Category: choons

stuff I hear

in which you expect a worthy Canadian election post, but get something about a lady who impersonates operatic chickens instead

Seriously, Orriel Smith — yes, that one who was so earnest on Hootenanny in 1964 (it must’ve sucked to be alive in the early sixties, living in low-resolution black and white) and the two spaced-out tracks on Fuzzy Felt Folk — is definitely the best chicken-impersonating coloratura I’ve heard. She even gives the Cackle Sisters a run for their money.

moothie

Had my first harmonica lesson with Al Lerman last night. He’s a really good teacher, and he had us all doing simple 12-bar blues in the first half hour. The improvisation will come later.

On the way there I discovered The ACME Burger Company. I think that will be my pre-class meal of choice.

announcing the automatic podcast

Every day, the automatic podcast presents a random selection from my music collection. And I mean random: cartoon incidental music, snatches of folk songs, instrument tuition, and ancient scratchy 78s nestle up against my favourite indie hits. And it’s all introduced by a synthesized compère. I have no idea what’s going to be in it each day, and no records are kept of what was offered yesterday. It’s meant to be a daily snapshot, not an ongoing record.

There are still a few bugs to get out of the RSS feed, but generally I’m happy with how it works. There is some listener discretion required, as I can’t vet what goes into each day’s presentation.

Update, 30 Sep 2008: think I’ve fixed the RSS problems.

no, he doesn’t like him either

Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track “What a Wonderful World”. With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can’t use at all – as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.

— Pat Metheny on Kenny G.

hooray for heather’s

We arrived in Vancouver yesterday, and in the hotel hit a snag: the combination lock of my case wouldn’t open. I don’t remember setting one, so the prospect of going through 000 .. 999 to get at my clothes would be tiresome.

Thank goodness for Heather’s Luggage Repair. They reset the combination, and showed me the annoying little feature of combination locks that can cause this to happen.

less than 100 CDs to go …

1492 Artists / 999 Albums / 15245 Tracks / 34.9 Days / 62.12 GB
(and here’s me thinking I had about 2000 CDs, too)

CDs that wouldn’t read: 0 (so far). That’s not to say that there weren’t some difficulties (copy-controlled CDs can go die, glitching and gronking in my drives) and my oldest CD (XTC’s Skylarking, my copy of which I think has just turned 20) had a ton of retries.

Lost CDs: Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick is somewhere in the house, but nowhere I’ve looked.

Found CDs: My long-lost promo copy of the (Portland) Decemberists’ Picaresque, which I thought had vanished in a road trip to Missouri. It was lurking in a long-forgotten portable CD player in the bottom of a storage bin.

Pleasant surprises: that freedb is generally better than it used to be.

Peeves: copy-controlled CDs (see above); flappy cardboardy cases that only have the title on one spine; oversized CD cases (Japanese imports, I’m looking straight at you), dark blue text on a black background, idjit freedb submitters who insist on Band, The syntax or worse, submit whole albums called sdfsdf;aefhsdf; bonus DVD “premium” releases (who watches these?).

ripping dvd audio with Ubuntu

With more than a little help from How to Rip DVD audio to mp3 or ogg — Ubuntu Geek, here’s how I’d rip audio from a DVD:
for f in $(seq 1 12)
do
transcode -i /dev/sr1 -x null,dvd -T 1,$f,1 -N 0x1 -y null,wav -m $(printf "%02d" $f).wav
done
Your track count and device name will vary. You’ll note that I caved, and used the annoying $(…) syntax instead of good old-fashioned backticks (which some youngsters will claim are deprecated, but I claim as job security). WordPress munges those badly, so we’re stuck with the ugly.
You could use livemp3 to convert to mp3s (if I remembered to upload the version that handles wav files) under controlled circumstances.

supplies!

Pleasantly surprised that a local store – Scarboro Music, at Vic Park and Kingston has autoharp strings.

It also has a very fine old Dobson banjo for $1500.

autoharp frenzy

autoharp chord bars

I got an autoharp on eBay a couple of weeks back. It was cheap, but fairly beat up. 32 of the 36 1970s-vintage strings were intact, if very tarnished. I spent more on new strings and a tuning wrench at Elderly last weekend. After spending a few evenings cleaning (you don’t want to know what I found in it), replacing strings (fiddly) and tuning (slow), I can now make 1970s sounds. Fun!

(and yes, before you ask, it does appear to have two Bâ™­7 keys.)