Extra drowsy Formula

Today I got some Plasti Dip liquid rubber and poured it into a couple of Altoids tins, coating the inside bottoms to prepare them for installations of little photo-theremins.  (Update: see here for the finished project.)

(The rubber is to stop the flow of electricity, so that the circuit board won’t connect to where it’s not supposed to.) I’ve collected a few different tins, so maybe I’ll make a few and sell ‘em for a couple of bucks — I’m keeping the Heat Miser tin for myself, though.

Now, of course, I’m looking all around the house for more stuff to Plasti Dip. It’s fun! It’s also, of course, totally super-toxic, and I think using it gave me a headache. Boy, they’re not kidding about using it in a well-ventilated room — I was on the patio, even.

I also took apart my Boss DR-202 to see if I could figure out what was wrong with the AC jack; the power cuts in and out. I was hoping it was something simple that I could look at and say, “oh, the solder’s gone and fallen off” — no such luck. So it’s batteries for now.

I keep telling myself to stop buying new instruments until I’ve worked more on exploiting the ones I have. It’s tough; I’m very acquisitive by nature. I’ll buy something and try it out — if it doesn’t create the effect I want it to the first time out I toss it on the stack and start looking for something else.

I used to be much more willing to work with what I had. this was mostly due to necessity, of course, but I think it’s a good ethic to hew to. Limitations are good for the soul, and being forced to find creative ways around them generate more unique results.

(Also, I might get some songmaking done if I wasn’t spending all of my time reading user manuals.)

One example: I have a hard time recording vocals that don’t make me cringe. I always think, “we;;, maybe if I get a different mic,” but really, I should be spending more time experimenting with the mics I have — for one thing, even if I do end up shopping for a different mic in the future, I’ll have a beter idea of what specific issues I’m looking to solve.

One suggestion I’ve run across for vocals: don’t sing so loud. Get up closer to the mic and sing quieter. Singing louder will make a thin voice sound thinner.

An unscientific and half-assed perusal of my back catalog suggests this to be the case with me. I’ll try some new, quieter vocals this week and put something up.

These are by no means new, but I don’t seem to have anything else to offer you right now, so these will have to tide you over:

Here is a 1992 interview I did with John Linnell of They Might Be Giants.

Here is a 1993 interview I did with John Wright of NoMeansNo.

I often complain that I never get any of the real good scores, like those people that pull Hammond B3s out of dumpsters or find Moogs at flea markets. As it turns out, though, checking Craigslist two or three times a day can pay off: yesterday I picked up a Korg Poly-800, plus, as an added bonus, an Alesis NanoSynth — $35 for both! Luckily, I contacted the seller almost immediately after they posted the ad — they probably could have asked 7 or 8 times as much and still sold it, so there must have been lots of other people inquiring about it after I did.

Here is a picture of the Poly-800:

This picture is from the “quick-start” sheet that came with it. The guy is Chuck Leavell, who is promoted here as “On Record and Tour With the Rolling Stones.”

He looks like a really nice guy and the photo is of course awesome, but part of me feels like this represents some sort of turning point for the Stones in some way that they could never recover from. Is it the shirt?

The keyboard itself had all of its factory preset voices erased — the only sounds it made were weird helicopter and static sounds. Since the previous user was a lady in her eighties (the [late, I assume] mother of the person selling it), I have to wonder what exactly she was concocting. I’d like to think she was just into making crazy-ass noise. (This idea is bolstered by the presence of the NanoSynth, a little thing with a few knobs that makes the keyboard — in the words of the person selling it — “sound weird.”)

Anyway, it originally came with a cassette tape (!) with the factory presets on it — you would plug it into the keyboard and it would make those fax noises and the keyboard would figure it out. This cassette was not included, but a little Googling turned up a .wav file and now everything is factory-new. Cool.

Just a quick note — I added another dozen or so instruments to the gallery. Now I just have to finish up some of the songs in the pipeline that actually use this stuff…

I’d like to update some of the big pics (what you see when you click on the little ones) at some point with pics of me playing the instruments, since some of them are pretty obscure. And it would be cool to have little sound files, too — just quick little snippets of the instrument solo.

Today — January 1st — I’m going to buy myself a cheap daily calendar — the kind where you tear off a page each day. Every day this year I’ll write down a song title (or at least every day on average. I’ll try not to fall behind but I’m allowed to get ahead). At the end of the year, I’ll have 365 song titles to act as future inspiration!

Most of them will be lousy, but that’s how this sort of “forced creativity” activity works. I could say, “oh, I’ll wait until they come to me naturally,” but I find that if I make a habit of forcing myself to write, thing come to me naturally more often. So we’ll see if this kickstarts anything.

I think at least half my songs start with me thinking of a title. If they don’t, the title is hard for me to come up with and often ends up generic or boring. I wonder how many songs have names that have nothing to do with the lyrics but were simply more interesting than anything in the words?

(Edited later — lemme just clarify that the point here is not to force myself to write a title a day, but to get myself into the habit of recognizing song titles when they appear in front of me.)