Casting of Pods

The casting of pods was easier than I thought it would be. All I did was take a track I had already recorded when I first bought Garageband and add a voice over. I do have some limited understanding of recording programs though, going back a few years so I realize how this could be difficult for folks who haven't recorded themselves via computer before. I can think of a range of things the podcast could be useful for in my life, but not sure exactly how I would use it yet. I was thinking it might be cool to do a weekly song or something. I'm writing songs almost every other day so It would give me motivation to actually hone and finish them as opposed to losing them to my famously inadequate memory. It might also be something fun for the band to do. We could do interviews with ourselves and even other bands we play with and play tracks from each others music. Maybe even collaborate on some in studio acoustic jams. If I can ever get motivated to start my own blog I'm sure podcasts will make an appearance, but as I said before I haven't figured out the exact details yet. So enjoy my one minute podcast. The song I wrote kind of sounds like elevator music haha but I still may have plans for beefing it up. Alot of the stuff I record on garageband is just pre production so I don’t forget a riff or a chord progression I want to use. This one I actually recorde pretty much to test garageband out when I first bought my mac. I was surprised with the quality of the internal microphone, but not very surprised with the amount of static in the tracks that I can’t seem to get rid of.

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Flickin The Flickr

I am extremely tired of these pictures. Most of them have been up on my facebook and myspace profiles for years now. I don't know why but at some point the joy of uploading tons of pictures of myself and others escaped me. This little project was kind of fun though so maybe I'll start taking photos again and updating my stuff more often. The only downside to Flickr is that I need yet another e-mail adress and password to remember as I had to create a yahoo Id. Thanks brand Identification, Your so convenient for massive internet corporations yet such a pain in the ass for me. Oh well I guess this will finally motivate me to start writing this stuff down or even use the little adress book program that came with my mac.

All of these photos are either of me or by me. The way to tell for those who aren't too quick witted is that the ones without me in them were shot by me. Some are of performances with my band TORA TORA TORA. Theres a bunch of photos of just running around Long Beach, and Santa Monica- two of the places I've lived in the past few years. And theres two of me singing with the Misfits. It was pretty funny. They let me sing a song with them and I blew the lyrics because I was so pumped to be singing on stage with a band I grew up listening too. Later on backstage Jerry Only was like "Who do you think you are? Fu**ing Mick Jagger or something?" It was rad. Another photo is of me with my old truck which had recently run over a fire hydrant. Lets just say that I don’t have very good luck with vehicles. Time to run this through word count HUZZAH!!

Fun with RSS feeds

So I set up a Google Reader account. This was a fairly easy task as I already have a gmail account. I used to kill alot of time going to news sites like punknews.org. I would read and sometimes comment on stories to pass the hours between classes when I didn't feel like doing anything productive. Well now I can read all my sites at once with googles rss feed reader. Its cool and it lets me kill time more efficiently by allowing me to read the news from countless sites at once. This article from punknews.org caught my eye: F*cked Up, Xiu Xiu suit against Camel, Rolling Stone dismissed I've read different articles about this for awhile now and had wondered how the lawsuit would end up. To summarize a bunch of bands were featured in a Rolling Stone article which was wrapped in about four pages of Camel cigarette ads giving an impression, according to the bands, that Camel was in some way sponsoring or endorsing their music. This is actually a complex legal issue and, if the lawsuit had been successful, would have set a precedent for free speech pertaining to commercial speech placement. In layman's terms magazines would have to be very careful about the placement of their ads and their proximity to other content. I am ambivalent about this. On one hand It was an obvious attempt at Rolling Stone to sell ad space by capitalizing on the credibility of these bands and threatening that very credibility at the same time. On the other hand, where would the line be drawn? Who would be responsible for deciding what commercial content was acceptable for a magazine and where they could put it? Any body have any thoughts on this?

Tweetdeck

My first blog post of all time. And its about a software program. Can you tell that Its an assignment for school haha? Anyways, I am here to tell you about how I am using tweetdeck to further my insidious goals and conquer the world of rock n roll. First I signed up and made some columns just for the sake of completing my class assignment. I chose to have a search column for hasom to see my classmate's tweets and any one else who may be tweeting #hasom. I also included one on The Replacements a band I've liked for years, but have gotten into heavily after reading "All Over but the Shouting: An Oral History of the Replacements". Basically a blueprint on how to prevent yourself from having a successful music career, but their antics are the stuff of legend. I also created a search column for 70's Punk. This time period and genre seem to be the style I've gravitated towards in both my listening and playing since I was 12 or so. Having a search column in reference to it just helps me see what other bands people are tweeting about and info about shows/clubs to related to the scene are tweeted about regularly as well.

After I set up my school twitter account for tweetdeck, I decided to use it with my band's twitter account. I searched my band name TORA TORA TORA and came up with mostly Japanese people talking about tigers and such. I also set up some search columns for related bands/music types so I could steal some of their followers and potentially funnel some of them to our music page. Just for fun here's a video of the Replacements performing the song "Bastards of Young" on SNL in 1985 I believe. They are one of the few bands/performers with the distinction of being banned from Saturday Night Live.

Replacements

GOD | MySpace Video