Undeceivable - Moonraker Zen

Hi, how are you?

Tesco Value earphones x mild anger = broken sounds

Whilst trying to expand the bumblebee bats' playlist from a meagre 1 song, I got so annoyed that I threw my earphones on the floor and they broke. I was sitting on the floor on a 1cm thick soft rug and threw them with a little force but not too much. They're not very strong are they? 

I think I'll take them back.

Ignore me!

I sold my KORG D4 on preloved a week ago and e-mailed the guy who bought it from me asking for some feedback. This is his reply:

"Sorry to have taken so long getting back to you. I'm very pleased with the KORG D4. Thanks a lot."

I was happy to receive his reply and to hear that he liked the KORG D4. Then I read at the bottom of the e-mail:

PS. No need to reply to this.

Eh? I thought we were becoming friends! 

I visit quite a few forums on the net mostly to do with Zen or music. But no matter what I seem to write, I make no impact whatsoever. I made a joke once on a Zen forum and it was completely ignored. I can't remember what it was but it wasn't that bad!

It's nice to be ignored though. Makes you feel special.

We watched this film today and it has got to be one of the worst films I have ever seen. There are scenes in it where it seemed that the director had just left the camera rolling without giving his actors any proper lines. They'd just be sitting around saying things like, I'm hungry or that's a big tree. And then the scene would be over. Here's a great line: "Man, we've been walking for hours!" "How do you know? If a tree falls in the forest how do you know? Are you keeping the time by the sun or something?" 

Just an incredibly bad film. I'm not even being snobbish - if I'd paid to watch it, I'd have complained...

1 thing to do before I die

You know those lists? The ones where you compile a list of 100 things to do before you die and tick them off as you go along. Experience junkies! I don't know whether it's just because I like disagreeing with stuff, but I don't get them at all. Everything you do is going to be in the past. And we live in the present. So what's the point of filling your past with good stuff only to be stuck here in the present with a bad back and sun burn? I think I'm missing the point but...

I know what my one thing to do before I die is and I think it's the best way for me to enjoy my life.

But I do often think, I need to go on a hiking trip to Iceland, visit the jungles of South America, drive a car across the US, spend some time on a ship, go somewhere with a cool name like Nova Scotia, become a wandering monk, do some busking on the streets of Santa Monica and write an album in a forest somewhere, like Bon Iver.

Maybe I could do all that. Just because it's fun. But I'm not convinced, aside from it being fun, that filling my brain with experiences will get me anywhere. 

But I think too much.

Hey, have you seen the new Simpsons' opening theme? If you haven't, make sure you add it to your list of 100 things to watch before you die!

Everything's broken like it should be

Here's the bumblebee bats' first B side (It doesn't count as a single!): Everything's broken like it should be

Yeah, it's lo-fi. Yeah, the drums are funny. Yeah, it's short. But I like it that way. And pumped up on my earphones the quality is a new found lushness I never had with the Peach Boy recording set up. Bumblebee bat is happy.

And no distortion! And no clipping!

Who's the real Mr. Kaufman?

Despite buying "All My Friends Are Superheroes" by Andrew Kaufman thinking it was actually the Andrew Kaufman who wrote the screenplay of 'Eternal Sunshine...' which actually wasn't written by Andrew Kaufman but by Charlie Kaufman, I'm absolutely loving this little heat-warming story. 

The main character, Tom, who is just a normal guy, is married to the Perfectionist. She has been hypnotised by Hypno into being blind to Tom - she can't see him. Tom's heart is breaking and he has the duration of a flight to get his wife, the Perfectionist, to see him again. Weird and wonderful. 

I wish it were written by the right Kaufman though.

Vocals out of time

I learnt a cool new trick on YouTube with regards to recording. I'll have to find the video again and post it. To give your vocals more depth and give the whole song more impact, you can copy your tracks and layer them. But instead of just adding them in exactly the same place, you add them a few milliseconds out of time. It's an awesome little idea. Here's another snippet of a song I tried this on. Sorry it's quite sad but that's all I had lyric-wise: when you're gone

Weird, huh? Still not quite sure what to do about mixing levels. Although it's flipping loud for a 'quiet song', there's some hissing on the vocal track. Maybe I should just turn the preamp down some more...

Note to self - Shit, get a job you dickhead!!!

Testing my E-MU 0404 and C-1 Behringer mic

It's not easy recording the proper way, I tell you. Now I have to look out for tracks clipping, tracks that are too 'hot', too much bass, too little bass and try to remember to write a proper song with lyrics and shit. This is not the first single by the bumblebee bats - it's just an experiment to see if I can record nice quality guitar and vocals. And I think I can: bye bye

It's not perfect. To get the mic loud enough and sensitive enough I have to pump up the preamp more than half way. As a result, I get just a little background noise but nowhere near as much as I used to get. And it reminds me of playing an old LP :-) There are also a few parts where the vocal distorts. Recording is a tweaking man's world,eh. Lots more room for improvement there. Good fun. Beats doing real work!

ps. turns out a lot of that last post was wrong. The conversion rates are nonsense - no-one records higher than 44.1 kHz because that's the normal rate for CDs. So I'm not quite sure what the 192 kHz is for yet! Just read Wikipedia instead of Undeceivable from now on...

The USB audio interface quest

(Very long post that probably doesn't interest anyone. But just in case you are a person looking for a USB audio interface, this is my journey...)

For the past month or so I've been dreaming of USB audio interfaces - primarily so I can record vocals and acoustic guitar through a mic hooked up to my MacBook.

Plugging stuff straight in won't get good quality sound because you need preamps to boost the signal from mics. I didn't really know anything about pre-amps until a month ago. Or mics for that matter. Even if you had some decent preamps you'd still need a USB adaptor to connect your gear to your computer. So rather than get a preamp and a USB adaptor, they have audio interfaces which have pre-amps, high conversion rates, effects and phantom power so you can power condenser mics giving you everything you need to get the sound from your mic to your computer in the best possible condition. So I knew I needed an audio interface, I just had to wade through the notoriously murky waters of internet reviews. And dude, there are lots.

So my quest started after I got my lovely UGM96:

It's a super small audio interface which seemed fine for what I needed: it had two inputs for simultaneous recording of mic and guitar and a pre-amp. It turned out though it just wasn't powerful enough to create good enough sound quality with my dynamic mic. Now I had a real problem - maybe I needed a new mic too! With a conversion rate of 24 bit / 96 kHz and a weak preamp (-20db) I'd need a condenser mic to get any proper sound out of this thing. Unfortunately, the UGM 96 doesn't have phantom power so they don't work with condenser mics. So I had to start again.

The next option was the M-Audio Fast Track Pro. Up until this morning this was the one. But strangely enough, I can't work out why I thought this was the one! The reviews across the internet (I've read them all!) ranged from saying it was pretty good for the money to people saying it was a piece of rubbish:

But with an average review rating of 7 and not much else out there that I could afford that got a similar rating, I ordered mine. But it didn't feel right - it got flipping awful reviews sometimes and the M-Audio forums were full of people complaining.  The final straw came when I stumbled upon a piece of vital information: it uses USB 1.1. This was going to affect the speed of conversion. (I'm guessing.)

The shop I'd ordered it from didn't have it in stock anyway, so I was waiting around thinking about the arrival of my M-Audio, reading bad review after bad review. And then it clicked - why am I getting it?

Among the crap reviews of the M-Audio, I began to hear of the E-MU 0404 USB interface. This one hardly got a bad review anywhere online. The only problems it had were driver issues but once they were solved it was great, according to the reviews.

So I phoned up my good friends at Dolphin and asked to change my order. My baby should arrive tomorrow:

With a conversion rate of 24 bit/ 192 kHz compared to 24 bit/ 96 kHz of the M-Audio and a preamp -127 db compared to the -20db of the UGM 96, this was more like it.

It is a long and bumpy road to USB interface happiness but I have a feeling I'm getting close.

As for the microphone, I went for a C-1 Behringer condenser mic:

This was cheap at £32 but everyone is united in saying it is a sturdy and good quality, cheap condenser mic.

I've gone with the bumblebee bats for my band name and my new MySpace is up there in the top right. I'm looking forward to writing my songs again. 

And once I get a job I'll be on the road to recovery.

 

Until some other shit (whose causes I fully take responsibility for and will accept) happens ;-)