This is cool.

It's getting pretty desperate in here, sheesh. Right now Alex and I are lining up a horn section to record a part for Limp Dick Christmas Lights (including Kyle and Gordy from Uncomposed, which, pft, how cool is that) in the next week or two. After that it's just finishing the mixes, which is mostly on Andy's schedule, but we're already close.

...

Anyway, here's a song.

It's worth mentioning that this is not the album cut. The real song is way cooler. (Among other things, we're hiring a horn section for it. Ya dig?) The only thing this has in common with the actual song is the lyrics and lead melody.

Limp Dick Christmas Lights - Gregorian Bootleg Cut

Uploading.

*e-hugs*

Hadn't even heard of this, and it doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere or playing in theaters anywhere near me. I'll keep an eye out, though. I like having my humanity futzed with.

I loved it. Though I've come to realize I have a truly awful memory in general, and specifically when it comes to a million characters I've only ever seen in a handful of movies. So the fact that I don't really remember... kind of anything about who anybody is or what just happened in the last movie might have helped.

But under those circumstances, I found it incredibly cool and engaging and much better at maintaining a tone than most movies.

Believe it or not, the following is a controversial statement in some circles: the microphone will only guarantee you about sixty percent of the possible quality-of-output. As in, "which mic do I plug in and talk to?" To get to one hundred percent of the possible quality-of-output, you have to know your stuff in the engineering phase and in the mixing phase. Without knowing your stuff on both ends, a $15,000 microphone will sound virtually identical to a $300 microphone to most people. As in, if people were used to hearing your show with the $15k mic, and you did an episode with the $300 mic, it'd be really unlikely for someone to leave a comment like "what's with the drop in quality?"

Accordingly, if you're fairly solid at engineering your recording for best results, and plussing your audio in the mix for best results, you can make even a fairly low-end microphone sound awesome. (Note for posterity: I do not lay claim to FIYH's audio being awesome. I think it's good, it could be better, and could be better if I spent more time mixing it. I just don't, because I'm lazy and we're past the threshold I cared about quality-wise.)

At a certain point, this conversation should be about your recording and mixing techniques, and not so much about which mic you use.

This is not to say all mics are created equal — it's not even to say all mics within the same general price range are created equal. When we did my album, Andy set up a handful of various Really Nice Mics and had me sing a verse into each of them. It's called a shoot-out. Some microphones just have inherent qualities that vibe well with some voices, and there's a tiny little benefit to be found in isolating the right mic for the right person. But the overall value of the right mic, compared to the overall value of the right setup and mixing, is pretty slight. Especially when we're talking about radio.

This is a long way of saying two things:

1. You can go wrong buying a mic, but it doesn't sound like you're likely to, so don't kill yourself over it.
2. Don't expect the mic to do the work, if better quality is your goal. You can make a shitty mic sound warm.

Fun fact: I still have no idea what this show is about or what network it's on.

After years of fiddling with our setup, the current FIYH lineup is (4x) a Shure SM-58, standard windscreen, $45 boom arm from Guitar center, standard XLR, Behringer Xenyx 1002B mixer board, and a laptop running Audacity. (And a second laptop running vMix and a webcam or two, along with some graphics and line-input.)

I've also got some nice pop filters I've never even used.

I think you can get a 58 in decent shape for sixty or seventy bucks, and it'll last you the rest of your life. It'd last you the rest of your life if you used it as a hammer on off-days.

I'm glaring at you.

Glaaaaaaare.

Unless there's some massive tornado in the cloud (haw) or unforeseen legal reason, the video will be around forever. Not sure if it'll be public or not, but if I ever wanted it "gone" I'd just set it to unlisted.

The problem with this particular video is that I forgot to start the video recording at the beginning of the episode, and only remembered when it was nearly time to do the unpause. So you miss the intro stuff. (Which isn't a big deal in this case, as we kinda blazed through it.) YouTube automatically archives the video as it is broadcast, so I do HAVE the beginning of the episode in video form separately — but I tend not to like those as much as the my-end recordings, for two reasons: 1., whenever the event starts (which is set up beforehand, 2:00 p.m. or whatever; the timer reaches zero, and broadcast begins) that's what ends up being in the video forever, so if we're waiting for someone to arrive, the permanent archive of that video episode starts with me playing guitar or whatever, and, 2., if there's an internet blip or the feed goes down for a minute, the permanent archive has a dead spot in it too. So for safety, I record it on my end and upload that.

In unrelated news about this video, though, I look forward to experimenting with the "technological advance" I came up with for this broadcast. Since Trey would rather not be on camera for these things, especially if the video is gonna be archived, I've been coming up with ways to obscure his image so the painting in the attic doesn't get any older. (Or whatever. Something something Oscar Wilde.) This week I got a wild hair up my ass and loaded up my webcam, pointed it at the empty room, frame-grabbed it, removed everything but a blob of empty couch where Trey would be sitting, and overlaid it in my broadcast software above the live webcam feed. Naturally whenever someone passes behind it they get erased, but I think that's kinda fun.

Plus, so long as I'm prepping those blank spots beforehand, we can kinda do anything with that couch spot to amuse ourselves. In my tests the morning of this broadcast, I set Tokes in Trey's seat for the framegrab, microphone and headphones and all. So for the whole show, it would have looked like Tokes was on-mic. Stuff like that. I could even Photoshop something into that seat. Hell, if I gave myself enough prep time, I could even webcam-film myself in that seat with a bag over my head that says "Trey," maybe fidget around a bit, make it a seamless loop in AE, and overlay THAT. Wee-hee-hee!

Yes, this is all very dumb and wacky — I could just as well pan the camera a bit to the left and be done with it — but it's amusing to me and I like being amused. Plus I think there's something to be said for having SOMETHING in that spot for us to be "looking" at. Maybe I'll just Photoshop Christina Hendricks into that spot.

I have fun.

HBO Go recently added some older made-for-HBO movies to their stable, so I caught up on two I hadn't seen before — The Late Shift and Conspiracy.

The Late Shift is the true-to-the-book account of the "Late Night Wars" in the early 90s, surrounding Carson going off the air and the fate of The Tonight Show, and who would get the job: Leno or Letterman? I had a lot of fun with this movie, in a very Pirates of Silicon Valley sort of way, and with the people in it. The actors playing Dave and Jay both did at least a good job, but the portrayal of Dave is eerily accurate (and sympathetic, just, eery). The guy playing Jay doesn't quite bring it so much, and is also bogged down by a truly grotesque chin prosthetic. Anyway. Not much to this movie, and there was some legal blowback to the book by folks claiming libel, so maybe take it with a grain of salt. But it's fun, and inside-baseball movies always intrigue me. Worth a watch.

Conspiracy I watched on Trey's recommendation, and holy shit you guys. I'll give you the elevator pitch, and then you have to promise me you'll pull it up and give it a watch: historical drawing-room drama, based on transcripts, simply walking the audience through the top brass of the SS getting together to figure out what exactly they're gonna do with all these jews they've been rounding up. Stanley Tucci, Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth. It's intense as fuck, and it's goddamned riveting. And horrifying. And just... wow. I'm very glad somebody made this movie. Do yourself a favor.