Back at Clallam Bay Comicon, I did “USSR” for the first time, as a karaoke track. When I got back, I posted a video of the live USSR performance on Tumblr, taken off of audience camera.

And that was fun, but the sound quality was pretty bad, because it was just the on-camera microphone. Plus, the camera did things like make automatic-recording-level adjustments throughout, which means the backing track is pulsing all over the place.

I’m going to be cleaning up some other, similar live recordings for some other people this weekend, so I’ve had a go at this audio, just to warm up and see what I can do with it. That’s meant a lot of level-control automation, heavy use of a multiband compressor (and a high-pass filter to get rid of most of an occasional rumble from… somewhere…), a bit of reverb to smooth out some of the sample rate issues, and a lot of EQ work.

I’m going to massage it a bit more, I think? But I’m reasonably happy with what I’ve managed so far (mp3 link). The amount of surprise audio-level changes is down a lot, I’ve brought back the low end and some of the high end, there’s even a hint of kick to the bassline now – though I wonder if I’ve over-built that at the moment. It mostly sounds okay but I’m not sure it’s so great on anything that does a lot of bass boost, like some gaming headphones.

Anyway, what do you think? I’ll re-upload the live video with the improved/massaged audio if enough other people think it’s better enough.

Remember that video I mentioned shooting a part for? It’s up! This is Mary Crowell, or more specifically Doctor Mary Crowell who didn’t go to Evil Medical School for all those years to be called “Misses, doing a jazz cover of “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked.” Enjoy:

It’s funny how an afternoon’s shoot gets distilled. 1:13-1:18, and 2:52-3:01, if you’re curious. But watch the whole thing, particularly for Zombie Chef and Zombie 10th Doctor, they’re both pretty great. 😀

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album.

Waiting on hold to arrange some engineering issues, and George beside me started snoring. So enjoy some video. (Hosted on Tumblr.)

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album.

Hey, remember I extended the raffle deadline – any Bandcamp download for free – to Wednesday, right? Then I didn’t post the winner because Second Thanksgiving and a Lair full of visitors and all that. Well, I did in fact roll the dice to determine a winner, and that winner is Kimberly Turriff on Facebook! Kimberly, I’ll tag you on the Facebook link of this post, please contact me and tell me what you’d like!

Also, thanks to everyone for entering! If you didn’t win, well, this being Cyber Monday, well, I think you can make a guess about the post I’m about to make right after this one. But that’s for the next post. 😀

Meanwhile, this weekend a few of us got out there and shot some material for Mary Crowell‘s upcoming new video. Tune in for EXCITING RAKING ACTION:

Actual raking not included

After all, that’s why I have Minion Rachel and Minion Ian. Note the stylish Minion sashes.

It’s all for Mary’s cover of “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked.” The video is due out later in December. I’ll link when it comes out.

And how was your Second Thanksgiving?

Looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominee post? Thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

I’ve got a couple of weekends off that I had planned out for work that fell through, so I finally made another one of those fake turntable videos. So now “Lukey” – from Bone Walker, of course – is on YouTube. Being played on a gramophone, apparently, for which we thank David T. Stone of Seattle! So, if you’re a big YouTube user, now you can play it there:

I could totally see this track being the one I’d put on an actual cylinder were I to do that craziness. It’s period! It could have been done then, and almost certainly was in some form. Ah, someday. Until then, we have this. Enjoy!

We’re uploading a set of videos, about one a month, of various tracks off of Bone Walker, all being played on different players, since that seems to be a thing with turntables. This one’s “The Burke-Gilman Troll,” on a gramophone!

Video provided by The Hand of the Wolf, a fellow supervillain and fan. Thanks, Hand! The location of your secret lair is safe with us.

Given all the things we know about Google Play’s new YouTube/streaming terms, I’m not going to be participating. The reasons, as I posted last week, should be pretty obvious.

Still, I need videos up there just so people who go looking for them can find them. I can do that with an ordinary personal account, which keeps me out of their trap service, which costs me a lot but gets me at least a chunk of the YouTube potential audience. It sucks, but those are the realities of going as an indie.

So I’ve decided that like everything else, I’m going to turn this into an art project.

There are a zillion videos of songs up on YouTube, mostly from the vinyl era, set to videos of those songs being played on turntables. Typically, but not always, on 45 RPM singles. Here’s one. Here’s another. SOmetimes you get really weird things, like Herb Albert on 16 2/3rds RPM. They have a pretty standard style to them; it’s become kind of a genre of its own.

So I figured hey, why not beat them to it?

Except… I’m screwin’ around with the format. Not in huge, obvious ways, particularly not at first. This one looks almost normal. The CD that’s sitting on top of the 1948 vinyl 10″ masquerading as as single actually looks a little too much like a label, and that makes the whole thing look like a proper vinyl disc.

Spoiler alert: I have no vinyl pressing. And so far, no one has noticed that the album is rotating backwards.

I intended it to be subtle, particularly in the first one, because there’s a series, and I plan to make them goofier as they go. But maybe this is too subtle. That’s okay. I’ll just ramp it up more quickly than I planned.

Anybody here livestreamed an Ubuntu Gnome desktop? I found this howto for justin.tv, but while I appear to have it running (albeit with a strange error that’s probably critically important) it doesn’t seem to work. I also found this tool (which was formerly on Sourceforge, which still has an older version) but haven’t tried yet.

Anybody have a preferred solution?

It’s new Inspector Spacetime! Yes, yes, thanks to NBC, it’s officially Untitled Web Series About etc nobody cares, it’s Inspector Spacetime. There’s an eight-minute prequel to Series 2 out, there’s a Kickstarter to fund the whole series, it is great. This prequel is everything I wanted in Series 1 but didn’t really entirely get. Don’t get me wrong; I liked Series 1, but it was a bit slow and kind of uneven. Now, though, now they have it going:

Here’s the Kickstarter. Hie thee and go fund!

Well, this is exciting – Kaiju Meat seems to be going over very well:

Total Plays

I am surprised! And excited! And a little confused about what to do now, if anything! So since 60% of online music plays are on YouTube, I made a mostly-static-image YouTube video for it, since that’s easy to do. If you’re one of those people who makes YouTube playlists and such, here y’go:

Props again to tereshkova2001 on Tumblr and Kathryn Tewson on Facebook for their chorus vocals. And to Flatbear on Tumblr for making Jaegercon badges!

Today is the big day, and del Toro showed up this morning. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING GUILLERMO DEL TORO SHOWED UP TO JAEGERCON THIS MORNING. Briefly, but still.

Jaegercon is awesome.