Oh, and I was advised I was "in the realm of professional drummers" which is easy on the ears. (Not that he doesn't have an incentive to blow smoke up my ass. Still, I'll take the compliment.)
In the realm of professional drummers a man who can correctly use a semicolon shall be king.
Sounds great. I do notice that the iPhone has a longer interference range than prior phones I've used.
(1) It's kind of freakish how much they can fix. "Oh you fucked up that fill a bit? We'll fly it in from another time you did it better."
Just wait'll they run your whole drum part through the autotune.
I've found iPhones play hell with headsets such as those used by many cubicle-dwellers whose jobs involve a lot of phone time, particularly when one tries to check one's email on them. At my last job, we and our clients used to run into this all the time. If a horrendous clicking and buzzing accosted a conference call, someone would invariably say, in a tone of exasperated annoyance, "Could whoever has the iPhone please move it away and pay attention?"
Yay for your EP!
The recording engineer explained that AT&T, unlike other service providers who send a steady stream of data, sends big whumps of data, like, every so often. Don't know if that makes sense, but I definitely heard the cell phone call we accidentally picked up in the headphones.
Yay for your EP!
Indeed! Thanks.
The section I quoted in 4 also reminds me of this blog-ish thing written by a pro recording engineer (this guy) working on an album by some terrible major label band. That drummer was far enough from the realm of professional drummers that, rather than relying on nimble protools work, they actually hired a session drummer to come in overnight and re-record the drum parts. Luckily the band was usually too drunk to notice.
The Farty Pick-Ups would be a great name for a band.
re: 8
Yeah, the Mixerman diaries are quite famous. They were first published as forum posts in one of the pro recording forums, a few years back.
Drumming does seem to be the weak link. Reading books on recording it's surprising how often drummers who are perfectly competent live drummers get replaced on studio recordings by session-persons.
They were first published as forum posts in one of the pro recording forums, a few years back.
Yeah, that's where I read them. He's a little bit of a prick, but that's part of what makes it so great.
re: 12
Yes, re: bit of a prick, did it ever get leaked who the band were? I've not followed the saga for a while.
I've done some studio recording myself, but only on demos, nothing that was released. Although in one case it was at a pro studio where some decent enough Scottish bands recorded. It's an interesting experience.
Why didn't you just record everything on ProTools in your basement and then distribute it at no charge over the Internet? Music wants to be freeeeeeeeeee.
14: Tried that first, actually. It's apparently not the easiest thing in the world to record drums, in part, I gather, owing to the wide swath of frequencies involved.
May this be the record that finally catapults The Angry Anger to the big time!
Interesting, odd, and semi-relevant. I can't get the audio to play smoothly, but even with crap sound it's clearly something worth finding out a bit more about.
Perhaps Stanley should get some B-P drums.
OT: I'm coming to NYC after the funeral, so like the 18-22 or some shit. Maybe we should have a meet-up. No kids in tow, for a change. on the original topic, rock on, Stanley.
re: 17
There's also Harry Partch, with his 43-tone scales.
There is a magical, woolly internet world of alternative timings and non-equal-tempered scales which is really interesting but which I ain't gonna google on my
phone right now. Still, it's rad! Check it out!
20 not to ttaM, who knows all about it.
Yes, re: bit of a prick, did it ever get leaked who the band were?
IIRC it was a, uh, lightly fictionalized amalgamation of several sessions.
re: 23
Yeah, after commenting above I did a bit of googling. He now claims that to be the case, but his disavowal reads like he's deliberately hinting to the reader that the disavowal (that it's one band) is bullshit. He has a blog post under his real name on myspace about it.
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=469701552&blogId=508274123
22: weird. iPhone autocorrect of "tunings". What do you know that I don't, phone?
||
There was a conversation a while ago about the very-difficult-to-find movie Minbo No Onna, by the director of Tampopo; there's an article on boingboing today about a reporter who covered the Yakuza who apparently has accused the Yakuza of murdering that director as a result of that movie. Crazy!
|>
Yes, I remember the discussion. I knew they'd stabbed him after the movie came out, but I didn't know it was also implicated in his death. Fantastic film.
I endorse numbers 1, 3, 4 and 5. Though IME the Spanish radio station is usually coming through my guitar amp.
Very neat or, as others have said, rock on.
The one time that I had the opportunity to sit in on a recording session it was fascinating. It was a really emotionally intense form of music-making.
Reading this post also makes me reflect again on how different that process was from a "normal" studio session. I'm still amazed that, in that case, all of the EQ for most of the tracks was done by positioning everybody around one mic -- not the normal way to do things but, in that case, it worked better than miking everybody separately.
There is a magical, woolly internet world of alternative timings and non-equal-tempered scales which is really interesting but which I ain't gonna google on my
phone right now.
Well, there's this, which uses Pachelbel's Canon to demonstrate all kinds of weird tunings.
The recording engineer explained that AT&T, unlike other service providers who send a steady stream of data, sends big whumps of data, like, every so often.
Pretty sure that's a GSM thing, rather than being AT&T/iPhone-specific. My Nokia does the same thing; it interferes with my clock radio every morning.
I have no reason to doubt this explanation (and see the a 217 Hz pulse used by the underlying TDMA referenced several other places):
The cause of this buzzing has to do with GSM's "time division" nature. The ever-knowledgeable Keith Nowak, spokesperson for Nokia, explains it as follows: "[[With GSM]] the RF transmitter is turned on/off at a fast rate, and that 'pulsing' is often picked up by nearby devices that don't have good RF shielding. In the case of GSM the pulse rate is 217 Hz, which can be easily heard."
Verizon and Sprint CDMA phones don't have this buzzing sound because their transmitter is on most of the time, according to Nowak. As a result, the pulsing effect generally doesn't occur.
32: That squares with the mini-version I heard, based on the producer's experience: AT&T bad; Verizon good (for the studio's purposes, that is).
The explanation in 32 seems to me like a decent reason to ban GSM. If you're throwing off RF signals outside the operating band of the device you're being an e-prick. Nice move blaming it on the RF shielding of the device being interfered with, too.
On the other hand, at least it provides some justification for the pilot demanding that everyone turn their cell phones off.
20, 30: yet I still can't get an easy solution to play any of the historical tunings through a keyboard, without going through the lovely irrelevant bent-note microtuning ffaw. Lazyweb, save me!
Allow me to be the first to encourage you to rock on, Stanley.
(5) Goddamn this shit's expensive.
I fully expect a near-future post or comment will sign off with "off to swim the trench of shit."
I also fully expect liveblogging of said swim.
I'd like to see a bass trio named: Farty! Farti! Farté!
||
I have to ride my bike home soon, and the temperature is 51 degrees! There appears to be wind! This is fucking BULLSHIT. I know you freakshows are all "What a pleasant balmy day.", but I can say with no qualms whatsoever that 51 degrees is colder than my body temperature. If it is colder than me, then I am the person providing the warmth here, and that is BULLSHIT. When will this crap end? I'm done with it, so why doesn't it stop? Also, it is going to rain again, which I point out is NOT a pleasant day in the mid-90's. I am so DONE with winter. Honestly, I've been over winter since the second week of November, when I had had enough.
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Temperatures in the mid-90's aren't pleasant, they're oppressively hot. You freakshow.
God, you people really need to switch to Celsius.
I really need to switch to summer, is what I need.
Good God, woman, you're made of muscle, what do you do with the waste heat? As soon as the fog leaves my Check Engine light goes on and I have to retire to the shade with something icy.
Seriously, there's no such thing as a pleasant day in the mid-90s (which is hotter than, not as hot as, you: have you felt the surface of your skin recently?).
|| So my son is going to break up with his girlfriend. We're going back to Md. for the weekend, and he thinks he wants to do it in person. She and her mother came out and stayed with us for 10 days after Xmas, and so we have enough of a relationship that the mom called me to talk about the schedule. GF audibly squealing and jumping in anticipation in the background. I was vague.
This is a very sweet girl. He may well never do better. He's 15, and they live 2,000 miles apart and it can't have a future. Advice? |>
Yes. It is goosepimpled and shivering, because the temperature is colder than 100.
He should totally text her, CCarp. It'd be rude not to.
She shouldn't have to find out from Facebook.
45: Ten degrees Celsius is summer.
(Pretty cool how that measurement system revolves around the freezing point of water and thus actually conveys some at-a-glance information about whether something is cold or not. Just sayin'. Y'all should get Obama to make a really, really good speech about this.)
Temperatures in the mid-90s can be ok if you are over a hundred miles from any major body of water, which Megan isn't.
Are you implying that it might get humid, from the major bodies of water? I say to you that two large rivers notwithstanding, in my town it does not.
This is a very sweet girl. He may well never do better. He's 15, and they live 2,000 miles apart and it can't have a future. Advice?
My advice is to scratch that second sentence from your brain because it is absurd and ridiculous and that's not how relationships work. If it's over, it's over, and it sounds like it's over. And relationships ending is not a problem to be fixed.
I am slowly coming around to Megan's way of thinking, which is actually scary for someone born and raised in a 60-degree bubble of weather. I am positively longing for summer right now. (Though I am also sure I will be whining when the 90s roll around.)
And it does make a huge difference that we have low humidity. 90 with humidity is killer.
The last 90 degree day that felt comfortable to me was in Lubbock, Texas.
It's remarkable how much my mood has improved now that the giant snowfalls have stopped and the temperature has been hovering near 60 during the day. If only it would stay precisely this temperature all year....
I too like 90 degree days. I do not like days in the 100s as much. If I had to rank the weather intervals, I would rank them: 70s, 80s, 60s-90s tie depending on which season I'm looking forward to, 50s, 40s-100s tie.
the temperature has been hovering near 60 during the day.
If you don't mind it hovering at 65, I'd suggest moving to the central coast of California. Nearly year round!
Also, heebie is completely right in her rankings, though I think I place 60s a little higher than 90s.
60s, 50s, 70s, 40s, 80s, 30s, 20s, 90s, 10s, 0s, etc.
If you don't mind it hovering at 65, I'd suggest moving to the central coast of California. Nearly year round!
Yes, I know. Sigh.
If you don't mind it hovering at 65, I'd suggest Denny's at 4pm.
63 is dead on as far as it goes. I'm trying to decide how far into the negatives I'd go before 100s would appear on my list.
It's not the heat, it's you people.
...that make Sacramento so wonderful?
Thanks, Sifu, but I think at least some of it is the heat, especially on summer nights.
SUMMER HEAT IS PEOPLE! IT'S PEEEEEOPLE!
||
Marc Thiessen fresh off his ghastly "al-Qaeda lawyers" Op Ed at his new WaPo gig will apparently be on "The Daily Show" tonight. I feel compelled to watch despite extreme annoyance at Stewart for inviting him on at all.
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It's not the heat, it's you people the humanity. Anyway, east coast 90+ degrees is way more unpleasant than west coast 90+ degrees.
Yes, re: bit of a prick, did it ever get leaked who the band were?
This reminded me of this piece about an ill-fated collaboration between a symphony orchestra and an erstwhile pop luminary. For the record, "Rock Bottom" is Gino Vanelli.
Charley C at 48: He's 15, and they live 2,000 miles apart and it can't have a future. Advice?
Oh, my. Honestly, if the girlfriend's mother wants to iron out plans again, I might say to her that maybe we should play it by ear and let the kids themselves decide how things will go. Erm. ? Just to give the mom an idea that something might be up, so she doesn't contribute excessively to the girlfriend's jumping up and down and squealing.
60s are perfect, 80s are good, 50s are refreshing, 30s have physical ramifications, 70s are a bit insipid but still better than the 40s, which are boring, the the 90s are too hot, as are the 100s. The 20s are too much, as are 10s and aughts.
73: better than the 40s, which are boring, the the 90s are too hot, as are the 100s. The 20s are too much, as are 10s and aughts.
They all hate us anyhow.
Let's drop the big one now.
74: At least we get to surf in Australia, JP. Geez. So negative.
TJ seems to get it about right, weather-wise.
Honestly, I've been over winter since the second week of November, when I had had enough.
It's been about the same temperature here since before the first week of November, except when it's been colder. Monthly averages lead me to believe that it's colder here than in the east in the fall and spring, but warmer in the middle of winter. Average highs don't get into the 50s until April; they're in the 40s starting in November.
My CA friends all talk this same way about the weather. Biking above 25F is fine with good gloves, makes a huge difference. Ice is the problem here, which is only just leaving the shady parts of my route. Ear protection if it's windy.
Though I really don't see how 70s are insipid. They are precisely when you feel inspired to do many things.
75: You'll wear a Japanese kimono, babe
And there'll be Italian shoes for me
See, I *wasn't* being negative.
People who ordinarily say sensible things talk about gloves and ear protection against the cold, somehow not recognizing that gear is an imposition forced on us by winter, oppression in and of itself.
Californians aren't very hardy.
Fuck you.
83: Oh, please don't take my remark seriously.
It is not my goal to be hardy. It is my goal to be warm and live free.
80: Have you heard the David Bazan cover of it? I can't find a great online version, but there's this one.
I vastly prefer the eastern winters, which I've had three winters in a row until this year, to what I've got here.* Colder, but with sun and more variety. And possibly even to what my parents get in southern California. But not to what I got in the Bay Area.
*I lucked out and missed the big snowfall, so maybe I'd have had a different opinion after this year.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the vast majority of Californians aren't very hardy. Or that they are, in fact, pussies.
How 'bout you and me go for a run here in August? That sounds fun.
Depends on your definition of hardy, I'd say. And surviving high heat is a feat comparable to surviving extreme cold.
|| Someone needs to tell Atrios about the word "enwhitlement".|>
Just because Californians have thin skins doesn't necessarily mean they're not hardy.
And by the way, word on the street rooftop is that Megan likes to party hardy.
76: TJ seems to get it about right, weather-wise.
"Some are weatherwise, some are otherwise." - Ben Franklin
Thereby providing the name of one of the main weather-nerd rags: Weatherwise ("the power, the beauty, the excitement") with articles like "Zebulon Pike: Great American Explorer or Climate Spy?"
In my heart of hearts I wish for spring to be followed by another winter. Heh, everyone would be so frustrated and grumbly, but at least we wouldn't see that summertime crime spike, I wouldn't think.
Just because Californians have thin skins deep golden tans doesn't necessarily mean they're not hardy.
Yesterday, I saw the sun in the morning and thought it was going to be unusually nice, but cold. At 11 it started rain/snowing - you know, the kind where you can't quite tell, but it's definitely not regular rain. It was overcast in the afternoon, but more or less dry, then blue sky at 5. Then overcast again. This is probably as close to snow as it's going to get. I guess there was a bit of snow in December when I wasn't here.
It's all not very exciting.
Also, 57 gets it exactly right. Awkward about the mom though.
I've been in 125 degree heat and 20 below cold. Both were super fun, but you know, it's all context. Actually I think it hit 130 degrees at a point, and that was sort of oppressive. And 20 below was pretty f'in' brisk when standing still, and my ears hurt.
98: But did you find five dollars?
You know what's actually way, way better than living in California?
Being me!
It's true!
You all should try it.
Hah, you can't! Still, I think you should all try to be the very best people you can be. It won't be nearly as cool as being me, but then, I'm sure it'll be nice for you, too. Second-rate by my standards, being you is, but that's totally fine. Me, me, me. Wow! I love it! Is there more I can tell you about being me?
101: His adopted people call that finding two toonies and a loonie. They've very loquacious.
Real hardiness is in Mexico. In the country, people ride cargo bikes (chinese frame with a locally welded two wheel cage of steel tubing instead of a front fork) along the insane 2-lane highway with potholes the size of goats to gather wood in the scrub forest.
Also non-ironic tricked out Gremlins with flames on the side.
Running on hills is brutal, but otherwise throw the fuck down.
Since it was December in the Arctic, none of us had thought to bring swimming trunks, so we swam in our pants and, afterwards, risked the short walk back to our hotel. At a mere -37°C, Hill and Gaddy report, 'standard steel structures rupture on a mass scale,' though nothing was rupturing in Bilibino at -49°C. I suggested we take out our wet pants and wave them in the air to see how long they would take to freeze solid, which we did. This was gratifying. In less than a minute, they had frozen harder than a standard steel structure. The hotel was for a short time adorned with what looked like porcelain ornaments in the shape of upside-down pants.
98: One of the classic wet maritime climates in the world. Never been below 0° F--about the same plant hardiness zone as Austin, Texas.
Well, anyway, there's adaptability. Surely there's something to be said for that.
about the same plant hardiness zone as Austin, Texas
Oh, sure, bring the plants into it. Those fuckers will out-tough us all.
83: Joan Didion shares your annoyance, neb.
The bugs will out-tough us all, and don't you forget it. Wimp.
113: Plants don't fuck you fucking fount of misinformation.
I INTEND TO KEEP KEEPING ON AND KEEP KEEPING AUSTIN AND WHEREVER FAKE ACCENT IS WEIRD. YOU ARE DUST. FUCK THE HATERS.
fake accent has rapidly become a keen observer of the PNW climate. He has not had yet had enough experience of it to feel any diminishing of his will to live.
100: Sister, please. 20 below is shorts weather. 40 below is for other garments.
YOU KIDS GET OFF MY VEGETATIVE MAT!
116: thereareelevenplanetsinthesolarsystemwhalesaremadeofgarbageicanseeinthedarkbyshoutingpoopyifyougiveahoboadollarhelltaylorizeyourfactorytherearethreeapostrophesindonutmanybooksinthewhereswaldoseriesarewrittenincodeicanlickmyownballsandittasteslikelimealltheseworldsareyoursexcepteuropastandmixersrunoffusionlookbehindyoutheresaspidermadeofyarnI'M ROLLIN', MAN, I'M ROLLIN'!
Fucking fount, perhaps. Of misinformation, perhaps not.
120: Now look what you did, you fucking fuck! You're a fucking margnl terrorist!
This has been one of the coldest winters that I remember around here, and my sister had snow on the ground for several continuous weeks, something that just doesn't happen and never happened when I was a child. I used to prefer cold weather but this year, for some reason, I just couldn't stand it. I've been done with winter since I had to slalom out of my sister's driveway the day after Christmas.
This sudden snap of spring has everyone feverish. People in my office are now competing at meetings for the seats on the side of the conference table that looks out the window. Today I went down the hall to the bathroom - normally twenty yards - by going out the back door of the building, down the sidewalk, around front, back up, around the back of the building to the loading dock and back inside to get to the bathroom from the other direction. No one can keep their eyes off the sky. Rah and I are getting to take an unexpected, spur-of-the-moment trip to DC this weekend to see a friend who's about to leave for two years overseas and we're giddy. I just subscribed to a couch-to-5K podcast. This is a pretty sweet time of the year.
He has not had yet had enough experience of it to feel any diminishing of his will to live.
I'm getting that from my classes.
On the plus side, the cherry blossoms in this neighborhood are beautiful and you don't have to fight crowds to see them. I guess they must respond to light rather than heat.
57 -- Oh yes, that's right of course.
By talk about the schedule, I meant the mom wanted to know if I needed her to pick us up at the airport, if we'd be spending a night with them, what dinner plans we had. She's a terrific person, and I'm sad to miss out on the both of them.
I wouldn't ordinarily be involved in such a thing, but there are logistical questions to resolve because 15 year olds aren't running loose on road trips. (He shouldn't be coming at all, but the wife will be in Germany looking after her elderly parents, and didn't want the party to be at our house. I don't often wish I was 30 again, but today . . .)
122: Margin, marginal, marginalia*, whatevs.
*I got that sequence once in Boggle. It was a great day (about 72°F, light breeze, puffy cumulus clouds).
Between 120 and 123, I'm downright giddy.
Who are you people who dislike the 70s?
iPhone noisiness - I certainly recall there being a lot of complaints about the thing's radio performance early on (crufty voice quality, dropped calls, no coverage where other devices were getting their CC_SETUP through fine). It wouldn't surprise me if it's still a bit special (as in "not different....special").
Annoying, really; one of the reasons GSM unwired the world was that everything had to pass the Global Conformance Forum test suite, which used to be standardised by Vodafone radio engineers. I wonder if Apple rolled-their-own GCF test implementation that might just have been a bit more charitable?
The RF chain on the latest ones is all Infineon for the cellular radio and Broadcom for the Bluetooth/WLAN. The earlier 3G ones are Infineon for everything but the power amp and CSR and Marvell for the Bt and WLAN respectively...do I care enough to look up the 2G teardowns? Probably not.
Of course, if it's doing 3G it won't do the RACH timeslotting thing because it's a CDMA technology.
The voice call audio quality on mine is definitely less consistent than the Sony K800 I had before. It's sometimes better, but it's definitely sometimes worse, where the K800 was pretty consistently OK all the time.
I haven't especially noticed it producing any more RFI or audible interference with the hifi or TV than my other phones, though.
That'll be because your hi-fi and TV don't use the frequency band just next to UMTS-2100 that's slated for wireless mikes.
There's another allocation in the UK Frequency Allocation Table for "special events production" (i.e. wireless mikes mostly) that's in between the GSM/PCS bands at 1800 and 1900MHz. Actually, the live music biz is deeply pissed off about the current plans to release more of the 2.3-2.6GHz range and re-farm the GSM/PCS bands because they don't like funny kaditkaditkaditkadee noises on their vocal PA channels.
There used to be a little stripe of spectrum each side of the 1800 and 1900 GSM bands that was roped off as a guard band to keep the mobile operators and everyone else from interfering. But in the last few years, as it turned out that the great majority of mobile devices are much more well-behaved radios than expected, and that we could pack much more capacity into much lower tx wattage than expected, OFCOM went back and cracked open the 1700MHz guard band for ultra-low power cellular operations - things like private networks for big industrial sites and also these guys.
..but if someone insists on inventing a shiny that tends to leak RF energy to either side of the damn band, their assumptions are a wee bit fucked.
Does anyone else remember a 90s dance track that was built around a sample of ringing tone RFI? Someone answer the phone!
Between 120 and 123, I'm downright giddy.
Way too hot for me.
i've heard people describe Chris Squire's (of Yes) bass sound as "farty". he used a fuzz pedal, though.