We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • oliver postgate’s world

    Sad to hear that Oliver Postgate passed away. Bagpuss was my series; it started just as I started school, and I caught the first episodes. I spent the whole evening learning the theme on the mandolin, and watched a couple of episodes, half-teary. Was it really nearly 35 years ago?

    The music and sounds are what stuck with me. I didn’t know it at the time – but did as soon as I picked one up – that the Bagpuss waking up magic sound is a slow upwards glissando on an autoharp. Similarly, the falling asleep sound is an autoharp strummed slowly downwards. Gabriel’s instrument confused me for years – I now see it has a 5 string banjo neck, but no fifth string (like someone else I could name). To add further confusion, it’s really a mandolin that’s Gabriel’s sound.

  • i was the sound man (kinda)

    I went to hear Chris Coole yesterday at The Local, and got pressed into the not-very-arduous duty of looking after the levels. With only voice and instrument, it’s not that hard, and I only once managed to produce an ear-splitting blast of feedback. There was a slight ring if Chris leaned forward and his guitar started to feed back a couple of times.

    I also ran my first soundboard-audience matrix recording rig, with the PMD620 recording off the board, and my old minidisc recording from my table. The Local’s not short of ambient noise, so it’s nice to control it. The board gives a clean but rather dead mono recording, while the audience mics pick up lots of colour (and dropped plates, door chimes, …)

    I haven’t put the full matrix together yet, but tried it on one excerpted song. Once you know what you’re doing, aligning tracks in Audacity is pretty simple – just find a clear note or beat in each track, get the tracks roughly aligned with the Time Shift tool, then zoom in as close as you can to refine the match. I suppose I should have delayed the audience track by about 0.01s to mimic the distance from the stage, but that’s a bit nerdy. Limiting the audience to 25% of the final mix, I get a great warm sound, but one that’s unfortunately almost entirely monaural.

  • a brief note on Julian Koster’s banjo playing style

    Having had a chance to watch Julian play at close range, he plays a regular five string with the fifth removed. It sounds like he tunes DGBD, but I could be wrong.

    His strum style is almost like a jazz banjo rhythm, but done without a pick. The one song he played used a familiar progression: first and fourth strings fretted at the 5th, then both down to 4th, to 2nd, then up to 3rd. Try it – it’s fun!

  • the little computer that should

    My home server went phut last week. There was a brief power outage, and everything else came back on — except the server. It was a three year old Mini-ITX box, and I’m casting about for ways to replace it.

    To serve my immediate music serving and podcasting needs, I have pressed The Only Computer That Runs Windows into service, running Ubuntu using Wubi. Unfortunately, I do still occasionally need to run Garmin Mapsource, which only runs on Windows, and also The Only Computer That Runs Windows is also rather too nice a laptop to be sat doing server duty.

    I have some options:

    • Get a new motherboard for the mini-itx box. Via still has some crazy ideas about pricing (over $200 for a fanless C7?) but maybe I’ll go for Intel’s snappily-named D945GCLF, which looks okay for what I need and is only $80.
    • I could resurrect the old Athlon box I got in 2002, but it’s big, loud, and its components are probably near end of life. Also, why disturb a mature spider habitat?

    What I was really looking for was one of those tiny fanless internet appliance boxes that were so 2007 (like the Koolu and the Zonbu, both of which have moved on to other things), but such units, without the tied storage service contract, are upwards of $500.

    My needs are simple:

    • run Firefly to feed the Soundbridges;
    • generate the automatic podcast every day, which realistically means a linux box with Perl, sqlite and the like;
    • have something to ssh into when boredom strikes the need arises. Perhaps unwise having an open machine sitting directly on the internet, but only the ssh port will be open.

    I really also need to get rid of all the computer junk in the basement. It now includes two fritzed mini-ITX systems and the world’s slowest PostScript laser printer. Such fun.

  • AWS OpenWIND

    AWS OpenWIND is a free wind farm design tool. It’s from people who know what they’re doing. I’m intrigued.

  • my browser knows about toronto highways

    Thank you, I’m here all week …

  • 2008 contenders

    I fear I may have to play by the “best of” rules that everyone else plays by this year. As I have had to rip and encode all of my albums this year, I can’t tell which older releases I bought this year. So here are the 2008 releases:

    • A Sound Legacy: 60 Years of Folkways Records and 20 Years of Smithsonian Folkways
    • Accelerate — R.E.M.
    • April — Sun Kil Moon
    • Bad Case of History — Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians
    • Cheap — Seasick Steve
    • Como Now: The Voices of Panola Co., Mississippi
    • Conor Oberst — Conor Oberst
    • Devotion — Beach House
    • Earth Sciences — Laura Barrett
    • Electronic Projects for Musicians — The Apples in Stereo
    • Everytime! — Sheesham and Lotus
    • Funplex — The B-52’s
    • Holler and Stomp — Dressy Bessy
    • In a Cave — Elf Power
    • Live at the Moonshine Café — Steve Payne with Al Lerman
    • Live! From CarnEGGy Hall — Orriel Smith
    • Luna — The Aliens
    • Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust — Sigur Rós
    • Modern Guilt — Beck
    • Music Tapes for Clouds and Tornadoes — The Music Tapes
    • Proof of Love — Old Man Luedecke
    • Recapturing The Banjo — Otis Taylor
    • Sea Lion — The Ruby Suns
    • Shadow Cat — Robyn Hitchcock
    • Shall Noise Upon — Apollo Sunshine
    • Skeletal Lamping — Of Montreal
    • Soft Airplane — Chad Van Gaalen
    • Spectrum 14th century — Final Fantasy
    • That Lucky Old Sun — Brian Wilson
    • The Living and The Dead — Jolie Holland
    • The Singing Saw At Christmastime — Julian Koster
    • Then We Were Older — Ideal Free Distribution
    • Third — Portishead
    • Turn the Water on, Boy! — The Coal Porters
    • Victory Garden — Laura Barrett
    • Volume One — She & Him

  • Music Tapes Caroling … at our house!

    Julian Koster played at our house last night as part of his Music Tapes Caroling tour. We had one other guest, Dan Farrar from Dunnville. It was a great night. Julian played some Music Tapes classics (he played Freeing Song by Reindeer, my favourite ‘Tapes song so far), while Badger Saw played some carols. A fun night.

    Julian plays Freeing Saw by Reindeer, while Badger Saw and Rudolph the dog look on
    Julian plays Freeing Saw by Reindeer, while Badger Saw and Rudolph the dog look on
    Badger Saw sings to us, while Julian supports
    Badger Saw sings to us, while Julian supports
    My banjo now has Julian Koster power
    My banjo now has Julian Koster power

    Recording is here: Julian Koster – Music Tapes Caroling, our house – 1 Dec 2008:

    1. Introducing Badger Saw
    2. O Tannenbaum
    3. Introduction to a song flown by a little blind girl
    4. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
    5. Introducing the Emergency Banjo
    6. Takeshi & Elisha
    7. Introduction to Freeing Song by Reindeer
    8. Freeing Song by Reindeer
    9. well suited to a throat …
    10. Introduction to The Silly Old Man
    11. The Silly Old Man said “My Hat is a Cow!”
    12. Introduction to The First Noël
    13. The First Noël

  • Chris Coole at The Local

    Chris Coole plays a relaxed set at The Local every Sunday. He had his new custom guitar last Sunday; it looks and sounds great.

    He played his version of Michael Hurley‘s Slurf Song. He let me upload it, so here it is: Slurf Song [mp3].

  • when fish go bad

    I don’t think even Odd-Fish would stoop this low:

    Q: Why were the sardines angry?
    A: Because they were brisling with indignation.

  • a fun word to say


    How often do you get to say goober in a serious context?

  • glaikit: n., chiefly Scottish

    that’ll teach me to mess around with photo booth and Catherine’s iMac.

  • I don’t like prunes, but I do like prune


    Just spent a pleasant morning munging gps data and photos using Prune. It has allowed me to edit a complex GPS track, add many photos, correctly correlate them to GPS locations, and save it all back out in a variety of useful formats.

    I see that the author is talking about producing a native KDE version. Noooo! I like my Java. It runs everywhere.

    (Incidentally, I see that with the recent software update, the Blackberry Curve will now geotag images from the camera. It’s now a really good “I was here” device – coming close to the “Utensil” that Robyn Hitchcock spoke about years ago.)

  • how to confuse a glaswegian

    So if he were successful, the person you voted in is oot. And as he didn’t get voted in, he’s still oot. Did his supporters chant “Oot! Oot! Oot! In! In! In!”, or did they make do with “In Oot, In Oot, Shake It All Aboot!”?

  • a big fan of picasa

    I’ve just started using Picasa, and its ease of use is great. It does all you (well, okay, I) really need of a photo editor, with some nice effects. It also does cool things like handle raw images, and uses Google Earth to geotag images. Here’s one I prepared earlier:

  • lowville

    (rhymes with how, not low, apparently)

    I’m in Lowville, NY, tonight. I’m looking at wind turbines. In fact, if my room faced the other way, I probably would see them right now.

  • the voice of the Mr. Owns

    I am trying to speak to my computer I’m not sure it understands the two well actually it’s doing not badly I’m speaking in a rather disjointed manner I have to go to New York state tomorrow I’m not quite sure why I have to look at twin turbo inns no I don’t have to look at twin turbo ends I have to look at wind turbine what’s

    While it’s remarkably accurate I’m going to be really mean and bald face and sure I don’t know “bold face is that I’m going to be located anyway, to your things have calmed pear shaped nine

    This is the voice of the Mr. Owns and I do I think I’m going to live. I suppose this is better than I expected especially since Mike accent is unusual most people in Canada do not understand a and so finally I have a computer that understands the this is a bit worrying isn’t it?

    Well that wraps it up for dictation. You have a pleasant evening. Good night!

    – what Microsoft speech recognition thinks I said. The random “what” and “nine” is me starting to laugh, and “bald face” is “blog this”.

  • Sunny War

    … is rather a good guitarist:

  • aagh! brainscrub required!!

    So I was idly picking away on the mandolin sort of playing scales when this song from my childhood starts playing itself. It’s the Uist Tramping Song, and has ultra-cheesy lyrics:

    Come along, come along, let us foot it out together,
    Come along, come along, be it fair or stormy weather,
    With the hills of home before us and the purple of the heather,
    Let us sing in happy chorus, come along, come along.

    No, really. I always thought that footing it out would involve a lot of squelching, this being Scotland. Must’ve learnt it when I was 8 or so; our headmaster was a teuchter, so my head is filled with Gaelic-ish things still. One of the pieces I recently heard Rhiannon Giddens perform with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, so they’re not all bad.

    Anyway, to share the brainmelt, here it is in all its awfulness:

    Plus the score, if you care to: Uist Tramping Song [pdf].

  • cosmic coincidence

    Three consecutive space songs in today’s helping of the automatic podcast:

    • The Lovely Universe — Circulatory System
    • See The Constellation — They Might Be Giants
    • Kelly, Watch the Stars! — Air

    That’s the thing about randomness – we see patterns that are of no import.