Podcasts, Choral Pieces, and Barometric Headaches.

I think that's the only thing I don't like about living next to a mountain. I have no clue when the next lightning storm is going to come and bring on the weird feeling that every sensitive part of my body is slowly being squeezed to death. It feels like that one girl from Golden Eye is getting a thigh workout on your cranium.

It's so lovely until it strikes...your nervous system.

It's the first time in my life I've considered the possibility of using painkillers long-term . Sounds like a familiar story prologue eh? Especially in this prozac-loving state. No worries though, I haven't taken an addictive substance that actually left me dependent yet, so I don't foresee any problems (though admittedly I've never had alcohol, or anything aside from stuff for a couple surgeries). Besides, now that I'm being forced to take the stuff, maybe I'll finally get around to easing the inflammation in my jaw! But onto more relevant things. Musical things even.

I'm trying to be all this, and the organ. It's a pain finding tie-dye pants my size.

I'm trying my hand at a choral piece. Again. I don't know if you've ever tried to write, sing all the parts for, record, mix and master your own choral works without the use of auto-tune, but it's frustrating as hell. Especially when halfway through editing a freak storm appears out of nowhere and begins an all-out assault on all those places that will forever cause you to regret the months you dedicated to cartilage-reducing sports growing up. However, I think I've figured out the worst of my problems.


It's not so bad once you get into the swing of it and nail the melody and first two harmonies, though figuring out alto lines is about the dullest job imaginable. The hardest part for me is creating repeated tracks to mimic the sound of a full choir without cloning. Every time I do it I seem to find myself a little flat, or grating, or off in tone and color. That happens when I try to blend my sound with pre-existing tracks while listening to said tracks. I'm saying tracks a lot. Kind of a fun word don't you think? Tracks. Tracks tracks tracks. If you want it's also fun to imagine some stodgy old fool with an aristocratic accent repeating it over and over again for several mintues as he makes the weighty decision whether or not to make it a part of the latest and greatest in cutting edge linguistic evolution. "Tracks.." he said for the twenty-millionth time, knowing each utterance brought his language closer to its new destiny, one whose history and origins virtually no one outside his field of expertise would care to study...and rightfully so, because that's boring as all get-out. It's not even that important a word."

Anyway, in experimenting with solutions to the problem of choir imitation quality, I've noticed that if I memorize the line and sing it as a solo track (hehe) where I can hear only myself (and if necessary the main melody) then the quality tends to be considerably better. I think the reason for that lies in the fact that mistakes and oddities in the sound are immediately apparent and corrected when I'm hearing only my voice and the main melody in playback, whereas if I pretend to be merely another voice in a throng it's easy for me to get distracted by the voices 'around' me and lose track of maintaining my own quality. Probably one of the many reasons I couldn't stay longer than a year in Rosalind Hall's Men's Chorus.

My favorite thing to do when she walked by was stiffen and yell out, "ALL HAIL
HER MOST ROYAL HIGHNESS, QUEEN ROZ!" She's quite the fan of the nickname.

Finally, the podcast. I've never done podcasting and neither had the author of the podcast. There's aren't podcast courses in college, No podcast trade school. It's such a recent invention of the evil financial empire in disguise as a benign, inventive computer company named Mac (like some silly, innocent Pixar character), that academic circles have yet to write a formula for classes that'll justify the addition of another 5000 page, $2000 book (without binding or holes, you'll have to pay extra to get the hole-puncher and a binder large enough to cram Professor know-it-all's ego into it) to their racket in school libraries.

So we struck out into largely uncharted waters with a rather different approach to the structure of the podcast. No spoilers here, sorry. Trade secrets. The audio was simple enough. My bedroom is more of an office space than living quarters, so I casually removed my bedding, dusted everything, vacuumed the floor and prepared some beverages and snacks for my inevitably stressed-out visitors, and went to town. I had three different mics ready, all facing each other in a circle so we could send and receive facial cues, keep things lively. I had two computers running Sonar X2 simultaneously to meet processing needs, got the audio about where it needed to be to prevent peaking, and then post-edits were pretty easy. Cut out all the white-noise in the background, shift the position of the voices so there's no uncomfortable overlap, and shwalla. The first Space-Cast podcast was born. If you'd like to listen in to Dan's take on some interesting modern board games, the link is here: MDH studios-hosted SB! podcast. 

Retired visual description of the 'Space-Biff!', aptly represented by professional cheek-muscle-tenderizer Adam Jensen.

And finally, new song this Saturday! I'm uploading one of the four projects I've been working on to my sound cloud, adding it to the store, and linking it on my fake facebook business page, haven't decided which one officially, but it will be there, so await with baited breath for the pretentious, life-altering music that will transcend the notion of genre!

Photo attributions:

-lightning: By original data: Sebastien D'ARCO, animate: Koba-chan - original source is Image:Lightnings sequence 2.jpg, animated by me., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1044915