This the last call for entries for the ARC raffle! You can listen to songs here to see whether you like this kind of thing. And it’s also a test of a new cross-posting plug-in I found this morning. Let’s see whether it works! XD

Solarbird, the Lightbringer – the public face of CRIME and the Forces of Evil – had a good weekend of work and play, talking with musicians and other shadowy figures, and perhaps arranging for some degree of shenanigans, about which you’ll no doubt hear more later. Muah ha ha.

We’ve also set up a Facebook band page, at last: clickie here and LIKE IT if you know what’s good for you. XD

But most importantly, Monday the 17th is the last day to enter the raffle for the Advance Review Copy of Dick Tracy Must Die. CLICKIE:

Click HERE to enter the raffle!

So what’d you do this weekend?

I’m making a kickstarter video for my CD duplicator kickstarter project! I feel kind of silly about it and the sound won’t be awesome because I don’t want to try to do lipsync over the bit I’m actually in. I’m not fond of making video but they stroooongly suggest it. See? Videos:

But mostly, this is just an excuse to remind you: don’t forget to enter the ARC giveaway raffle. ^_^

…hold on, I have to ask this d8…

Five!

And that would be lj:foxipher, who wins a copy of the Dick Tracy Must Die ARC! I’ll post off your CD later today, and look forward to your review!

Thanks to everybody who entered!

And, due to both the number of entries and! a couple of people who said they couldn’t enter because they couldn’t write a review in January – welcome to:

ARC Giveaway Round II! It’s another Advance Review Copy raffle. Entrants agree to post a review sometime in the month of February 2011. Entrants from Round I who didn’t win are automatically entered in Round II unless you want out for some reason, but I note you can write the review whenever and just not post until February, so I’d hope it’s not a problem. Reviews must be publicly posted, but that’s the only requirement.

If you did not enter Round I at all, comment here by the end of Monday, 17 January 2011, to enter Round II! All comments will be screened, as usual. Good luck!

Last day to enter the review raffle for an ARC of Dick Tracy Must Die! Clickie or lose out! XD

Wednesday night, Anna and I hit our first Irish Session – the first night of a new one, down at A Terrible Beauty in Renton. Yeah, it was awesome:

Photo by Liz Jackson

Thanks to Matt for organising it and Annie for inviting us; it ruled. There will be more. Click here for Anna’s super-detailed write-up.

Today I wrote a new version of a traditional song – Old Black Rum (West Coast Style). I’ll be recording that for Not Quite Trad O’ th’ Month, tomorrow. (Check Great Big Sea’s version here.) Frankly, I’ve never been able to hear the line about the “queen of George Street” without having a very different vision to the original, so my version’s all Riot Grrl Dykes her Way Across Queertown Vancouver, j0. XD Want a copy? Sign up for the mailing list. Or wait ’till it’s on the downloads page, but then you gotta pay for it.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the no-cost post-a-review raffle for an Advance Review Copy of Dick Tracy Must Die today! Or at least before Monday, the deadline. Go! Now!

Let’s have a raffle!

I’ve made a few Advance Review Copies (ARCs) of the pre-master Dick Tracy Must Die. This is the complete album, with a bunch of final mixing changes and a couple of new vocal performances that you almost certainly haven’t heard yet. Lookie:

To enter the raffle, comment here by Monday, January 10^th saying that you are willing to post a public review of the ARC by the end of January 2011, and give me a way to contact you directly. (I’ll need a physical mailing address to send you the CD.) All comments will be screened and left screened unless otherwise requested. Winner will be chosen by random number generator, one entry per person. Good luck!

I’m seriously considering setting up a Kickstarter project for one of these:

Double-Sided Disc Duplicator

I figure small donors would get free copies of Dick Tracy Must Die and other music, large donors could get some free uses. It could maybe be a local resource. I do not want to get into the general business of CD printing, but I could see doing something like this for very small runs – bring in your LightScribe discs, I burn a few hundred free for large donors, a smaller number at amortised cost or something for other people.

I have the rest of the technology, this seems like a fairly simple step. And it’s so cheap now that it seems intuitive, really. Sure, I’d like to do four-colour scary glass-plate CDs, and hopefully will eventually, but I also do a lot of tiny runs – they’re almost like art projects. This would be cool for things like that.

Good idea? Dumb idea?

It looks good:

Trash-O-Matic 68000, First Complete Assembly (1)

Trash-O-Matic 68000, First Complete Assembly (I/O ports)

…but it’s picked up some new noise somewhere that is not outside interference. I’m going to have to debug it some more to find out what. Some of it’s kind of awesome, but it’s a little excessive, even for the kind of crunchy trashnoise I want, so I hope I can pull it back a bit. Wish me luck!

Oh, and Happy New Year, everybody!

So I went back and forth with John at panicStudios about Shout at the Desert vs. the iTunes “Enhance” setting, and he’s in agreement with, well, everybody I can Google, who are all saying, ‘do not play with it, do not mess with trying to work around anything iTunes is doing, turn that shit off on your own machine and forget it exists. You can’t control what people have at home. Deal.’ So I’m dealing. It is amazing how much “Enhance” blurs and crappifies music all kinds, listening on headphones.

I’m also talking with another musician about maybe providing some live instrumental work as backup for a couple of their performances; we don’t know whether it’ll work out, but I hope it does. I don’t really have the kind of instruments they want – they don’t do the same sort of music I do – but they’re kind of fond of some things I can do on octave mandolin, so I’m in the running.

Look, I have more Trash-O-Matic build photos!

input, output, and battery – I’m pleased with that battery cut

This grid will host six setting buttons.

Epoxy set, Round Two

So, what am I showing here? The first picture is the new case, with holes cut for XLR input (mono, balanced, mic level), TRS output (mono, unbalanced, line level), and the battery case from the original toy. The battery case is epoxied into place now, and seems pretty solid.

The second shows the control button grid – the Voice Changer has six various distortion types, and I’m keeping the original buttons. I cut the grid box out of the original toy, sanded off the paint, and recess-mounted it into a hole I cut into the new case’s cover. It’s epoxied into place. I was originally going to surface-mount it, but that complicated an already complicated mess – anchoring the circuit board.

The third photo shows the case assembly right now. I put the balanced-to-unbalanced-signal wire harness on the XLR input jack directly – even preserving the noise-cancellation effects of XLR, it’s trivial – and I’ve got the signal wires coming off that but not hooked to anything yet. The TRS output has wires already soldered in, too, and the battery pack is installed (with recessed external access door out the bottom) and positive lead run to the new power switch you can see from behind on the lower left of the cover.

I’ve made some mods to the circuit board; the old power switch (still mounted) is bypassed, as are another couple of controls that aren’t meaningful if you aren’t using it as a toy – little things like that. Right now it’s mostly serving as a weight, as epoxy sets for the new circuit-board mounting poles. The three screws visible in the circuit board are actually bolts to new mounting poles, to hold them in the right places as the epoxy sets.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to trust these mounting poles, so I’ll add insulating foam as a back-support to the circuit board, braced against the battery pack. That should help with the button-mashy-mashy.

Originally, I was going to have balanced XLR in and out, and have the output be microphone level, but when I realised I’d have to generate balanced output from a nonbalanced source and reduce the signal because that the onboard preamp would be too difficult to bypass, I decided, eh, fuckkit, line level’s better for noise purposes anyway. Particular with electronics this cheap. XD

You’ve read this far, you must make things. What’re you making?