thanks for not being a zombie

Media Trips: "A guide to artists and producers who sample (remix) popculture." (via Lawrence Lessig)

Posted by at 10:20 PM | Permalink

Thanks to everyone for your input on the past two entries. My career as an amateur musician has memorable peaks:

• Age 10: Playing banjo, solo, in front of the entire school at a talent show in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
• Age 20: Playing guitar in a band in front of a crowd of drunken sailors from the sixth fleet inside an inactive volcano in Naples, Italy.
• Age 23: Playing bass in a band in a small club in Nashville, Tennessee.

And now: ephemeraltoybox, which is another kettle of fish altogether.

Posted by at 7:00 AM | Permalink

...pick a tuning, please.

And head over to Weez's and offer your thoughts on her questions.

Let's get this show on the road.

Don't make me talk about eighteenth-century Methodist sermons...because you know as well as I do that I'm not afraid to do it...

Posted by at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Weez and I are collaborating on another audio project, and we need your input, dear reader:

1. How long should the track be? Choose any value between 120 and 300 seconds.
2. How should the guitar be tuned? Choose one of the following:
   • E G D G E D
   • G G C G C D
   • C G D G B B
3. How many guitar tracks should there be? Choose any value betwen 1 and 4.

Pick one question and answer it. First come, first served.

After we have answers to these questions, I will record guitar parts in small enough chunks that they can be looped and arranged in a variety of ways. Weez will record voice tracks in a similar fashion. Then we will share GarageBand files of what we've recorded and, independently, come up with two final mixes, arranging the guitar and vocal (and possibly percussion) parts as we see fit. Two sound files. Many collaborators. Game on.

Update: Weez has posted questions, too.

Posted by at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Collaboration with Weez. Game on, indeed. Wanna play?

I got home from school, spent an hour with the Telecaster and the Powerbook, and came up with this: 20040929.mp3 (mp3, 2.6M). The GarageBand files are stuffed at this location (3.4M).

Posted by at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

"He was angrier than a Georgia chicken in a bread pan without any dough!"

I was inspired by Michael Berube. This is my GarageBand masterpiece (mp3, 3.8M). It's composed entirely of loops provided by the software and stitched together by me. Oh, and there are some sampled vocals by... well, you'll figure it out.

I hereby release this mp3 into the wild with a Creative Commons license. Dump it into your favorite P2P music swapping service. Put it on your mp3 device. Burn it to CD. Tell your friends. Do what you like. If you have GarageBand, too, and you'd like to remix it, send me a self-addressed, stamped CD mailer with a blank CD-R and I'll mail you the files (which are something like 40M, and right now I don't have that kind of server space).

Posted by at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)