Here’s the story:

The original clip is 720p25. That is, PAL frame rate. I placed that into Adobe Media Encoder, cranked it up to 50fps and let ‘er rip. Success – but the quality was poor until I made it take 2 passes. The first pass warns the encoder about rough patches and means that very difficult sections are still decently handled. Build the BD and wacko.

OK, so now for NTSC land. Time stretch the video to 59.94fps. Load that into AME, let ‘er rip. End result – as before, quality could be better. Switch to 2 pass, and Encore doesn’t accept it as a useable file. Arse. So I let Encore do the transcode directly. Fails – the file lacks ‘SEI timing’. I try a different encoder. Fails. You need to multiply each stage of this by 8 hours to feel the annoyance. Yes, after a while I started to do little sections and the results are in – 2 pass means fail if you are using a converted NTSC source.

But if I take my 2-pass file and mux it with open source software it plays as a BD just fine and it looks great. There’s just NO WAY to have Encore accept it as a real source. No Encore means no menus and so on.

Help from the Adobe forum was – the error is probably a confusion between a progressive and an interlaced frame. That is, somewhere in the standards conversion it’s (something like) creating a single field and Encore can’t figure out the field dominance. But there’s no way to find that one 60th of a second in 60 minutes of video – 216,000 images. I also can’t really trust this explanation because I’m using all kinds of test footage now with the same outcome.

The writer has advised me – use MPEG-2 instead. OK, so I just did a minute of 2-pass M2v and it works. I am going to have to crank the bit rate up much higher, and that means dropping some of the other stuff on the disc… maybe just one thing. Oh shit, hang on a second I didn’t test something

… OK it does build. Phew!

Choices: (a) make it 24 fps. Looks nice but songs are slow. I don’t like. (b) Single pass M4V. No, it craps out when it hits some sections. (c) Go with 50fps. Would love to do that but I doubt it would work. (d) Buy some other software. Sure the University would love that after I hounded them for this. (e) Do what the guy says. I’ll do what the guy says.

I’m hating this.

I am also particularly pissed off about the federal election. No need for analysis as every journalist has already had a twit and a wipe over it. But I had to see John fucking Howard again. I had 10 years of that prick and I thought it had been dumped down a well and the well cemented over. Anyone who had a hand in bringing John Howard back to political life is a criminal. Christ wasn’t over TEN YEARS of John Howard enough? And I saw him on the street the other day it was just horrible. Enough.

Labor, for fucks sake get yourselves together. It wasn’t a wipe out, but how did you go from most popular prime minister to feather duster in one year? Get your Bolshie back on. Look at the Greens, totally useless but adorable. Get some of that action. Sure, Rudd was a wind up toy, but you could have taught him how to speak English as well as his native Mandarin. You didn’t have to put him in hospital. No, get Latham and put him in a sack, add some bricks, sort it out. Now get Julia off the women’s mags, and get her a crow bar. She’s a fighting woman not a damn pillow.

Do I have to tell you everything?

As it is there’s the distinct chance our next prime minister is a man unsure whether someone is his son without a DNA test.

Tonight something twigged. It’s a wonderful moment, possibly like for a UFO believer if a flying saucer were to land in front of the UN building. Bear with me while I flick through some old ideas again – I hope to offer a shareable joy.

Google has released a little application builder for their Android mobile phones. It’s more BASIC than C++ and the ‘professionals’ are already deriding it as the source of more fart pianos. But, I thought to myself, at least people can make their own fart pianos, which is more than I can do on my iPhone. At which point the whole thing that pisses me off went klunk.

You see, I’ve been hanging around the community for GameSalad, which is a game authoring tool for the iPhone. This was the tool my students used in my Intro To Game Design class. The GS community has become a tedious place where all the talk is about how to get on the App Store, how to make money on the App Store, who is selling the most on the App Store blah blah blah – as if it’s a musicians’ forum where everybody talks about stocking shelves all day. The conversation has been defined from above by the way the entire iPhone ecosystem is set up.

(Stop press – latest addition to GameSalad – in-game advertising. OH right, of course – no arrays, no string parsing – let’s have ADVERTS first. Because it’s not about game design it’s about money. Not teaching this tool next year – their capitulation to Jobsism is complete.)

Instead the Google application builder lets the phone owner slap together something only they might want and without it having to be stocked. It’s a Do It Yourself process – something that has been missing for some time – something which was once a given feature of computing.

Not just the BASIC language of old computers but more recent tools like Bill Atkinson’s HyperCard on the 80’s Mac, or 90’s AmigaVision. These tools served one user as well as they served many. They were part of the personal computer revolution – a revolution that is now being dissolved in “clouds” and “spaces” – the smiley face return of mainframes. A centralised marketplace has (by constant reinforcement) become axiomatic in computing and that is what the rabid social science people call ‘a violence’. I kind of like that. ‘A violence’.

Aligned words from Dale Dogherty on the iPad:

… I am just pointing out the lack of really good tools available for amateurs and professionals to use to create new kinds of applications for the iPad. HyperCard was not only used by The Voyager Company; it was used by teachers to create coursework; or students to prepare a report; it was used by individuals to develop novelty applications like recipe databases…

… If the iPad is just another consumer platform for consuming and not creating content, then it will just be another way to watch TV …

Which is exactly what it is supposed to be.

Following the Android page leads to MIT’s Scratch project which I’d looked at before and decided wasn’t suitable for teaching game design. But another look, particularly reading this article (warning PDF) has led to clarity. As the MIT crew explain they are trying to inspire creative programming of the sort that’s been missing since the old home computer days, empowering people and reversing a tendency to passive social networking (“I have X friends, I have X cows”). Justifiably proud of their achievements they may have neglected some other people working on the same problem – e.g. Microsoft’s SmallBASIC which leads up to Visual Studio Express or HyperNext which is a free HyperCard replacement. And GameMaker which has just hit the Macintosh.

All of these initiatives are politically important. You can see what happens when in the case of GameSalad the whole dialogue becomes one of seeking approval from a gatekeeper. It’s like the old idea of ‘broadcast standards’ that kept control of television with the major networks. Of course the majors broadcast rubbish in the way the App Store stocks fart pianos – the idea of ‘broadcast standards’ is not about the worth of the programming but control of the programming. Or use the example of bands and record labels if that’s your concern. Recent malarkey with the terms of use in the App Store simply yanks the chain to cause anxiety, break dissent and remind the community of where the power lies.

But along with this self policing governmentality comes a smokescreen of limited and directed dialogue – where arguments are merely about brand allegiance and ‘fanbois’ line up to defend the people that exploit them. A more pathetic version of the way the lower middle class can be whipped up to vote for the controlling upper classes by controlled media.

wonderful great amazing

If you have previously bothered to read this blog you will recognise old themes I have tediously covered many time before. The change is that a coherent protest is starting to form – which therefore promotes a coherent response. And given I am responsible for teaching digital media it is my responsibility to go over this again and again trying to form the most helpful and liberating ideas.

Try to remember how to individuate, to rebel. There are infinite ways – that’s the key – there’s not the correct way. The person that uses FaceBook to coordinate their Friday nights with their real friends should lecture me, who looks at FaceBook like a poisonous snake. For my part I begin to understand why I instinctively took on the teaching of game design. The computer has become a projection, a kind of idol with which we’ve become intertwined. As more and more people have adopted a computer as identity (an avatar, a persona, a mediator) there’s been a push to make it an appliance and therefore an aid to what Foucault termed ‘technology of the self’. This constantly connected, linked to a mainframe, rights managed consuming device serves as a very poor role model – to individuate it to run unique, self serving, (even if badly written) applications is healthy for individuating our minds.

I can sum it up: D.I.Y.
Make software for the self and not the marketplace.

In the way that ‘indie’ was a term introduced to dis-empower independence and ‘alternative’ was adopted by the major labels to market rock, the use of ‘my’ and ‘i’ by the new major broadcasters is an obvious signal of the intention to remove the real ‘I’ and ‘My’ from our creative palette. The only way to regain these is to know the difference and exercise it.

To program, and perhaps to programme to entertain ourselves, not mediated by a marketplace, is effective (and fun) dissent.

The old man had a stroke about a year and a half ago. Because the Australian public health service is fantastic they cleared the blood clot in about 2 hours from the emergency call. No hemiplegia, although he shuffles. He has problems remembering many things, and gets irritable like you would if half your mental life was erased in one day.

My main job is the television. He had a fancy set for 1990 something, a SONY CRT, a DVD recorder and a VHS tape machine. No amount of retraining was going to get him to remember that the DVD was on input one, the tape on input two and so on. Of course this caused anxiety, because what might seem trivial to you is a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle to somebody who is trying to hold the fragments together. Keep that in mind – half of this is about control and self respect.

First problem – three remote controls. Solution, look for an ‘intelligent’ remote. I found something made by Logitec that seemed to have the right stuff – you told it what gear you owned and it would show a LCD display that had ‘Watch TV’ and ‘Play DVD’ in nice colourful letters. When you try the technology yourself, it makes sense. When you give it to somebody aged 85 you learn just how wrong you are.

For a start the buttons are little slivers next to the LCD screen. He found them after some discussion but they are ergonomic disasters. Logitec has made them identical to the frame around the LCD. What is it with designers who find controls somehow obscene and try to hide them? Oh a button – reminds me of a penis, must hide it. It’s a frigging controller not the Mona Lisa.

But the main disaster is that the remote learned a signal for ‘turn on’, which translates into ‘toggle power on the units’. So if the DVD was already turned on, then ‘turn on’ would turn on the TV and turn off the DVD. Which lead to confusion. That remote now is out of the loop.

Better solution, although a bit of a risk: buy a new TV with a DVD built in. These are not common above the size that goes into hotel rooms – I guess by the time you buy a huge TV you will go Blu Ray anyway. Didn’t have a very good choice of brands – shitty or not so shitty. JB Hifi took a month to source and deliver the not so shitty version.

Generally the problem is now much less. Once I had figured out how to hide most of the channels, it’s a matter of : turn it on, keep pressing the up arrow to change the channel, turn it off. That’s only one page of a picture book I’m creating for him. Some anxiety comes from channel 2, as there’s now channel 2 one, channel 2 two and channel 2 three. Great naming guys – we can spend hours trying to sort out why there’s a channel two two which is not channel twenty two and two three is different to three two and … anyway you get the idea.

But the bloody DVD player is taking three pages of the picture book. You can’t insert a disc until it’s the video source and the list of video sources is DTV, ATV, VGA, HDMI1, HDMI2, HDMI3, DVD, COMPONENT, COMPOSITE 1, COMPOSITE 2. Seriously people… do we need three HDMI inputs on a television set and do they have to go above the built in DVD? OK so we push the INPUT button, and keep pushing it until we get to DVD. That’s probably going to be teachable.

But then the DVD throws up a choice: DVD, MEDIA. The latter means a USB stick and it’s the frigging default. Every time he wants to run a disc it’s going to be DTV, ATV, VGA, HDMI1, HDMI2, HDMI3, DVD … DVD before the damn disc will even insert. Three pages of the picture book just to get to the image of shoving the disc in the slot.

Sure, I could install some kind of media centre thing but right now I would have to demand that it be completely logical and bug free – and you know and I know that there is no such thing. Also, keep in mind that physical discs make more sense to somebody who has grown up with media objects.

The world population gets older, the technology gets more complicated.
I can see a car crash coming on.

Attempts to hide controls are well intentioned but should not be based on aesthetics. Example – the ‘magic mouse’ on the machine I’m using has multiple controls which are hidden in one surface – worse still the monolithic touch pad. Pretty … confusing for the average user. If you have one button, OK, but don’t hide three or more as physical ‘magic meat’. Things that you might hate – step by step ‘wizards’ – bright and colourful buttons with pictures – ‘Are You Sure?’ – these things done right are going to be needed forever.

I guess this is a plea to do these things right, for people who aren’t dweebs, who might have not have the memory or vision they did 20 years younger. I suspect that as the baby boomers age they will, as they have always, drag society to fit their needs. OSX will look a lot more like Microsoft Bob.

Said one editor, “It’s hard to fathom how this mealy mouthed lying son of a bitch KRudd has lost his shine over the last few months. Just a short while ago he was extremely popular with the public, who were obviously deluded and needed to be re-educated on a daily basis.”

“As a mother of three beautiful girls I can’t wait for the Labor Party to be put in a gas chamber.”

Many of those that opposed the Emission Trading Scheme are disgusted that the bill was defeated twice in parliament. “We were resolutely opposed to this going ahead”, said one lobbyist on condition of anonymity. “So when the government decided to delay it rather than call an election we were appalled at getting exactly what we wanted. It just shows you can’t trust Bolshies”.

Also causing anger was the stimulus cheque sent out to help individuals make ends meet during the recent financial crisis. “I cannot believe the hide of that man, sending money to help us out”, fumed one citizen. “Just because Australia is in a far better position than most other countries in the world doesn’t mean this government is acting responsibly!”

Australia’s position as one of only three OECD countries to avoid recession last year has led to calls to bring back hanging and the stocks.

Much of the angst started with the failure of environment minister Peter Garrett to personally oversee all the subsidized home insulation provided last year. Tragically some houses burned when householders chose completely dodgy installation services. The opposition spokesperson for the environment said that a conservative government would come round to your house and put in the Pink Batts themselves.

Particularly grating to the public is the suggestion that multinational mining companies be taxed for ’super’ profits during boom periods to help pay medical costs. “Hey, it’s my dream one day to become a multinational mining corporation, and this government is raining on my dream!”, fumed another citizen from the same source as the previous one.

So far the polls show the conservative opposition only slightly more popular than the government. The Sydney Morning Herald predicts that with constant opinion pieces the natural order of things will be restored, as conservative rule was cut ‘dreadfully short’ after only 12 years.

DID YOU MISS ME?

When asked for their views, the publishers at News Ltd. said they were currently “more interested in stringing up that commie nigger in the white house”.

The birds fall silent and dismayed
The clouds gather dark and listless
The rivers congeal, their sparkle gone
The heavy air will no longer fill our lungs
Men lean haggard, whispering, fumbling their feet
Pro Tools HD has been hardware cracked.

Look upon the ruins of Avid, ye mighty, and despair.

Glasnost spills across the virtual western world – open letters are opening up openly each opening yet another 1000 flowers of open-mindedness about … well … openness! Yes, we all opine on open source, open standards and opening doors. Open your mind and your mouth! Join in! Blog and Twit and let everyone know what you think about openness!

It makes me cry to think how lucky I am to be here – right now – in the moment when the whole world is opening. Best that I right away open up and show up how more open I am than anyone!

Of course if you want to keep your opinion to yourself … well nothing wrong with that I suppose. Don’t have to blog or twit every day. Mind you it’s kind of odd. You must have something to hide right? Scared that you might get found out. We know about people like you. Perverts.

Quick. Some technology talk. The police are watching.

Delightful toys descend upon me this week, as we gear up for second session. Kunst Kamp has been choosing new cameras and what a dizzy business it is. There used to be just two kinds of video camera = good but expensive, near misses and cheap shit. You ask for the expensive ones and get the near misses. Easy. But this year the range of cameras has become like the Addams family.

Lurch – There’s great big ones like the RED that shoots video George Lucas could re-edit. It also costs the entire school budget. Even the cut down versions, the SCARLET and the SLIGHTLY TEPID PINK are too much for undergraduate movies.

Morticia – Then you have the SLR cameras, the Canon 5,7,9 and a half – these are still cameras but they shoot video too. Advantage is they have nice lenses. Disadvantage is the lenses cost more than the actual camera and a student will eat it in the first day. Other disadvantage is that all the fancy features turn off when you shoot video, which you can’t do for more than 12 minutes or the camera catches fire. But still you can do shallow focus and this is now synonymous with ‘good film making’. We bought a bunch of these and teaching is now solved.

Fester – Then the domestic AVCHD cameras. They don’t cost much, they record full HD and they are light and easy to use. You point on the touch screen at the thing you want in focus and it turns the focus knob for you. They’d be really sweet except we’re cursed with Apple computers so it’ll take twice as long for Final Cut to import the footage. We bought a bunch of these too.

Pugsley – The one I bought myself … was the cheapest and shittiest one. Hey look, I don’t have a whole lot of money to splash around. But this is actually a great thing. The SONY Bloggie costs about 250 bucks and it’s about as big as a phone. Shoots full HD so long as you don’t wave it around in which case it gets seasick. Hang it around your neck, point it out a car window, throw it, tie it to a cat. The small size and price encourages the kind of silly buggers that bigger cameras don’t tolerate. I had penis envy for a while then realised how liberating it is to have a video camera you don’t feel precious about. Got a few videos up on YouTube, more coming.

The other toy is the new Adobe CS5 which I am going to be teaching next session. When you look at the new features, it’s like a poem celebrating life:

• Remove people from photos easily in Photoshop. Now you can be Stalin at home.
• Produce music without any talent in Soundbooth.
• New Flash Catalyst provides the ease and features that you used to enjoy in Flash. Flash itself is now so complex that it has become sentient and plans Armageddon.
• No one gives a shit about Première. It could buy you a necklace and you’d still sneer.
• Ah After Effects. My baby. Now with even more features taken from Nuke. Why don’t Adobe just go and buy Nuke if they like it THAT MUCH. I mean really. So the new feature is that you keep the person and lose the photograph. It’s like the anti-Photoshop. Heavy concept.
• Indesign now makes Flash. I told you Flash was planning something.
• Illustrator probably does something but that’s for School of Design, they can worry about that.
• Dreamweaver does some stuff that makes even more obscure complex HTML.
• All the other crap you never use.

The future!

Up on the wall was a picture of Jed in white tuxedo with a white bow tie, sitting at a piano. I seem to remember there were balloons in the background but that might be confabulation from the grog. The photo was from when he played the piano on cruise ships. I like to think that many pretty ladies swooned to hear him play and would drift to his cabin after all night tinkling. But then I know a guy that DJ’ed on a cruise ship years later and he said that most of the ladies tended to be rolled up and down the decks in wheelbarrows by their husbands.

I would buy just about anything Jed pointed at. I bought a whole host of Electroharmonix drum pads – Crash Pads, Syndrums and a thing called a Clockworks which was the ‘brain’ of the pads, if by brain you mean something that could count to 12. I still have that. The rest of it I hit too hard and broke. Jed said it was as if somebody had dropped bricks on them.

I was looking at synthesisers one time and it was a big decision between this and that – back then you’d get a new synthesiser maybe once a year, not like virtual instruments. I asked Jed about it and he said – people spend their life learning how to play the piano.

And as always if Jed said it, it is best to think hard upon it.

The day I walked into a room of my house and saw all the synthesisers I owned piled up in a circle like an electronic Stonehenge – it was Jed’s axiom that came to mind. I got rid of almost all of them, sold them, gave them away, passed them on at cost*. Over the years however, Stonehenge just moved from reality onto the hard drive. Around the beginning of this year it was ImageLine’s Harmless virtual synthesiser. I didn’t want another, but it was on special… and… it sounded nice and…

The first synthesiser I bought, I knew every tiny tweak and turn, every minor movement that would get the thing to do exactly what I wanted. Same for the MS20, I can still work that thing with my eyes closed, get everything from a woman’s voice to a planet dissolving. But let’s be honest: I have much less command over Absynth or Reaktor, MaxMSP or even Harmless. Just don’t have the patience or the time to sit and learn every control. I don’t really need Pro Tools plus Ableton Live plus FL Studio plus Soundtrack Pro. No one does. Anyone who has a passion for music struggles to focus their libido on composing and not on shopping. Like Stewart says, by the time you get electronic music gear set up you’ve forgotten the inspiration that led you there. He’s gone back to the bassoon.

This is a wider issue. Imagine a pack of baying hounds, running here and there chasing whatever fox or rumour of fox is current. The hounds at front are lost but they bark the loudest. Right now they are barking about one thing, tomorrow it’ll be something else; anything will do so long as it allows the chase to keep going. The running about never touches on the heart of the matter – it’s all about chasing ‘solutions’ to things we didn’t need solved.

Some are barking about HTML5 which apparently will bring a revolutionary change to the workings of the Internet – I guess the same change that VRML was going to bring back in ‘94, or perhaps DHTML or what about SVG; there’s been yapping going back a long way. They woof: HTML5 will free the slaves forced to use Adobe Flash (quite happily up to this point) – although how a banner advertisement will be any less annoying when open source remains mysterious.

Very few things made in Flash have so far been beautiful.
Maybe we should concentrate on that rather than learn another way to do the same thing.

There’s one hound up front with a turtle neck sweater and little round glasses – his yapping is all about how a particularly virginal mobile phone will not have any Flash derived software – it would defile the purity. The howling and baying strikes up across the pack: the phone won’t run Flash… but then it doesn’t run HTML5 either. In fact it won’t properly display many web pages, and the whole browsing experience is like knitting a sweater for ants.

Maybe the entire idea of reading on a telephone needs questioning.

There’s another pack of dogs who are howling for more touch screens, more knobs and ribbons and heart rate monitors and Wiimotes and anything else that could possibly modulate a sound or an image. They’ve forgotten that they were once seeking these things to make better music. The audience finds them irrelevant and are increasingly happy with Led Zeppelin. I can’t tease them enough but it’s hopeless, they can’t hear above the noise.

The endless hunt is empty and pointless but the hounds rush on to the next great idea for delivering nothing, faster. Will it be a cloud or pad or a thrown stick? Who knows, they don’t. Their baying deafens our ears.

I am not about to trash my laptop and go live in a tree. That’s pointless. Jed’s advice was to stop and use what you have – REALLY use it – in the service of inspiration. Hold the upgrades: I want to learn how to play an instrument, not buy ‘solutions’. I want to clear my mind of all the shit that pundits and marketers, CEOs and fan boys keep trying to wedge in there. I think we should tell them to get out of our face and we’ll be far better artists for it.

BTW don’t wait for the academics to lead the changes. I just got this in an email:

“This concept will need to incorporate a vibrant materialism of the image’s sensory and cognitive strata and an evanescent immaterialism of its affective qualities. Rather than locate our conference in the space of negotiation between disciplines or media (the “inter-“), we propose the opposition, transit and surpassing of the interdisciplinary by a “transdisciplinary aesthetics”, and its conceptual and physical practice of a “transdisciplinary imaging.”

Trans – the upgrade to Inter.

—

* Recently a ‘lifestyle’ magazine contacted me for an interview. Everything seemed to be in place until I mentioned I didn’t have any ‘old gear’. That killed it; I mean who wants to talk about music when you can stand in front of old gear.

Courtesy of Apple we’ll be touting the new iPad.
But there’ll be plenty of other REAL  KNOB ACTION.

Some of the talks on offer over the first day:

• DJ Skewl will patch the iPad to send a control over OSC to MaxMSP controlling Reaktor modulated by a Wiimote under the robotic control of a homebrew Arduino driven LEGO vacuuming robot.
• Kurt M will demonstrate touching a Lemur to generate a sound tone converted to a control voltage that modulates a light source picked up by a photocell wired to inputs in Processing that operate a PD patch over MIDI to pan a 440Hz test tone through a 6 speaker array.
• I’ll be there controlling an iPad with another iPad.
• David Pseudonym will be sending wireless signals to an Netbook running Javascript that shows pictures of mice to a homebrew cat that will then drag an iPad off a table onto a Whoopee Cushion.
• Nancy Spudgen will present her now legendary demo of beaming microwave signals under the control of an iPad at high intensity to pop a whole bunch of toads in a bucket in time with a Foreigner track.
• MC Lollipop will use a prototype iPad GSM as a support mechanism to snort some fine ass cocaine.
• Micheal Dorkmeister will show his 1024 button monome and world’s largest ball of MIDI cables.
• VJ Hu Pop will be sharing a way to embed Quartz Composer patches inside Jitter inside Quartz Composer inside Jitter to make a 3D rotating doughnut.

The latest iPad applications will be on show including Fart Piano Professional sending out wireless OSC to a homebrew hydrophonic speaker array in the ladies toilets. See the SQL pipe organ! Thrill to the Fastest knob twiddler in the East! Blog booths and Cloud Rooms and NYC’s biggest Twitting Twister!

We also have expert debates on Saturday:

• “Open source: mainstream in 2011 .. maybe 2012″.
• “The future: 8 bit chip sound on 64 bit recording or 64 bit chip sound on 8 bit recording”
• “Closest approximation to a human relationship: Touch VS Tactile devices”

Sunday Night – a special concert presentation: Taking the chance out of John Cage.

For all his supposed success Cage was notoriously lacking in control. He allowed chance and circumstance to determine his musical outcome. But what if Cage had an iPad? We think he’d think different! Hear your favourite Cages placed in a cloud controller context!

TICKETS ONLY $250 for all three big nights!

Bigot has left the shop.

In 1999 I made a pretty good effort at scrubbing it up given the tools I had. Mostly a treble boost and a bit of bass to try get the ass moving. Back then the music style was pumping and I was drawn to make it sound more like the music that was coming out on 12 inch – oh the 90s!  That was OK but I think it’s time to rethink the sound given the freedom (abdication of defined taste) that we have today. I dug out the original master tape from 1986 for a new listen.

Let’s look at the problems. Bigot was recorded on a Fostek 16 track open reel with Dolby C. Like most things I have ever owned the machine was second hand and a bit dodgy – the speed wobbled for a start. It probably reached 18KHz on the day it was made, by the time I got it, maybe 16KHz. Dolby C was really for domestic use, in guarding against hiss it rolled a lot of high end off the top. Not that my synthesisers had much high end. Down the bottom there’s the usual 50Hz hum of domestic power outlets, plus the burble of the tape.

When the music was transferred to Betamax PCM the old ADC added some funny business at the very bottom and an effect called ‘distant sirens’ up top, because it sounds a bit like police cars. Can’t do much about the latter, but the first thing we do is remove everything below about 30Hz. Nothing really useful there (the Fostek did not known this realm) and it instantly removes some bilge. That leaves  the 50Hz hum but I have never managed to remove this without damaging the kick. Leave it be and gate it.

Bigot was recorded over more than a year and there’s no two songs the same. Last time I took what I thought was the most unique and distinctive mix (Phantasised Persecutory Breast) and matched to it. While PPB does sound great, I now see it’s a very special kind of ‘great’ that I was approaching from a political point. This time I have so far ignored that track, and have taken each song as an isolated event.

Some issues are common. The voice is coming through the shittiest microphone known to man and back in 86 I blasted 1KHz to try cut through the mix. Now, I don’t want to remove that decision, but I have to try detail around it – add some high end without touching that region. The microphone is crackling and that adds bursts of high frequencies. These will have to be, although limiting the very highest does help. Then there are the kick drums made on the SH101. They are cute, but occasionally obese, filling up all the bass space and not allowing any counter rhythm. The usual trick works here, strong compression with slow attack around 80Hz or so to tighten the boom, and then raise the bass level to compensate. On Propeller that has worked a treat – you can actually feel the bass riff now. While the SH101 and MC202 didn’t make frequencies above a certain limit I have enhanced their ’snap’ with a little high boost above 8-10KHz to make them more effective. Really, it’s just fixing bass and treble… very delicately.

I’m going to try the most radical work on the bonus tracks (where fanatics will be least incensed) that are mostly half demos. Son Of needed a couple of hours to try coax a bit of life out of it, the bass is supposed to be, well, funky. It was instead wimpy and seeing there was nothing there I’ve added some harmonics below. The vocals needed a bit of room, oh just the faintest, teeny bit. It helps.

At this rate it’ll be a few more months before I can get around to the artwork. LTM like this to be as close to the original as we can get – I’ve found the original slides from the 86 Australian cover and will scan those. The other thing is LTM don’t like the CDs to be too long, they apparently get complaints from people with old steam driven CD players (seems that most of their sales are war time sing a longs). That could mean something gets cut. We’ll see.

The past!

Whale ahoy!

Remember me? Don’t pretend! That’s right – I’m your BODY and you can think all you like but you aren’t going ANYWHERE without me. I’m with you your whole life, cradle to grave – and you can PRAY TO GOD about not needing me afterwards – but that’s not likely now is it?

No, you and me are deep in it together and you had better get used to it.

So you didn’t mind me when you were younger did you? Caught you looking  in the mirror a few times and it was ME that you were admiring. And you liked the feel of things – don’t need to remind you. Now you’re all pissed off that I keep getting older and your ‘mind’ stays young. I’ve gone flabby, my face is sagging and my hair is retreating faster than the Iraqi army. WELL TOUGH SHIT BUDDY. Take a good look in the mirror now because it’s just going to get worse and one day you’ll be howling to look as good as this again.

I'm feeling a bit better honest.

It’s all your fault – that flab is all the good times you had pouring crap down my throat, lolling around in front of a computer when you should have been doing laps. A nice sculpture of all the times you had ‘one more’. Then there’s the lines that come from all the bad times – all the times you screwed up and had to start all over again from the bottom. Shake it with genetics and serve on ice. We’re a real work of art and the best bit is way we’ve started stooping, a little now and then, getting ready to be a wizened old hunchback.

Pain is nature's way of saying hahahahaahahahah

Are you frightened? You better be. This is MY time. I already sent you a present with that pain in your joints. Enjoy that little tweak in your morning hobble? That’s just the first SOLO, you wait for the full ORCHESTRA. And you have to admit this week’s toothache was a real show – a lecturer that has 5 hours of continuous talking and a screaming pain in their gob. All those teeth got to go one day, may as well sound the first bugle!

Yep, by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll be looking at all the young people around you with a burning jealousy that’ll have you alienated and lonely in no time. But don’t be too jealous – for all their current youth they’re right behind you. Everyone has a body and they’re all dying.

Keep busy writing and recording and all that crap you think is going to ‘transcend’ me. We’re best buddies, and as I rot so will you. When you can’t even sign your own name – we’ll finally be equal, and maybe then you’ll just have to accept who was the REAL master here.

Wanna start a band?