I recently got re-acquainted with Jarod Watson at a Kirby Krackle show this past spring. Jarod used to show up with taper equipment at my shows (and others like Everyday Jones and Flowmotion) and record full sets for the Internet Archive. A few days ago he posted an IA link to a show I did at the Borders in Redmond in 2005. Wow. Listening to these sets is pretty surreal.
Jarod's actually posted four different shows, all from 2005. Lots of FLAC and Ogg formats, coffee grinders and evidence of my brief foray into live looping.
I haven't listened to everything here, but my favorite so far? This:
Scott Andrew, "Secret World" (live, Peter Gabriel cover)
State-of-the-art geek rock. Sort of like Megadeth except we're not speed metal and we have songs about Transformers. So, nothing like Megadeth actually.
We're going to be debuting the record at a live show at the San Diego Comic Con in just a few weeks, but until then you can feast your ears on the title track:
The new Kirby Krackle album is far from finished but the rhythm section can now enjoy a cigar. Yesterday, Nelson and I went into Don's studio in Shoreline and cut the drum and bass tracks for the entire album. Thirteen songs, nine hours, one lunch break. Kyle was there to provide a guide vocal and guitar accompaniment.
I'm tired.
The new album should be ready to go by the time the San Diego Comic Con rolls around in July.
We start recording the third KK record just five days from today. Zoinks!
Posted May 31, 2011
How ridiculous is it that I'm about to write an entire post about a Gateway computer I bought in 1998, complete with uninteresting photo of the aforementioned nondescript beige box? Extremely ridiculous, that's how ridiculous.
Have I ever mentioned that I made it through five years of college without ever having an email address? In fact, I barely touched a computer except to write papers for school. This despite teaching myself BASIC programming while a teenager on an Atari 800. I was pretty good at it, but I never considered any sort of career in computers because of all that math. I hated math and it hated me back. That's another post in itself.
Over a decade later I got my first dot-com job at the only dot-com worth working at in Cleveland. I knew I had to make up for lost time, because nearly everything I knew that got me that job was basically linked to aptitude rather than skill. So I purchased a Gateway G-350 with an employee discount. My first real PC. Windows 98 -- pre-installed! The very first thing I did was mess up the startup config. Phone support talked me through the fix.
I learned so much with that computer. Mostly HTML/CSS, Perl and Apache. I wrote a lot of terrible code that would horrify anyone who actually knew how to write good code. Many, many late nights. I also learned JavaScript, which led to an obsession with DHTML and web standards, which led me to start a blog, which led to to a brief-but-glorious tech writing career, a bunch of code and a number of opportunities that landed me in Seattle where I am today. Much of my contributions to the ill-fated DHTML Bible book were written at that computer.
I also learned how to record audio! The first versions of Gravel Road Requiem and Cast The Net Wide were recorded using that same machine. Some of that original audio is still in the final versions. I did most of the artwork with Photoshop and the GIMP there, too.
Eventually that computer became a web-surfing and email-reading device. Now running Win2K, it was just too slow to do anything else. My phone has more processing power. Last week, after I'd discovered that it had been over a year since I'd last booted the thing, I decided it was probably time to find new homes for the beige boxes taking up our floorspace.
Over the weekend I backed up the entire contents of the hard drive -- almost 13 years of work -- to a 1TB external drive the size of a small pork chop. Then I removed and shelved the original hard drive and loaded the now-brainless PC along with my wife's old PC (purchased around the same time, except she got a better deal on a G-460) into the car and took it to the local recycling center.
If this all seems overly wistful, you should know that I'm the type of person who has to make one last pass through the empty apartment to say goodbye to the linoleum. But it's no different than bidding farewell to your first car or your first home. Our relationships with people are rightfully elevated, but things can be important too, especially when they mark a waypoint in our lives.
So yeah, I was sad when I placed them on the PLEASE PLACE RECYCLED ITEMS HERE cart inside the entrance. They probably won't find much use for its 350MHz Celeron processor, outdated RAM and stock A/V cards.
We had a good run, ol' buddy. Thanks for everything.
The new Foo Fighters' record Wasting Light was done entirely without computers. No Pro Tools. What?! Even the mixing and mastering was done by hand:
We mixed manually on the API board, with me, James, Alan Moulder and Dave, all eight hands on board, all doing the faders, no automation; we couldn’t even do mutes. So every mix was a performance. Much like the recording was. I would focus on the vocals, and I’d get it done, and everybody would say, “did you nail it? Did you miss anything?” We all started sweating. We’d jump up when we got a mix. It was so exciting, and so different from how records are made these days.
The entire article is lengthy but totally worth it if you like geeking out over microphone choices and stuff like that.
By the way, the Foo Fighter's documentary is out on iTunes on June 7. I watched the first 20 minutes a few weeks ago and was totally engrossed, so I'm really looking forward to seeing the rest.
