Do you, yourself, make a thing that you want to show or even sell to other people? THIS IS YOUR POST! It’s kind of like what Scalzi does, but just one post, rather than a whole week of them, because his audience is way bigger than mine. But I know I have creative people following me, too.

So, your crafts, music, books, electronics, sculpture, arts, whatever: talk about it HERE SPECIFICALLY in comments! Not on whatever echo this is, but OVER HERE. I’ll collect and repost them as a separate blog entry next Monday.

And tell friends, so they can do it too. 😀

We’re finally recording the readings this weekend! Yay! Some test recordings and such on Saturday, and hopefully we’ll keep some of those, and the finals on Sunday.

Also, I got the Klopfenpop remix/bonus track in from Josh, and I have to say he’s really outdone himself. This is great work, and not what I expected, but totally fitting. You’ll love it.

Next week I want to do a show-off-your-stuff post, so if you have anything you do or make or write and want to talk about it, look for that on Monday and start commenting. It’ll be like Scalzi’s, except I’ll make a top-layer collation post too.

So watch for that next Monday.

Anyway, got to prep for the final readings. Have a good weekend, everybody!

One of the big tricks you have to do when throwing your album and/or single out there – either or both, honestly – is say “fans of <foo> will like this, too!”

Typically, that’s who you sound kind of like. I flailed around on that pretty hard with Dick Tracy Must Die, and I’m still not happy with choices I made.

So who would you list?

I think it’s clear that the lists would be different for the songs (particularly “Something’s Coming” and “Song for a Free Court/Anarchy Now!”) than for the instrumentals. So both of these would be really helpful.

Obviously, I’ve got a few – mostly the ones left over from Dick Tracy Must Die for the songs, and a bunch of Newfoundland and Quebecois trad bands for the instrumentals. But I’m not happy with either list.

Got any ideas? I really could use the suggestions.

A couple of years ago, I could still walk in to Best Buy and test mixes on an assortment of consumer-grade CD players. And while I’ve been calling CDs “concert souvenirs” for a while now – that’s what they are, people want them, people want you to sign them, they still have value – I haven’t entirely realised how true that is.

Part of that is because CD sales as of 2013 (iirc) were still the largest single sales segment. And they’re by far the largest sales segment in albums, despite vinyl’s resurgence.

But… a couple of years ago… I could still walk in to Best Buy and test a CD full of music tracks on an assortment of consumer-grade players. While it’s partly a ritual, it also serves a real purpose – does your mix survive all these different weird players?

And now I can’t. I couldn’t even test it one one, because there weren’t any. The only CD audio players were in the Magnolia HiFi audiophile ministore.

But that’s fine, right? I’m not stupid, I have exactly the same track mix on my phone, and for this exact reason. But then it got really annoying, because I couldn’t test-listen with my phone, either. Sometime in the last year, Best Buy tied all their display gear down to preset sample tracks, which no doubt hide their flaws and emphasise their strengths. Play your own music to see how that sounds? Nope.

Not cool, Best Buy. Not cool at all.

It’s a little surprising, to be honest, because of those sales numbers. Are all those CDs still being sold – a decent number – going into older, legacy players?

So I went poking around online – Best Buy is the midrange, let’s drop down market segments a little. Target’s page on audio brings up a turntable before a CD player, but they at least have a few – Crosley, the maker of retro-styled audio gear, and Jensen.

It took going to Walmart to find a bit of a selection – or Amazon, of course. But what you seem to have is audiophile and low-end, and not a whole lot in between. Just like the American economy. Aheh.

Which leaves home theatre as the last mass-market stop for physical media. But do people actually do this? Do people play CDs on home theatre systems? I don’t. Never have. Anna doesn’t either. We’ve had it set up for AirPlay for a while, along with all the other audio – we pipe mp3s over the LAN.

But most people aren’t going to do that until it’s a standard feature, or at very least, common. So maybe other people pop CDs into the BluRay player? Is that a thing?

Of course, the CD… it’s a concert souvenir, so it doesn’t really matter. Rip and put in the souvenir box, right? No big.

Until computers stop having optical drives in three years’ time. Then what’re we going to do for souvenirs?

So after all the eye surgery adventures last winter, I fell six months behind on everything, and then summer was filled with surprise extra tasks and work that aren’t related to music… or, really, fun… at all. But I had a lot of catching up to do, and it needed to happen.

And I finally have been. I haven’t been around the last few days in no small part because I have finally beaten down my to-do list to items that were on it before GeekGirlCon 2013 (the weekend my right eye went lol no) and all of those adventures. I diagnosed the roomba’s problem and repair parts are on the way. The minor ceiling repairs (cosmetic, really) upstairs that I started right before all that? Finished. The small mountain of weird credit union rewards points I apparently had? Sorted and spent! And so on.

Not to mention the album, of course. I just dropped Release Candidate 1 for another track. o/

The downside of all that kind of catch-up work is that I’m really kind of out of performance shape, and I need to start working on that now. Studio shape – that, I’m in. But that’s very different to performance shape.

I guess it’s a little like the difference between being trained for sprinting and trained for a marathon. Right now, I’ve been in studio a couple of months, I’m real good at short bursts, because that’s what you need, and you need to be your best at it. But that’s tiring. Live, you also need to be at your best, but in a different way that doesn’t crash your stamina. And I need to switch back to that.

Plus, I need to be booking events. I mean damn. But it’s about time to be thinking about spring anyway, so at least, this time, I’m not late.

But yeah. Catching up, one task at a time, and far enough along that old things are coming off the stack. I’m tired, but it’s the good kind of tired, and now, the decks are almost clear, and we can be moving forward again.

And in this case, the inspiration I need for these vocals is a psychopath who can throw lighting around like confetti. So I made a little shrine to Azula. I got the idea when I spontaneously added the line, “not you, Zuzu” in rehearsal.

“I imported it from the Fire Nation. They make the best red stuff there!”

Also, you might notice I moved the studio closer to the lava core for this track. Fire nation, j0.

Do you have a crazyspiration, or is that just a supervillain thing? You should get one. It’s motivational.

Okay okay okay so I’m playing my way through fast scales over and over, while running the midi device selector up several dozen instruments towards the one I want, which means the instrument being played by the keyboard is changing constantly? And I let go of the “next instrument” button as I quit playing (on the tonic) and it lands on “orchestral strike.”

BOOM

I could not do that on purpose if you paid me. XD

Remember my unexpectedly easy mic stand mount for a pair of bongo drums? It lasted exactly as long as it needed to, but not one second longer. The midrange drums recording I was doing – they may be bongos technically but I wasn’t playing them in that style – I got completely done. Then when I started taking the drum off the stand – CRACK! The epoxy separated and that was that.

But having the drums on a mic stand was pretty cool, and I’d like to be able to do it again later. So I’ve come up with a Mark II mount system! I’ll call it the Drumclip, even though “drum clip” means a different thing elsewhere. I’m not 100% sure this is a final design – I’ll talk about that more below – but it’s 98% final.

Like the previous attempt, this is very simple, and still under $10. First, order a cheap but metal microphone bar, or double mic attachment. This is a small device you can screw onto on a single mic stand to make a little platform that will hold two to three microphones. I found this one online for under $10, with shipping:

Now like the name says, this is a drumclip, a mic stand clip for drums. And it’s going to attach to the connector bridge between the two drums.

TIME FOR SOME METALBENDING!

Sadly, I can’t do it that way. I have to do it with hammers and an anvil and a big bench clamp. But if you have those tools, it’s very simple.

Remember the hole I drilled into the drum’s bridge, for the first attachment? It’s still there, and looks like this:

Take the mic platform and pop the centre mic attachment into that hole. Make sure it’s perpendicular to the plastic bridge, and mark where the sides of the platform would meet the metal if the corners weren’t so rounded.

If your bridge is more square than mine, you can just mark where they meet. Mine is all rounded at the corners so I have to allow for that. You may not need to. But just follow the wall down to where it would meet the metal, if it didn’t curve in first.

That’s where you want to bend your new drum clip. Draw lines on both sides. I used a knife, but whatever is visible works.

You could also measure the width of the bridge and mark that, centred, on the bridge. It’s the same thing, and again, those marks are where to bend the clip.

Then remove the microphone attachment knobs and centre mic attachment. Place the platform bar into the bench clamp so that the top of the clamp is right on one of the lines you made, and start hammering it over!

this is why it needs to be metal. plastic is not so good here.

You want to hammer down near the clamp point, or you’ll end up warping the base of your new Drumclip. Don’t worry about getting “too sharp” a corner, you won’t. Just make sure that clamp is nice and tight, so it doesn’t slip! Then flip and do the other side.

If you do warp the base a bit, you can hammer that back to flat pretty easily. However, you only want to do that once, because doing that repeatedly will weaken the metal. So if you start to bend it, don’t fix it immediately; get the sides bent into place, then hammer the base flat again, so you’re doing it only once.

If you have to do it more than once, for a small drum pair, it’s not too big a deal. But if you did this for larger drums, it would be a bad idea in general, really a very big deal.

You want to hammer the platform into a sharp-cornered U shape, but so that the sides are just past vertical, and angled in just a bit, to give it a better grip on the bridge connecting the drums. Once you’ve done that, it’ll slide on and hold pretty well.

This is where I actually needed that hole I made for the first attempt – it’s there so the platform stand attachment that came with the microphone bar (and which you removed earlier) can screw all the way in. That provides an extra bit of attachment security.

In my case, I ended up gluing that attachment into a permanent vertical position. I also tried doing it using double-sided tape on the silver metal piece as glue, because I like reversible changes better than I like epoxy. But that wasn’t strong enough, and the drum set kept tipping slowly over, so – epoxy it is.

Of course, after doing that, I realised that you don’t need the extender at all. This drumclamp will screw straight onto the mic stand just fine. So yay, unnecessary work. But that may not be true for other microphone platforms. And even in my case, it’s a little less awkward to use the platform stand attachment as kind of an extender than to attach directly to the stand, so it’s not a total loss.

Here’s the drum and clip and extender on the mic stand:

Yay! It works! But this gets to the design bit I’m not sure about.

You’ll remember from the first picture that the platform comes with knobs on each ends. These are for attaching other microphone clips so you can then attach microphones.

Right now, I’m using them as very slight tensioners on the sides of the drum’s bridge. Or that’s what I tell myself. In practical terms, it’s really just for storage and appearance. It does look better with them, don’t you think?

The question is: should I drill two more holes, one on each side of the plastic bridge, so that these knobs can screw all the way in? That would certainly make the drumclip more secure; it simply couldn’t move left to right.

But I’m also worried that two more holes might overly weaken the bridge. Were it metal, I wouldn’t be concerned about that. But it is of course plastic, so I am.

Any materials engineers got opinions?

It’s a Roland SC-55 MIDI Sound Canvas from 1991! I can now make all the noises you heard in any videogame in the 1990s.

Cheese Factor Five, Mr. Worf – let’s see what’s out there.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but honestly not much of one. I got it from Ben Deschamps via his internet yard sale, for, as he put it, “a six pack.” XD I also had to fix it after it arrived damaged in shipping – I’m pretty sure the post office punted it here from New York State, given how quickly it arrived and how the left side of the front panel was punched in.

But hey, now I can say I’ve repaired a potentiometer. Not replaced: repaired. I did that because it’s custom and weird and was in three pieces. (Also the metal frame was bent, some parts got disconnected and also bent, a bit of the motherboard broke off but I’m pretty sure that was just a little bit of grounding pin and it’s already grounded. And I fixed all that, so it’s all good.)

Anyway, it’s a Roland, and my A-30 MIDI keyboard is also a Roland, and turns out, they know each other! Such a small world. All those useless buttons suddenly do things!

There is also a thunder and rain setting. This is hilarious, mostly because there’s really only one thunder effect, so I can use it exactly once ever. I have no plans to do so, but don’t push me, I got thunder.

not me. okay, kinda me last night. but not really me.

Honestly, though, while I expected mostly to be using it for things easy to get right (bells, chimes, simple pipes, synthy-effects, etc), this is 1990s pro gear. The strings and horns, while definitely cheesy, are much less so than what you find in, say, Garage Band today. With the right tweaking and careful, careful playing – it respects key velocity, aftertouch, all those cool tweaks on my keyboard – I might be able to use more parts of it than I expected, maybe even for the swing jazz version of Lisdoonvarna. That’d be awesome.

I’ve just been watching artists and writers online talk about what they listen to or just generally have on in the background while they’re working. A lot of people are saying they are stimulated by that, it makes them more creative.

But I’m a musician, so I can’t do that for most of my creative time. I can’t have music on (because hi, I’m writing or performing music) and I can’t have a television on (because there’s no point, I’m watching the digital audio workstation), and I haven’t had much luck with spoken podcasts – I’m paying too much attention to the sound I’m working on and don’t get much of anything out of it.

But back when I was a visual artist, I could totally do that trick. I kind of miss it. Right now, I’m doing paperwork and stuff and have Anpanman on the background, which is about the right level of non-distracting stimulus.

I’d like something akin to that for the studio, mostly for when I’m doing tedious things like timing edits and comping. You know, the boring shit. But I have no idea what that would be. Anybody have any ideas?