Things and Stuff
As the name implies, Things and Stuff contains things, as well as stuff. We provide you, the listener, a distracting Saturday night, because you know you need one. Right? Phone calls, music, acts of random chaos, and other things... and stuff...
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On this weeks' particularly strange show:
* Although I should have stopped long ago, I'm still amused by one particular effect preset I created on the Quad IV processor last year, and used it on a few phone calls, including the traditional first call from Derek.
* The now nearly traditional second caller, Josh Owens, shows up to talk about radio stuff (as per usual,) bad weather, washing cd's in the laundry, the fact that North Carolina's record low temperature was recorded on January 23, 1985 (-34º F,) and other
stuff.
* A phone call from Mary Ann leads to discussion of the world-famous "bad for you" effect, brought to you by a Dell Dimention 8200 in 2005, accidental mid-western accents, and a demonstration of the random cart categories for interjecting noises and comments into
the show.
* This week's Mommy call reveals that I missed some fun things on Friday night involving lots of cop cars, which is, naturally, rather unfortunate.
* Thanks to a couple of strange Australians, we hear the amazing sound of four berocca multi-vitamin tablets being dissolved in two glasses of water, in stereo, of course.
* Did you know that Ronnie Milsap promoted the use of Windows 3.1? Well, maybe not.
* Things expire over time, but does time itself actually expire and time out?
* Patrick Kelly shows up after not existing for a while. Many things are discussed, including fun experiments with dry ice.
* The sound track for nothing at all?
* I finally have news about the Phonic board. TriTech has *finally* been approved by American Music and Sound to fix it under the warranty. Maybe I'll get it back before next year now instead of 2021, as was originally suggested by the length of time it takes people to actually do things around here.
* Would anyone like a Seth Thomas pocket watch?
* Mary Ann finally got called out for something she did 15 or 20 years ago regarding a grandfather clock, thanks to a conversation at dinner. Cute how these things turn out, isn't it?
* Let's have Christmas on an acid trip, brought to you by what had better be a mislabeled cd. If it isn't, someone has issues.
* Time to play the keyboard some more.
And, as they say, that's that.
Melanie is coming down for a week on Wednesday, meaning Borris goes to another hockey game on Thursday, and, depending on what's going on, there may or may not be a show on Saturday, January 30. If there is, it should be an interesting one. Stay tuned, as per usual.
Hello, and welcome to another week... except not, because it's over. As
a result, a new episode of Things and Stuff is now available for you to play with.
On this messed up edition:
* After the first standard call from Derek, relaying some amusing things as usual, Josh calls in and discusses more old radio stuff, broken English, and Redneck Tech, among other subjects.
* A new possible segment of the show, things you know but might not understand, starting with Sting and the Police... in Japanese?
* A call from MaryAnn, including a demonstration of the Moshi talking clock, and why it's a bad idea to use as an alarm, discussion of the Korg KO1 I bought last week, expensive remotes with touchscreens, and the Logitech Squeezebox.
* After a few false starts, playing with the talkbox a bit much, and a call from Alexander, we get a groove going on the Korg KO1 that I call the extended dial tone remix. It will be obvious why, I think.
Congratulations, there's this week's show in the recycle bin. More of the same wonderful crap next week.
Here we are again: the end of another week, most of which I spent in bed, feeling like crap. Way to start out 20o10, huh?
As the standard cycle of things go, another Things and Stuff archive is now available. Here are just a few of the noteworthy things from this week's show:
* Instead of the hacked, duct taped system of using the Alesis Multimix8 through the Yamaha Motif as a master compressor, this week's show was brought to you by my Yamaha MG124C console, XLR out to the analog inputs on the Delta Audiophile 24/96, using the DBX compressor on mic, a two-stage hybrid compression system+side chain on the phone, and Sony WaveHammer and Smooth/Enhanse plugins on the stream for mastering, otherwise known as all that for that.
This board doesn't have master inserts, and I did try putting a hardware compression solution directly in place between the board and the sound card, with some pretty nasty results. I think this sounds better than that would have.
* After the standard first phone call from Derek, we heard from Josh Owens again, with another unusually long phone call, reminiscing about the good old days (well, for us, anyway) of ham radio, old local phone systems, and too many random things to mention here, including more unexpected news relating to said person.
* Last week, I bought a Sansa Sandisk 2gb mp3 player for $20, which runs Rockbox, and can be expanded to 16gb with a MicroSD card. We learn why using it's built-in recorder as a drum miking solution is a bad idea, unless you like that "low-fi" effect, or something.
* We finally have solid proof from Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve that the year should be pronounced 20o10.
* This week's Mommy Call breaks in an interesting way when Dad decides to pick up another phone. Zoom ATAs don't like it when multiple phones are off the hook, resulting in me being looped back into myself and trying to compensate for it. Oh, yeah, and my father is weird.
* How's the Randolph County Sheriff communications frequency doing? Find out speratically throughout the rest of the show.
* A call from a Canadian listener prompts discussion of many things.
* Carbon mics and ping pong effects -- a great way to waste your Saturday night.
* I can't find what I'm looking for, but I do have a talkbox, and a lot of time on my hands, apparently.
* Let's have some out-of-tune side-band from a Canadian HF receiver.
* Kelly the Eyes makes an appearance from Phoenix, acting as the last call, and provider of typical bad humor.
As per usual, other things happened that aren't logged here, but where would all the fun go if things were properly detailed? My response to that: Let's not!
Next week may possibly feature random things from the Korg KO1 Kaossilator I ordered yesterday, but don't have yet. This is a portable, battery-powered phrase synthesizer which does several strange things. Not what most would consider a serious instrument, but it looked fun, so
why not? Oh, yeah, and it was cheap, so there's another reason... or
something like that.
This fun show, being the first from 20o10, deserves a proper description. Really it does! Thing is, I don't feel like writing one. It was fun, and included, among other things, me making an absolute fool out of myself with a talkbox, a short song about 20o10, Rusty in Orchestraville, which was recorded in the late 1940's and features lots of sonovox, and other fun things.
I rather enjoyed doing this one, but I don't enjoy staying awake anymore. I have been told, internally, to shut right on down. And really, who am I to argue with myself? Oh, yeah, me!
By the way, for anyone curious, */I WANT MY BOARD BACK!/*// OK, I'll shut up about that for now, but damn!
Well, what do you know? We've almost *finally* made it to the end of 2009, which, for me, didn't suck as badly as it did for other people, and for history in general... but more about that at a later time. For now, I modestly present the last Things and Stuff archive for 2009
Here are some of the highlights:
* After the standard first call fromDerek, we have a rare appearance from Andre Louis, who, as it turns out, also did something rare for him these days... a show!
* Among other fun things, I received a Rocktron Banshee talkbox for Christmas. I explain what that is, how it works, and naturally, do many bad things with it throughout the course of the show.
* I was apparently bored enough to make a Christmas tribute to carbon phones, including lots of obvious autotune... then share it with the world.
* The Phonic mixing console still isn't back in the studio. Find ou why... Oo, isn't this exciting?
* Ode to... stupid?
* A tribute to my Yamaha PSS-560 keyboard, or at least it's drums, which turned 23 years old on Christmas Eve.
* Due to a relatively low listener count, especially at the end, lots more tracks were played than usual. Oh well, I should do that more often anyway.
* Sure, let's talk about TBRN's early days, as we tend to do around this time every year...
* There is always hope, but supplies are limited.
* The radio is broken.
* Hello.
* As always, other things.
As a random note, I did this entire show with no effects processing, other than compression and the talkbox, which isn't really an effects processor since it's actually a physical/mechanical thingy. Also, no one told me the show was so quiet as I was streaming. I had to squish it a lot later to get it to a decent level. Thanks, guys... or something?
Well, here we are, the last Saturday, and thus, the last actual Things and Stuff before Christmas 2009, although I will probably do something dumb on Christmas eve.
'What did it do?
* The phonic board is still being fixed (maybe). The show starts out with a very bad side-effect of using a keyboard as a master processor, but it was left in for the amusement factor.
* It snowed in North Carolina yesterday, which naturally made the state fold up and shut down, however, it was worse in West Virginia. This among other things was discussed with the first three callers to the show, Derek Lane, Josh Owens, and Randy Gilkey.
* Randy Gilkey... good ol' boy from West Virginia... does the Electric Slide? That's right! Here what Randy doesn't want you to know about him... that he actually enjoys it.
* We find out what Christmas Clunkies are, what they have to do with my mother, and why they are a bad idea in general.
* William the printed circuitboard made himself known today, existing in my Zoom h4 recorder, which broke, and was later fixed.
* Toys that play/sing Christmas songs in Arabic: do they exist?
* Cad fart?
* Let's revisit creating songs using only a calculator, Sound Forge's tone generator, and manually quantizing everything, and demo a partially finished project using this method of fake music creation.
* The mix bus, a new show on tbrn... or not?
* Of course, Other things.
Congratulations, you've almost reached the end of the year. Just one of these boring things left, and 20o10 will exist to do possible fun things to you! Note that 20o10 is not a typo. As I have told my friends and family, I will be calling the next year 20o10, not 2010, because it just sounds more interesting that way. I don't particularly care about correctness, so too bad! Enjoy!
My Phonic board is broken. Did that stop me from doing what I do best, I.E. wasting time, energy, and resources for not very much other than my own enjoyment, and hopefully that of at least two other people? Of course not! As a result, this week's show is now downloadable
On this show:
* We learn the day's true date, November 35, 1990-19.
* The current issues with Phonic, TriTech Electronics (who are, according to Phonic, supposedly authorized to fix my board under the manufacturer's warranty, although they claim otherwise), is discussed, as well as a description of this show's very convoluted broadcasting setup. Just for the info, this is probably the weirdest one I've used to date, and includes a keyboard being used as a master compressor.
* Wo, where'd that come from? A totally unexpected phone call from a long-time family friend, Josh Owens, which lead to an interesting discussion about radio, greyhound buses, West Virginia, Christmas, and many other things. This is a longer phone call than usual, as it was so unexpected, given that Josh had no regular computer access the last time we spoke, and, in fact, didn't really know how to use one that well.
* A standard fallback, going through production libraries at random, leads to a few interesting things, including showcasing some very nasty scratchy pots on the current broadcast board.
* Let's have a Sennheiser MKE2002+dummy head demo from 1973.
* Why wasn't the popular Beatles song 'Let It Be' called 'Let It Generally Exist' instead?
* What Things and Stuff episode would be complete without playing with an effects processor or two, even on a scaled-down streaming setup?
* If you don't have a phone booth, you can put a phone call in a box... Well, I can, so I did.
And there you have it, another show thingy has passed us by. As a reminder, Things and Stuff won't be on next week, since I'll be at Randy's place, for which I am leaving in about 10 hours. Maybe I should start packing? Yeah... Maybe. If possible, I will try to stream at least one of Randy's live gigs, but there isn't a lot of 3g coverage in West Virginia, unless you're in Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg, or Wheeling. Maybe we'll get lucky, and have some available wifi somewhere. Who knows? Stay tuned and find out, because, after all, it's something to do.
This show is fake, but will give you a great idea of why there was no real show on November 28, 2009.
Proving that I'm still dedicated to the fine art of completely wasting time, this week's show is now consumable. It's probably not very tasty, but feel free to ingest it at your leisure... or something.
On this weeks highly enjoyable show:
* Although it's not terribly obvious unless pointed out specifically, my Phonic Helix Board fw24 MKII, the console I use to produce Things and Stuff, and many other fine? things, is having some power supply problems, and will most likely be shipped off to Florida for repair in a few days. Not happy about this, you know. It's the kind of problem I only know will get worse, so I'd better do something about it now.
* A fake section called "why I shouldn't own a studio" was introduced, including bad drumming, and a cover of a Beatles track I did while under the influence of a headache on Friday. Sorry
about the nasty sound from the floor tom.
* We hear from the 1956 RCA MK II synthesizer,
and explain very briefly how it worked, on the fundamental level.
* Mommy reports nothing at all, which is becoming more and more standard in these parts, now that all the loud fighting neighbors have moved away.
* We briefly discuss and demonstrate the G722 codec on a Snom 320 IP phone, and wish all phones could sound like that.
* Let's have fun with recordings made from my Icom tuner over the week, as well as an incredibly inefficient but amusing way to communicate with the show.
* Thanks to Kyle, a discussion of the Large Hadron Collider occured, including several possible theories as to why it didn't work originally, which leads to the world having never been destroyed, of course.
* Bored enough to count from 11:48 PM to 11:49 PM? I was, apparently.
* Random crap was added to the end of the archive to make it exactly two hours long.
* As per usual, other stuff happened that never quite made it to these pages when it actually came to writing these fake show notes.
And there you have it, people. Another week over, another show gone. Next week should, theoretically, play host to PDAudio Realtime 2009.5 from Derek's place on Friday, assuming it all works out. What it will do, I've no idea, but then again, things work best that way.
Have fun, and don't die.
And now, on the forth anniversary of a very memorable show from Portland
with myself and MaryAnn, one of the more unusual shows in a
long while comes to you a lot later than normal, and is available for download
This show is a great example of how to recover from technical issues that make things impractical to deal with, and end up doing something interesting anyway. In this case, Melanie and myself streaming from the netbook on the hotel's internet connection wasn't working out so well due to saturated bandwidth, most likely caused by someone running torrents on the network. After nearly an hour of broadcasting this way, being highly fragmented and only just existing, I decided to try streaming via my phone on AT&T's 3g internet, which worked surprisingly well given that we were streaming in ogg quality 3 and taking phone calls through a sip softphone at the same time. Latency on phone calls
was a bit long in some cases, and, over all, the sound isn't as polished as I've like, but given the circumstances, things could have been a lot worse.
This was a rather crazy show, which I would be hard pressed to describe and get right, so I don't think I'll say much, leaving you all to figure it out for yourselves. I will, however, mention that drunk people in a hotel on a Saturday night are fun, hockey in the south is apparently wrong, and... oh, look at the time!
I know you're tired of hearing this phrase, but I seem to be saying it a lot lately. I apologize for this show in advance, and promise to nevewr not do something like this again.
This week's show can be downloaded here, and offers the following:
* Co-host Chris is introduced, and what is left of a heavily medicated Derek explains the state he's found himself in.
* The technical problems begin with failing messengers, and a dying APC UPS that really wants my attention.
* A Canadian listener calls in, at which point several things, including broken Messengers, an appropriate sound scheme for Windows Vista, and old, bad Things and Stuff references from 2007 are discussed.
* Chris plays with my effects processor for what is arguably a bit too long for anyone's own good.
* Haven't you always wanted to play with a model airplane? Well, now you can, on model airplanes and stuff!
* More unfinished ideas, brought to you by the Yamaha Motif XS and it's pattern sequencer.
* No Mommy Call this week, truly breaking that after almost a year of doing it.
* Thanks to a Canadian node on GlobalTuners, we have a comparison of the United States NOAA weather radio, and Weather Radio Canada. Both are bad, but which is worse?
* Have you ever wondered how WWV sounds on narrow band FM, instead of it's proper AM?
* Shins for Windows takes the streaming client and a couple of other things down after a nice, hard crash, prompting a remote session from another computer to kill it, resulting in issues with the
stream for several moments. Gotta love those external archiving solutions... I suppose I could have edited this more, but if Don Joyce can spend half an hour trying to fix a buzz on real FM radio, then I don't feel so bad.
* A ringing endorsement of Time Warner Cable business class? Well, maybe it doesn't actually ring...
* TBRN's live stream is dead... or is it?
* A call from a slightly intoxicated Kyle and Jody at a camp fire ends this poor excuse for a show.
Well, there you have it. Enjoy it more than I did, for what it's worth.
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Well, ya know, time for another stupid show?
or something like that.
This week's two hour masterpiece includes:
* How many knobs does Borris's board have?
* Derek's girlfriend, a Roland Juno G, is leaving his life after just a few days?
* The fake plastic stalker gets two seconds of fame.
* A listener's comment about being temporarily broke leads to the constipation blues.
* Let's play with a barebones Motif pattern and acoustic drums.
* Autotune the news? Sure, why not?
* to the listeners in Antarctica, We've got your weather conditions!
* "Ha Ha," said the clown, including a bunch of Mary Anns for good measure.
* This week's Mommy call reveals the fact that my father lost his sell phone at a local WalMart.
* A discussion of belching with Mommy results in some bad time with burping delays and drums.
* The Borris Sorry Mix?
* A fake Fideliphone promo (except not) provided by Over the Edge.
* A bit of info about my new Icom PCR-100 all-mode pc controllable receiver, which will be available to the public to play with soon.
* A waste of time, jerks, and going all keyboard crazy.
* Buzzy times with a Marshall condenser, a bad cable, and a sink.
* Kyle calls in to tell us about a retarded cat, which apparently has vocal quality of a dying baby, as well as introducing his new, up-coming show on TBRN (sort of).
* Someone in LA really didn't want me to leave. Too bad for them!
As usual, other things happened, which weren't mentioned in text.
Enjoy, have fun, and good night? Well, maybe it's not night where you are. For that matter, it isn't here, either. Oh well.
First of all, let me apologize for the lack of an archive last week. A show did exist, but it was a bad experience (tm) and I didn't like it much, so it never was uploaded or written about. I didn't even want to think about it, and thus, haven't actually reviewed it, and don't remember if there was anything fun from it. If this turns out to be the case, I might post it later on.
Now, I would like to also apologize for this week's show being available from here
Due to the fact that I am sleepy, lazy, slightly preoccupied and lazy, I will summarize this week's show with the following few words:
* Mommy and toys that make bad noises
* a fake stocker who won't die, even with a burned and broken face
* self-made Jerks, and a call from Venison
* Kyle Mckenzie, music and more noises
* random samples from a vast, unorganized collection of crap
* a review of Stephen Clower's difficult phrases from Augost 2007
* a fake ride in a 1965 Ford Pick-up truck
* other unmentioned things.
Enjoy. I did.
Well, it's that time of the week again... Time to go off and download this week's show if you dare.
Here's what it did this time:
* Playing guitars in the rain, bad mic checks, the lonely conductor, and a phrase sampler? How do these all fit together?
* Monty's phone line is really, really noisy, and gets progressively
worse throughout the course of the show. Since he called five times, this becomes apparent.
* I was bored enough to make my listener count a part of the metadata using a PHP script, so you can simply look at your player's title bar to see how many people are bored enough to listen to me being bored. Yep, innovations in all the wrong places, that's us...
* Don't stand on my monitor, a comparison between a badly miked and compressed recording of a track played first through my Alesis monitor 1's six years ago, then the same track miked up and played through the new/old JBL 4311's. Why? Why not?
* An abrupbt change from the standard archiving method to the Behringer Squishalizer at thirty minutes and seven seconds into the file, because I apparently was stupid and closed the archiving solution. Sorry about the Squishalizer. I really don't like it's sound anymore, and I'm to the point of maybe trying a software multiband solution that isn't Stereo Tool to replace it... if I can find a decent one.
* More accidental fun with a phrase sampler? Sure, why not?
* Cloning MaryAnn's, and a possible returning show on Sunday mornings?
* Kyle Mckenzie, a friend I met during my days as an active ham radio operator in 1994, showed up for the rest of the show to make life interesting by playing random sound effects, and some of his tracks via Fideliphone, after a technical issue on my part.
* How much are people willing to pay to have their caps lock indicator lights repaired?
* Some callers are apparently much more amusing in boxes.
* Talk of spring tank CB radio reception, fun with old cordless phones, baby monitors, FRS and drive through windows... Alwys a good fallback.
* Where did the weather go?
* How about the weather at the south pole?
This edition of Things and Stuff has been brought to you by an increasingly leaky set of headphones that I should really replace with something better.
I'm lazy, so I'll just say this about this week's show.
Did you know there is an official sound for Summer going away for a year? Yep, there is. Basically, as for the rest of it, the show features a lot of fideliphone, including alcohol issues (except not), loud things that go toot, dogs, and a friend who found me after losing contact for about thirteen years. Fun times.
Due to levels being all over the place this week, I decided to try using the c4 multi-band compressor in post-production. Doubt I'll use it every week, but it worked for this. If loads of people complain about the sound, I still have the unprocessed file, and can edit it all over again... Of course you'll all want me to do that, right? Yeah, definitely a fun time!
* Thanks to MaryAnn, a new rule has been enforced. If you don't have a valid ID in your possession, you can't listen to the show.
* Last Saturday, I went to Piedmont Dragway with my father to see some nytro-burning Harleys in action. I talked about that, played a small preview of what I recorded there, and complained about the horrible band I saw at a bar afterward.
* Last Tuesday, I blew up my Hafler 50-watt per channel amp, which I replaced with a much cleaner AB International precedent Series 600A on Thursday. Twice the power, and three rack spaces instead
of two. I had to move things around in the rack to make it fit.
* Let's play with keyboards and vocoders again.
* Mommy visited the studio, at which point, such strange things as bad bands, bar violence, wireless microphones in toilets, marshmallows, cadavers, condoms, and beeping baby Borrises brought to you by slow scan TV are discussed. We also discover that Mommy's mic technique sucks, but not as bad as some.
* The recording I made with an open transducer in the toilet was played again.
* Slow scan TV will die? Apparently, Borris through a pitch shifter thinks so.
* Beds and vocoders are fun.
* FX Radio is also fun.
* 9-minute drum solos from Deep Purple are also fun.
* Plastic melodica keys and fake wurlitzers are fun as well.
Enjoy.
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Yes, that's right, folks. It's October 25, and, instead of posting yesterday's archive, which is 12 minutes long, by the way, since it broke in all kinds of fun and interesting ways, I'm giving you a show archive that was previously not uploaded, because I didn't like it at the time. Have I changed my mind? Well, not really, but it's something
to have.
According to the notes I wrote for this show in June:
At the time of the show, I was being plagued by a migraine from hell. I did manage to do a few fun things, such as putting a well-known and quite horrible song through a midi controlled Granulab, which was rather amusing (at least to me), showed the last couple of minutes of WCWG's analog TV feed as it went off the air forever, and complained about
various things. For some inexplicable reason, I extended the show for almost an entire hour just to talk to Alexander Nelson about keyboards and pointless things, and to play around a bit with the Ensoniq TS-12.
I think I left out a few things, such as Venison's problems with big words, I.E. anything longer than two syllables.
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