2010-12 C Side music compilation

Collect the oddities I've gleaned over the year, digitise them, select and create a play-order and cover notes then make CDs and send a N Year card.

• Sort through 45's, flexidiscs, 78s and 10"ers - I just want the real scraps from the bottom - done.
• Digitise and weed out - done.
• Create play-list, re-weed, created test CD and give it a listening - done.
• Mail list.
  
• Create cover art.
• Create liner notes.
• Make the buggers and post them.

It'd be nice to use a home made print or stencil process for the cover.

Play-list:

• [1] Hep Clothing : side2-07
• [2] The Electric Prunes : Get Me To The World On Time
• [3] Samantha Jones : The TC Theme[
• [4] Fanta
• [5] Hep Clothing : side2-02
• [6] Teach Your Canary to Sing : Humoresque
• [7] The Partridge Family Fanclub NZ : side1-01
• [8] Embassy_Theatre : Spot and Win
• [9] Fanta
• [10] King Flash : Mama Looka Booboo
• [11] Kapuana : Bill Wolfgramm
• [12] Hep Clothing : side1-02
• [13] The Partridge Family Fanclub NZ : side1-02
• [14] Xi_Qi_Feng_With_Ye_Ling : Tears_Of_A_Lover
• [15] The Fire : Treacle Toffee World
• [16] Asha Bhosi : Chinatown
• [17] The Partridge Family Fanclub NZ : side2-04
• [18] Fanta
• [19] The Saturday Night Suit : side1
• [20] Hep Clothing : side2-03
• [21] HipHigh : side1
• [22] The Fire : Fathers Name Is Dad
• [23] Strawberry Alarmclock : Incense And Pepermints
• [24] The Partridge Family Fanclub NZ : side2-02
• [25] Hep Clothing : side1-01
• [26] The Eelectric Prunes : Are You Loving Me More
• [27] The Shadows Of Knight : Ill Make You Sorry
• [28] Saturday Night Suit : side2
• [29] Fanta
• [30] Syndicate Of Sound : Keep It Up
• [31] The Partridge Family Fanclub NZ : side2-01
• [32] Strawberry Alarmclock : The Birdman Of Alkatrash
• [33] The Partridge Family Fanclub NZ : side2-03
• [34] The Shadows Of Knight : Im Gonna Make You Mine
• [35] Samantha Jones : Ford Leads The Way

These are all from disposable or obsolete records and this is distillation of last years finds. ; 45s : meant to be destroyed by teenagers, 78s : No one has a 78 player any more, Flexidiscs : too fragile and beautiful to live, 10“ discs : everyone thinks they’re 78s and can’t be played, advertising records : no one wants to buy an ad. If this stuff was food it would be crumbs from behind the fridge.

• Get me to the World on Time : This is cheating. I didn’t get this this year, I've had this single for many years but it so blew me away it's kept me digging in bins for manky vinyl ever since so I owe them. Sometimes you can tell a band by it’s cover. Fantastic Title. Fantastic Band Name. Fantastic song.
• The TC Theme : Ah now this is advertising as it should be. I think the product is a car but I'm not really sure. The 45 sure sounds good though.
• Humouresque : Canary Training record. I never imagined such a thing existed but here it is. Poor Canaries.
• The Embassy Theatre Promo' : Who was Rita Samora?
• Mama Look A Booboo : Ah yes, That eternal problem: What to do when you are really ugly. If you're King Flash you write a song about it. This is the B Side to Zombie Jamboree which is very very wonderful too but I’m not going to play it to you.
• Kapuana : This is a 78. I love the slight Sheila Twang in her voice. And the slide guitar. And the rhythm guitar. And that small recording studio sound. So good to hear an NZ accent on a record this old. Listen to that authentic 78 hiss.
• Tears Of A Lover : This is a 10” 33 1/3 and the photo of Xi Qu Feng on the cover shows her with a 60s beehive hair and cocktail dress. She looks great. I like the slightly seasick strings and the way her voice just floats over them.
• Try to imagine it as the soundtrack to the life of a lost English ex-pat' stuck in a seedy hotel in 1960s Hong Kong waiting for the next trust fund cheque so he / she can buy a ticket out of there.
• Treacle Toffee World : Well, the A Side of theirs on here is so very good I had to put this on too. Perhaps that was a mistake. I remind you it is the B side.
• Chinatown : I've been looking for some Asha Bhosle ever since I heard Cornershop's Brim Full Of Asha: Their sung homage to favourite record labels and stars at the end of that song mesmerises me. It’s half Roadrunner half Sister ray and full of deep affection for real music. I was lucky to get this 45 complete with a photo on the sleeve and she looks great and sounds as good as I'd hoped. Imagine if saggy old Madge or the famous for being famous Gaga could actually sing pop songs as well as this. Imagine if their croaky pitch shifted banalities instead darted like small sliver fish in vast dark green undersea cathedrals or soared like a 1970s hang-glider over the grand canyon at sunset the way Asha’s voice can: I'd start listening to commercial radio then. Really.
• Saturday Night Suit : This is the A side. The B side is even better and coming up later.
• Hip High : I suspect that this is the Hamilton County Blue Grass Band. And it's quite good in a nicer side of duelling banjos kind of way. One of the things about Bluegrass is they way they just throw out these blinding licks even in joke songs.
• Fathers Name Is Dad : Wow. How could this not have been a hit. Proto Black Sabbath guitar riff, coolly studied vocals, great lyrics and a Bee Gee'sie chorus. Play loud. Bang head. See stars.
• Incense and Peppermints : Good organ but the rest is a bit mad if you listen too closely. I think that this was a hit. Go figure.
• Are you Loving Me More? : Good rock with neat neat bass stuff going on and wild organ break. Top production that suits the Prunes to the ground and this is the B side to “...world on time” better then most A’s eh?
• I’ll Make You Sorry: I tried to shake back my Shag Cut hairdo and felt the hairspray hold, but I was saved from foolishness when right then the Purple Hearts I’d put in my PepsiCola kicked in and “I’ll Make You Sorry” clicked into play on the Jukebox: I stood, radiated some coolness, adjusted my cuff-links and did the Frug.
• Saturday Night Suit : Now with more words. The B side complete with sales pitch which really makes this brassy rocker complete.
• Keep It Up : If the Temptations covered this it would have been huge. This is at the same time very cheap and so sophisticated. Great no budget soul. How did they get the piano to sound so plunky? Brilliant.
• The Birdman Of Alkatrash : Strawberry Alarm clock attempt a novelty song. As good as you’d think it would be. Nice Duck noises.
• I'm Gonna Make You Mine : Also known as “Return to the speed fuelled 1960s American dying industrial city nightclub where an American Garage Rock Band pretends to be a British Mod Band but that band is pretending to be an American Blues Band.” The classic narrative arch.
• Ford Leads The Way: A free-wheeling song to end it all. I’m hoping that this is sung by one of the women that Ford’s fix it men hired to try to seduce Ralph Nader to blackmail him so he wouldn’t publish “Unsafe At Any Speed” but it probably isn’t.

The interludes:

• Hep Clothing: I can see what they were trying to do and I laugh at them not with them.
• Fanta: There were a few LPs released that had charting songs on them and these advertisements interleaved. These are the ads from one. Interleaved.
• The Partridge Family NZ Fan Club: A well preserved 45. Its all there; no songs, just please buy our records and we’re really tired now.

2010-11 Font beerwine

There's a great naive raw looking sign by a corner dairy just down the road. Take photos and make a font based on it. Call it beerwine.
I'd forgotten until a friend and myself walked passed it and he had his camera-phone handy . Here's a trimmed shot
So the task is to make a vector font from a photo of some lettering. I checked for tools to this so I could get together a process and this seems to be a reasonable approach :
gimp -> glyphtracer -> FontForge.

• Use gimp to make an image of a full alphabet and character set in the style of the characters in the image.
• Use glyphtracer to parse them into vector fonts.
• Use FontForge to gussy-up the result into a font usable on most PCs.

And here is an example created using GIMP. Open office , desktop themes, abiword all see the font and treat it properly. Cool.

2010-10 IR Menus system

The OSD tools I'd used for the IR control menu have bit rotted, are too slow and not good looking.
Get a simple, fast image based menu going. Theme-ability is a bonus.

2010-09 Stereo patch bus

Tired of plugging in various new devices for recording or playback. It's a chore and messy to the point where I'm deferring audio projects on account of it.
Some simple patch panels to allow selecting / routing inputs and out puts are needed.

2010-08 Theremin

A Theremin from a kit but then re-cased to look less ugly and more in keeping with it's ethereal quality.
The case is a wooden box of mystery I found in a junk shop. The kit is the revised one from Jay Car. I did Not add the mods' for more linear tone control or timbre controls. Save that for version II I think.

It's just about what I thought it would be like to play. The volume panel is counter-intuitive in that it's quieter the closer you place you han. I'd like it to be silent until your hand is near.

You adjust the length of the antenna until the tone drops to nothing when your hand is away from it then you're set.