Will

I have a digital typesetting business on the side. I just started proofreading and formatting (laying it out for publishing) a novel by an older Jewish gentleman about life in the Jewish resorts up in the Borscht Belt of the Catskills during the 60's. I've already learned more about borscht, flanken, knishes and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray then any sane person would want to know. Outside there's about ten inches of snow. What a life. If there really are parallel worlds, this would be a good day to visit one.

The stuff that was in it worked better in one of the previous posts.

Wanted to delete this one but can't. Shame we can't delete our posts. I'd like to request that feature please.

If you got most of them wrong, as I did, to some people, this is proof that we're living in an altered reality. Be afraid. . . .

Without second guessing yourself, simply put down the quickest, most common sense answer you have for each of these questions. I'll write the answers in the next post. Question 1 – What is the name of this animated family of bears? Question 2 – In the Disney movie, Snow White, when the wicked queen looks in her mirror, fill in the missing two words here of what she says: “________ _______ on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” Question 3 – Fill in the missing word where Mr. Rogers sang the opening theme song to his children’s TV show “It’s a beautiful day in ___ neighborhood.” Question 4 – Fill in the missing word of what Darth Vader says to Luke in Star Wars: “ ________ , I am your father.” Question 5 – About what year (as close as you can guess) do you remember having first heard that Nelson Mandela died? Question 6 – Complete this sentence: “Thanksgiving falls on the _________ Thursday in November.

Yeah, I found a bunch of videos of her on YT last night that I've never seen before. Got a whole new appreciation for her.

I know what you're saying Star Man, and I sort of agree on one hand, but on the other I also think that we get many, if not most, of our ideas from listening to others play and building on it, especially when we're younger (musically speaking). I was never one to try to copy licks on guitar. I would just listen to what was being done and then try to do something similar but not the same. And I would take ideas I got from one song and apply them to an entirely different kind of song. Like I might take the way Jerry Donahue could bend three strings at once in different directions or one of them slightly before or after the beat in a country song and see if I could do something along the same lines in a rock or jazz song. I agree that just doing other people's songs note for note is not particularly productive (although I guess most people do it when they're first starting), but I do still listen for inspiration, though not nearly as much as I used to. More often than not, I just sit and noddle until I come up with something on my own. I guess that comes with age and experience.

For some reason she was, and still is, better known in the UK than in America, even though she was American. And yes, she was a real fine fingerpicker too. No one ever talks about her guitar playing, so I'm happy you brought that up.

Anybody remember Eva Cassidy? I was just watching this video by her. Hadn't thought of her in a long while. Released her first album at 29 and died of cancer at 33. She would have been one of the great ones in my opinion had she lived. Hard to believe she's been gone more than 30 years already.

I had a few different 4-tracks back n the day and there was a music store around town that rented out several more, of which I probably used all of them. The best I ever used, and I owned this one too, was the Audio Technica RMX64. DB Sound Engineering Magazine also referred to it as the best they had ever seen. It ran at 3 3/4 ips with Dolby C (DBX was lousy back then, trust me), had 6 input channels, four of them with XLR, two fully parametric EQ bands on each channel, and two headphone outputs so you didn't need a headphone amp to record a friend. It also had actual VU meters, two effects sends per channel, and a very flexible digital transport that was also incredibly quiet so punch-ins were absolutely noiseless. This thing sounded so good that I actually got rid of my TEAC A3440S 4-track reel to reel and my mixing board as well. I often wish I had kept this unit just for old time sake. It took up a lot of space though. It was around 2' x 2' and weighed 50 pounds. Biggest 4-track cassette multi-tracker you ever saw.

It'll give you about an extra 2K of high end. Plus it just seems to thicken things. It's hard to put your finger on it, but you'll notice it.

The Snoopy dance is the only one worth doing.

Isn't that pretty much what I said?

0:30. Now that's sexy.

Nah. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, dancing is stupid. Besides, there's nothing less sexy than someone trying to act sexy, unless maybe they're just kidding. Sometimes kidding around making fun of people trying to act sexy is in itself quite sexy.

Dang, I was just coming back to delete that piece of garbage, but you heard it first. The humiliation. . . .

That's great too.

Paste the url into your browser window David. I thought it was interesting, but it abruptly stops at 2:37 with dead space thereafter. Is that when the mime orchestra kicks in? I find no fault with them. It was a perfect performance.

Great! I wrote a song like that once: Are you balding tonight? Is your hair just a fright? Are you sorry you can’t find a part? Does your memory stray, To before you went gray, And your teeth were not kept in a jar? Does the skin on your noggin seem empty and bare? Do you gaze in the mirror and wish you had hair? Is your heart full of pain cause your hair clogged the drain? Tell me dear, are you balding tonight?

I would never use a backing track (nor any of this band in a box junk) to record a song I intended to put on an album. I consider that kind of thing good for practicing and will sometimes use someone else's backing track to record a practice session and put it on my YT channel or something, but that's about it. If I wanted to record a cover for album purposes though, I would certainly give it a new arrangement, so a backing track would be out of the question. It also seems pointless to me to record a cover tune if you aren't going to make a new arrangement for it. I've read that some people try to record just like the original to get the recording / mixing elements down, but I personally don't see much point in it. I remember going to church when I was younger and seeing these people get up and sing songs to "tracks." Always drove me nuts. Like the only thing that mattered was their singing.

Ain't that the truth. I was born in '59. Radio stations when I was a kid would play an Elvis song followed by the Beatles, and then maybe a country-ish song (Bobby Goldsboro and John Denver were big back then for instance) or even a jazzy instrumental by Herb Alpert. Now the stations are all so divided into specific genres that it's a bit mind numbing to listen to any particular one of them for very long.

I'm genre-tarded. No brag, just fact. Good music is good music to me. I have everything from old Edison cylinder and diamond disc recordings of pop songs from the late 19th century to the modern London Philharmonic, with Dizz, Trane, and Hendrix in-between. Why wouldn't I play and compose it all? When in doubt, I ask myself, "What would Chet do?"

Pretty neat. Maybe you can set up a play date between your frog and Allen Craig's turtle sometime.

I like this a lot Bjorn! Sort of a combination of English pastoral and Celtic folk.