Right after I broke my ankle last month, as I lay on the couch wondering how I was going to cope, I thought about my Toshiba netbook and how it should be capable of multi-track recordings. I figured that it have have just enough horsepower to do the job. I saw a similar model in my Musicians Friend’s catalog that was meant to be used as a multi-track right out of the box. It was about $200 more than I paid for mine and came with some shareware and some low cost audio software. My netbook has an Edirol USB audio interface and Cakewalk Sonar 6 LE digital audio workstation (DAW) software on it. I knew it had to work, but I have two other DAW’s and had no time to experiment with it.
Until now.
Here’s the song I recorded on it, over the last month:
I thought about writing a new song. I still might, but just to get up and running I decided to use a song I wrote a few years ago about a former classmate that passed away recently. I had recorded it once before, but I had done it with drums and electric instruments. I have always wanted to do this song “unplugged”, so this was my chance. I wrote some additional lyrics and changed the arrangement too.
I decided to limit myself to just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and a tambourine. I really couldn’t get to the electric stuff in the basement anyway. Because of my ankle, I can’t play drums even if I wanted to. So, this would just have to do. I set up the netbook on the table in the kitchen. I plugged in my audio interface and my Korg NanoKontroll programmable controller and plugged in my guitar, a microphone, and started to record. I did most of this recording sitting in a wheel chair but by the time I mixed it down, I was able to do it on my main DAW in the basement. I proved my point that I could record on the netbook, so I wasn’t going to punish myself mixing it all down on that small screen when I didn’t have to.
What I proved was that I have enough portability to create digital recordings whenever and wherever I want to. I thought maybe I would do some nature audio, like setting up some mikes by a remote waterfall or by a bubbling brook. A CD of something like that would be nice to fall asleep to. In addition getting others to help on my recordings would be much easier as they wouldn’t have to come here. Not that they do anyway.
I recorded this song on my Toshiba netbook using Cakewalk Sonar 6 LE DAW software. I used my Takamine G-Series jumbo acoustic guitar and two Shure SM-58 microphones and a tambourine. I mixed it down on my main desktop computer using Sonar 7 Producer Edition and Sony Sound Forge v9. The only effects used were equalizers echo, and reverbs and not a lot them either. The natural reverb in the kitchen actually made the dry recordings almost sound interesting enough.
Cheap Trick really kicked butt live as evidenced by the fact that no one ever really paid that much attention to them until their Cheap Trick at Budokan (1979) live album was released. Then it became a little too much about songs like I Want You To Want Me and other power pop rock tunes in their repertoire, for me at least. I’m glad they got the attention, because they deserved it. They are all great hard rock musicians and even rockers have mortgages and car payments.
I saw them live once and guitarist Rick Nielsen must have tossed six guitars over the backdrop after he was done playing them. I am sure someone was catching them, hopefully. He also had a custom five neck guitar that was very cool. He didn’t throw that one, at least not that day.
No matter what you think about the current administration or the previous one, the problem with our government has always been the level of corporatist influence in it and the corruption that it has caused. But I just don’t believe that it has ever been this bad and out in the open. The last thirty years has been a real bonanza for the well connected corporatist
The end of the broadcast fairness doctrine and relaxing media ownership concentration rules certainly played a part in this, as the watchdog of investigative journalism was finally under the control of the corporate owned media conglomerates with no equal time for dissenting opinions and any real fact checking. Other factors are the uncontrollable propaganda that 500 different cable channels could broadcast, again without any requirements any of it be true, or fair. The fairness doctrine never covered cable, so that was never an issue anyway. Another is that corporations have long been about controlling whatever government agencies and branches they could, to extinguish labor and safety regulations and their resulting law suits and other responsibilities. Corporations know that it’s hard to market a defective product when people know the truth about it and them. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently I started having problems with the Adobe Flash animation plug-in in my Firefox web browser. This is at least the second time since I started using Firefox that the Flash plug-in has gone AWOL.
Just like last time I tried uninstalling the plug-in using the Windows Add/Remove programs applet in the Control Panel, and then reinstalling Flash with no luck.
That’s when I remembered that I had found an Adobe Flash uninstallation program on the Adobe web site last time, that could get rid of the program completely, so that I could reinstall it.
I found the program and ran it. It got rid of all traces of the Flash application. I then reinstalled Flash and everything is fine again. For how long, I don’t know.
This problem seems to be tied to plug-in updates not “taking”, but I’m not certain of that. The download link for the uninstaller is below.
Mt. Sterling wasn’t always a very friendly place for someone who went to high school in London. Many times, I had been in a car driving there with several other London teenagers hell-bent on kicking some Sterling ass once they arrived there. Usually over some minor incident, trivial or imagined. It was a slightly smaller town, about 15 miles from London, and that made for a nice little ride before you got there so that you could strategize on the coming carnage, yet not one ass ever got kicked on any one of the trips I went on. By high school I had made many friends in Mt. Sterling. Once on an ass kicking trip, one of my London “friends” told me he would personally kick my ass if I didn’t help him beat up someone from Mt. Sterling that evening. I told him he might just have to try that.
My Friend Dennis.
By 1974, I had a mostly different set of friends. I had known Dennis for several years but we had grown closer in the recent past. We also continued to be friends for years to come, even sharing an apartment after high school. Dennis’ father was a single parent with two other older children. He worked for the state like my father, but both were better acquainted from the local taverns. His father was very strict, so anything that caused Dennis to arrive home after his established curfew could be stressful for me and my parents as well. Many nights I would arrive home late only to find my mother on the telephone with his father.
Dennis by far got the most severe punishments for anything that we got caught doing. Sometimes he would be grounded for months. I spent many Friday and Saturday nights with him at his house, when he was even allowed to have company. I could easily get out of my punishments after a few days. As a teenager being annoying sometimes had its benefits. Dennis never could get out of anything. His father was a stone wall. Read the rest of this entry »
I bought Operator on a 45 RPM record back in the 70’s. I saw Jim Croce a lot on TV back then, He played a light folk-y style pop rock that was real popular at the time. I guess he was really a pretty wild fun loving guy. His tragic death in 1973 at the age of 30, deprived us of all of the songs he never was able to write.
One of the problems I have always had with video sites like YouTube has been that the videos occasionally stop and start over and over again in Windows. If I am watching an interesting video, that can be especially annoying.
The issue is that, usually, the video’s speed is being throttled by Windows itself. I am not sure how that is supposed to help anything, except on a business network, but it is fairly easy to fix by editing the Windows registry.
(I have never ruined my Windows registry by editing it. Especially if done correctly, nothing will go wrong. I don’t back it up before I do any editing either. I run a separate backup program and there’s always Windows System Restore. Still if you are afraid that you will screw something up. find someone more capable to make this change for you)
Here’s how to do it:
Press <Windows key> R
In the Open: text box, type regedit then press <enter>
In the left pane navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Multimedia \ SystemProfile
In the right pane double-click NetworkThrottlingIndex, which causes a dialog box to appear. In the box, you can raise or lower the value data to change the throttling effect. Change the base to decimal and you will see the default is 10. Change the decimal value to 70. Press the OK button and then close RegEdit.
Hexadecimal default is a and the recommended value is 46. I think decimal just gives you a clearer understanding of the percentage of data throttling by Windows.
My assumption is this value could be from 0 to 100. Zero would obviously be complete throttling and 100 is no throttling at all. Microsoft recommends that this not be set over 70, but experimenting shouldn’t cause any real harm. Just change it back if it doesn’t work for you. I changed my throttling to 70 and am satisfied with the performance, so far.
I was a big fan of progressive rock in the 70’s. It was mood music for hard rock fans. I think there were many levels of prog rock then, and King Crimson was on the extreme of the genre. I would guess mostly just musicians could be entertained by some of their material. I have always said that I almost killed a good party once after playing their Larks’ Tongue In Aspic album.
I have always liked this song. I was listening to it a little while ago and thought I’d post it.
I wrote and recorded Bridge To Cross around 1994 about my cat, China, after she died. The message of the song was really about me not being able to do the right thing or at least having that feeling that I could’ve done better at dealing with the death of a pet. Pretty silly, huh?
I liked that cat. She was fun to play with. She was a mental case and would pee in the corner of the foyer. But I loved her just the same.
This song makes me sad, but was good therapy at the time.
I sang all vocals and play electric guitar on a Fender Stratocaster, a Yamaha acoustic guitar, and bass on my Rickenbacker 4001, and a tambourine. I originally recorded the song on an analog Yamaha MT-1000 4 track recorder. and processed it with from the dbx encoded master tape in Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5 (?) a few years ago. I doubt if I did much to the original mix. It sounds just about like it did in 1994.
One of my favorite entertainers is radio host Stephanie Miller. I have pretty regularly listened to her radio show since its beginning in 2004. She is witty and very funny. I am the “Official Cable Guy” of The Stephanie Miller Show. Here is the best of Stephanie Miller from 2009 (so far) from her many TV talk show appearances.
I decided to limit myself to just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and a tambourine. I really couldn’t get to the electric stuff in the basement anyway. Because of my ankle, I can’t play drums even if I wanted to. So, this would just have to do. I set up the netbook on the table in the kitchen. I plugged in my audio interface and my Korg NanoKontroll programmable controller and plugged in my guitar, a microphone, and started to record. I did most of this recording sitting in a wheel chair but by the time I mixed it down, I was able to do it on my main DAW in the basement. I proved my point that I could record on the netbook, so I wasn’t going to punish myself mixing it all down on that small screen when I didn’t have to. 
