I got the Trash-O-Matic 68000 built and working! Bonus points: I was working on noise reduction circuitry and accidentally came up with an entirely new effect. XD This video shows the six basic voices plus the new effect (which I’m calling BERTHOLD RAYS) but doesn’t show the adjustments you can also make with the knob on the side. Supervillains must have our devices, and this is one of ours. XD

Enjoy:

Previous Trash-O-Match 68000 post | < a href="https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/2016/06/20/another-weekend-of-noodling-with-electrics/">Version 1.2 update post

Good night Gracie, that was a surprise! Apparently the way to get funding is to say that none of the curves show you making funding! XD Thanks so much to everyone who decided to back the project in either money or rebroadcasting – I’d still hoped we’d make it, but I didn’t think we’d close the final 23% overnight. XD Thanks to you all!

The project stays open through the end of the 30-day backing period. If you came to back the project, you still can – we’ll have plenty of expenses beyond basic duplication. Any overage will go towards printing the CD booklet, buying jewel cases and the UPC barcodes you need to be listed on Amazon and played on Pandora – things like that. All the backer rewards are available until the end of the project period.

But mostly this is about thank you! Once the project closes and confirms, we’ll go ahead and place the orders. Payout is delayed a couple of weeks, but that’s what credit cards are for. XD Thanks again!

ps: OH! I almost forgot: the guest appearance I’m making with Leannan Sidhe on Valentine’s Day is actually open to the public! I’d thought it was private. It’s a Humane Society fundraiser in Burien, Washington. $3 minimum donation required. Click over to the shows page for details!

We have our final mastering session on Tuesday! Shortly after that, we’ll have what should be the final disc master. Hopefully on the following Friday, we’ll have the funding to get duplicates made! Anna was listening to the current test master last night, and is really impressed with what a good mastering studio can do, so that’s pretty exciting!

Of course, I have to listen to it another zillion times before Tuesday, and honestly, that’s not exciting, because it’s like reading your own novel into the ground – most of what you hear are the things you’d like to do better. So I took a few days away from it and listened to the test master again, earlier this week, and I gotta tell you – I’m proud of this thing. I may suck at PR and I may not be good at talking people into caring, but this is a fucking good first album.

As I type, we’re at about 77% of duplicator funding on Kickstarter, with a week to go. (It says eight days, but it’s seven and a half, and counting down as I type.) If we don’t make 100% of target, then we actually end up with 0% of funding, and I admit I’m getting pretty nervous. If you’re already a backer, thank you so much – and I hate to ask more of you, but could you post about the project? One word from you is worth a hundred times any number of words from me, because you’re not the ones with the vested interest.

If you’re not because things are just too tight right now – well, for various reasons reasons, this whole last decade has been pretty hard on us, too, long before the Great Recession started. I understand. But you can still back us informally, if you want, by reposting about the album and the project to get it made.

Because, honestly? We won’t make funding on the strength of my talking about it. There isn’t one curve projection that shows us making funding that way. But you guys talking – that changes it. Here are the URLs:

Kickstarter URL:

Band website:
http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com

Thanks.

So Tom Smith linked to this incredibly relevant to our interests article today, featuring this graph:

Plays Share and Growth

So! My agenda is clear and obvious!

1. GET THE FUCK ONTO YOUTUBE. Okay! Have to shoot a video! That’s fun. And:

2. GET THE FUCK ONTO PANDORA. Can do, sport! This one’s much easier to at least attempt. But I need to go ahead and get something I was going to get anyway:

A UPC barcode or several. One right away for Dick Tracy Must Die, more later. I know CD Baby is a decent place to get them but I’ve also heard they’ve kinda started sucking lately. Is there a better place or are they still okay?

Paraphrased:

Venue manager: Yes, absolutely, we can provide sound.

Bandleader: Okay, great! What’ve you got?

Venue manager: Oh, it’ll do everything – it’s a karaoke machine!

…I’ll be bringing in my own PA.

A week and a half left, and we’re 75% towards fundraising goal – become a backer! Dick! Tracy! Must! Duplicate!

Hey, if you have accounts on Digg, Technorati (hi guys: X9ZC64XQKZ2P ), anywhere else like that – could you add the band website and blogsite to it in your accounts? I’ve been reading this book on discoverability and those are sites I never use and have no presence on, and, supposedly, should!

Band official URL: http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com

Band blog official URL: https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog

Band blog RSS feed: https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/feed/rss2

Pleeeeeeeease? Thanks!

(I’m trying to figure out things like HOW I CAN DO BOOKMARKS and all that, lol.)

I just posted this to the Kickstarter site as an update, but that doesn’t echo around. TL;DR: we’re at 65% of funding, we have technically 15 but really 14 days left, mastering is awesome, tell your friends, your enemies, that guy with the sign on the corner saying the police are communist – whoever will listen! Two words from you carry a dozen times the weight of two hundred from me.

Here’s the update:

The first mastering session went really well. Mastering is when you take the final mixes of a bunch of songs and process them for CD and digital download – you’re evening out levels across all the tracks, adjusting equalisation so that everything behaves better across different sorts of speakers and in different environments, setting spacing between tracks, and things like that. It’s a collection of subtleties, really, but as with all such things, they add up.

It’s also something you don’t do yourself. You can do a lot to be as mastering-session-ready as possible, and we did those things, but it has its own set of skills. Plus, you just need the fresh ears on the project. As I’ve heard credited to Jeff Bohnhoff, “Mastering your own album is like defending yourself at your own murder trial,” and just for the record, we’ve learned from our mistakes. XD

So we’re working with Mark Guenther at Seattle Disc Mastering. He runs a vacuum-tube-driven mastering studio – I’m pretty sure his D/A converter alone cost more than all our equipment combined, and I’m not even joking a little – but that’s kind of exactly what we need for our DIY low-end digital monster sound. We need something like that to take that brittleness off, and we are very much liking what we hear.

15 days to go – well, 14, really – and we’re at 65% of funding. If you’re considering what to do – trust me, we’ve put a our own money into this thing, in spades. Time in a mastering studio is not cheap. (And for good reason – that was over $150,000 worth of equipment I sat down in front of a couple of days ago at Mark’s studio.) That’s purely out of pocket.

If you’ve decided to back us but haven’t yet, any time is good! ^_^ Click on Project Home and click the big green shiny BACK THIS PROJECT button today!

And if you’re already a backer – thank you, thank you, thank you so much. And I hate to ask anything else of you, but I am: would you tell your friends? The words of backers are a hundred times more persuasive than anything we can say. If we don’t make at least 100%, we don’t get funded at all, and we’d really, really like to get there. Point them to the project site:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/solarbird/dick-tracy-must-duplicate-launch-our-cd

The rest of you, I hope you’ll check out our band website:

http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com

…and sign up with us. This planet isn’t gonna conquer itself, after all! XD And thanks.