the best ten tracks from those analog years, from boom box, through ping pong, to four track recorder.
But for me it was interesting to revisit all this and realize that I spent my twenties just... tinkering with wires and solder guns, and drawing and writing in notebooks, and taking film photos of everybody, and writing and recording songs.
------------{=0=}------------
END OF DAY
So I found out today at work that they need me back to full time on Monday, August 14th... a week before classes actually start.
I told Chantele that was fine, but that I wanted to take a few days off before that, and she okayed it.
So I will be off on August 9th, 10th, and 11th... a WED, THU, and FRI... giving me a five day weekend before I go back to full time... forever!
That'll give me time to clean the house and spend some quality time with the pets before I go back to vanishing until midnight five days a week.
------------{=0=}------------
In other news, I finished the final graphic for Coffeehouse Boyfriend late tonight.
On the way home from work, I stopped at Oakhurst forest preserve, which is the site of a large hill by a small lake where me and my friends used to hang out... because it's only a couple miles from the house.
That was the site mentioned in the line of, Melancholy Moon that goes, "Melancholy moon, rising by the hill. That's where we used to waste our time."
I took a photo of the hill, and then at home, processed it, and turned it into a night scene with the appropriate half-moon in the sky (melancholy moon, oh, split in two) and the result is below...
°¦}
https://soundcloud.com/snoozefestaudio
The wifi repeater and the cameras have been doing fine all week!.. even when it got up to 94F the past two days, with a heat index of 100F. They've been running 24/7 without any issues.
Last night, I continued working on graphics for, Coffeehouse Boyfriend, and now I'm almost done. I need one more song illustration, and then the album cover.
It's been kind of a head trip, going through all those old drawings and photos this week.
Let's look at some examples of what I came up with...
In the song, Chasing You Away, I sing the line, "You stole my boom box and you headed straight for the door."
And the inset drawing I found explains the significance of the boom box.
That and a hollow body bass guitar were my first recording studio.
I had a lot of songs back then, that I practiced every day, so I could play & sing them through in one take.
But after a while, I started wishing I could do a little more...
This graphic for the song, Idiot, shows the studio that the song itself was recorded on, along with a little diagram from my notebook about repairing a faulty pair of headphones.
"two tape decks with joined, mono-fied ins and outs (married)"
That's what I've referred to in the past as my, "ping-pong" recorder.
Basically, both tape decks had separate left and right microphone input jacks... so I could record the bass on the left and my voice on the right... in a live take.
Then that recording was sent to the other deck, where it became mono... meaning both the bass and voice were on both the right and left.
Then I could take that mono tape, stick it into the first deck, plug a microphone into, say, the right... and sing a harmony.
Or, in the case of the song, Idiot, I think I sung a harmony and played a little bit of extra bass in a higher octave, to complement the first bass.
The drawback to a ping pong cassette recorder is that the more tracks you add, the more generation loss you get.
But I used to experiment with this thing, doing rhythm stuff first... with like shakers and little cans for bongos or whatever... then add the backing stuff next... then do the lead vocals and bass last.
That way the generation loss was suffered most by just the rhythm and backing stuff, which didn't matter as much.
After a while, I bought what was being marketed as a karaoke boom box, and added that to the setup.
The new boom box not only gave me some amped speakers, but it had a little EQ on it, and a reverb knob!
So that allowed me to have a little more control of the sound quality, and monitor things in the room, rather than in headphones... and I could add reverb to stuff!
The fourth incarnation of the studio... still ping-pong... included more speakers, a better speaker amp, a full equalizer, and a new bass guitar.
All of that was before the cassette four track recorder!.. but now you can get an idea why I was saving up money to buy myself one, by 1996.
Coffeehouse Boyfriend is the best ten tracks from those analog years, from boom box, through ping pong, to four track recorder.
But for me it was interesting to revisit all this and realize that I spent my twenties just... tinkering with wires and solder guns, and drawing and writing in notebooks, and taking film photos of everybody, and writing and recording songs.
So I found out today at work that they need me back to full time on Monday, August 14th... a week before classes actually start.
I told Chantele that was fine, but that I wanted to take a few days off before that, and she okayed it.
So I will be off on August 9th, 10th, and 11th... a WED, THU, and FRI... giving me a five day weekend before I go back to full time... forever!
That'll give me time to clean the house and spend some quality time with the pets before I go back to vanishing until midnight five days a week.
In other news, I finished the final graphic for Coffeehouse Boyfriend late tonight.
On the way home from work, I stopped at Oakhurst forest preserve, which is the site of a large hill by a small lake where me and my friends used to hang out... because it's only a couple miles from the house.
That was the site mentioned in the line of, Melancholy Moon that goes, "Melancholy moon, rising by the hill. That's where we used to waste our time."
I took a photo of the hill, and then at home, processed it, and turned it into a night scene with the appropriate half-moon in the sky (melancholy moon, oh, split in two) and the result is below...
°¦}
