DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So, I spent last November recording drums for five songs, and then over Thanksgiving I engineered a two-day session in which my ex-bandmates overdubbed guitars — lots of guitars — bass, and vocals. I have not written about those sessions yet, but plan to, just as soon as I write about the 2nd half of my Utah parks trip (December 2002), the 2nd half of my Greek Islands trip (Sept. 2003), or the middle of my British Columbia trip (July 2004).

I won’t be mixing all these tunes, but I’ll definitely be mixing the drums for all of them. I started with the hardest song of all, my own tune Ode to Soup, because (as reported previously) it was recorded in sections. This means I had two tracks of snare drum, two of kick drum, two hats, four toms (two stereo pairs), and four overheads. Attempting to EQ, compress, and reverb all 14 tracks was killing my workstation’s CPU, because essentially I was trying to do twice as much work as I needed to. Two possible answers were evident:

• buy a dual-processor G5
• combine redundant drum tracks to halve the amount of processing required

Needless to say, I queued up store.apple.com right away… no, actually my G5 Upgrade fund has been appropriated and renamed, something about gradeschool tuition? Fortunately my workstation isn’t a complete dog. I recently upgraded the CPU to a 1 GHz model and added another 512 MB RAM. The CPU upgrade came with a tiny bumper sticker reading, “Don’t Laugh; It’s Paid For.”

Pictured is my ProTools session before combining the individual drum tracks. In most cases I simply solo’d each pair of tracks (e.g. the two snare tracks), set the faders to 0, and used Bounce to Disk to create and import the resulting mix.

In a few cases I applied gating and EQ as well, in an effort to reduce some of the processing I’d need to do later. The problem with applying filters in two passes like this is that fixing mistakes can be time consuming. I had to re-bounce two of the tracks multiple times when I later discovered that some of my filter settings were whacked. Given that I have not completed the final mixdown yet, I may again discover that some of my filter settings were whacked. The beauty of nondestructive editing is that I can always go back and redo this stuff, assuming of course I have the million years necessary to iteratively tweak every picosecond of audio in this song.

During playback I realized that I’d inadvertently achieved a different snare sound during the choruses, because I was playing more of a rimshot. As a result I re-mixed the snare channel with plug-in automation, enabling additional EQ during the choruses to reduce the nasty ringing sound the mic had picked up.

I did some editing too. I had captured pretty clean takes, but there’s always room for improvement. One downbeat in particular was killing me; it was a couple hundredths of a second late, and absolutely murdered the groove coming out of a fill. The repair was easier than I expected… and would have been even easier if I’d discovered the Nudge tool in Pro-Tools.

Then, left with just one set of drum tracks, I replicated the session setup advocated by David Franz in his DigiZine article on Phase-Coherent Drums. The final drum sound will consist of a dry submix, a heavily compressed submix, and a reverb track… 13 faders in all.

I need to play with EQ and compression levels still, but some of that has to wait until I’m ready to mix the bass and guitar. You can hear what I have thus far; the following clip contains an alternating 2-bar phrase to illustrate the change. I’m pleased with my progress, but I think I’m not done yet.

Ode To Soup Drum Excerpt (2 bars dry, 2 bars wet, repeat)

The ‘dry’ sections sound closed and boxy as compared to the ‘wet’ sections. The ghost notes in the dry sections are completely buried, in fact inaudible at low playback levels. The snare sound is much improved — check out how anemic it is, dry — but I’d like to get more of a crack out of it. I experimented with an additional snare track, created by running this track through a sound-replacer plug in (aptrigga, ~$46), but the results didn’t justify the cost. I’ll revisit that decision further in the mixdown process.

The next step is to extract a single guitar track from four takes plus an overdub (plus two harmonies and a powerchord track too!).

EBay Inc. and Intel Corp. launched a recycling program Thursday to motivate Americans to safely dispose of mounting piles of used computers and other electronic gadgets.

http://www.ebay.com/rethink/

Perhaps most significant about this announcement is this statement, which shows that Ebay’s staff has done its homework:

Rethink will only link to recyclers that promise not to dump the machines in landfills in developing nations — a growing source of environmental toxins in China and southeast Asia.

We had a great cordless phone, made by Siemens. The base design was clean and simple, yet lacked no useful features. The handsets were sleek and high-tech and worked well. And the phonebook feature was really cool — each handset could “beam” phonebook entries to the other handset.

Then one of the handsets died. We could hear fine but nobody could hear us.

We exchanged the unit. The replacement worked for about six months and then died in the same fashion. The warranty had expired, and Siemens had discontinued the line. Repair prices were greater than the cost of full new phone systems from Costco.

So we dropped $90 on a Uniden phone system, spent a half-hour setting the thing up, spent another half-hour retyping in all the numbers from the phonebook on the Siemens, spent a half-hour lamenting the Uniden’s seriously lame design, and then discovered that the Uniden folks hadn’t figured out how to have handsets share phonebook data. They’ll sell you a 2-handset phone, but they assume you want to type in all your friends’ phone numbers twice. WTF?

The Uniden phone also rejected the headset we’d bought for the Siemens. So we bought the Uniden-brand headset, and it sucked — the sound quality was poor on both ends. I swear there are two miniature tin cans and a string somewhere inside the case. There’s a volume control; the three settings are “off,” “static,” and “not loud enough.”

14 months later, one of the handsets died — we could hear callers, but they couldn’t hear us. Of course, the dead handset was the one that stored our phone book.

I looked with fondness back at our sexy Siemens phone. Some research revealed that the Gigaset 2400 line was plagued by handset death due to inadequate shielding. I found a guy who claimed he could repair them, but before we could work out a deal he disappeared, probably taken out by Uniden’s advance marketing team.

Is this planned obsolescence? Or are the makers too focused on whizzy new features to spend any time on reliability? I’d burned through three phones in four years. We are creating a steady stream of usable answering machines without handsets, and an equally steady stream of landfill waste. Can handsets be recycled?

We reviewed a dozen phones at Hello Direct, and rejected them all. I can’t believe some of these phones can only store 10 phone numbers. I can buy a 64 megabyte USB pen drive for $15 — enough memory to store approximately 1,342,177 names and numbers, which would allow me to index all of Sonoma County, including cellphones — yet the rocket scientists at GE can’t find space for more than 10 numbers in a $50 telephone.

Wandering through Costco, we spotted a phone bundle from AT&T — $90 for a digital answering machine and four handsets. That’s twice as many handsets as we need, and I was already moving to the next aisle when my wife pointed out that this would be cheap insurance: after the first two handsets die, presumably in about 14 months, we’d still have two that work. I couldn’t knock the logic. The interface design is needlessly complex, but at least the handsets can share phonebook data: a minor victory in a battle that consumers have already lost.

ANWR is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The site’s homepage contains their charter:

ANWR was established to preserve unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values; to conserve caribou herds, polar bears, grizzly bears, muskox, dall sheep … [and 7 other species]; to fulfill international treaty obligations; to provide opportunities for continued subsistence uses; and to ensure necessary water quality and quantity.

See anything in there about oil drilling? Not unless oil drilling is a “subsistence use.” (I don’t speak Bureaucrat.)

The Bush administration has wanted to open ANWR for oil drilling since before it took office. But in every attempt to win a vote to proceed with his plan to hand over a wildlife refuge to the oil companies, Bush has lost.

Until now. According to a great editorial in the Chronicle,

Though the House has approved drilling, the Senate has always blocked the plan, most recently by a two-vote margin.

There’s a twist this time. Instead of a noisy floor vote, the GOP backers of drilling want to slip a go-ahead for drilling into a much larger budget bill. By doing so, drilling supporters need only 51 votes to win. The budget bill is also immune to filibustering, a key weapon for minority Democrats.

In essence, Bush can’t win the ANWR vote on merit, so he and his oily friends have to resort to backhanded political maneuvering to do something the American people don’t want him to do.

How can I say that drilling in a wildlife refuge is something the citizens don’t want? A poll conducted in late December revealed that 55 percent of Americans said “no” when asked whether oil companies should be allowed to drill in ANWR.

Do I believe so deeply in polls that I consider the above to be irrefutable evidence that Americans oppose drilling in ANWR? No; I’m sure the folks at Zogby could write poll questions that would get 75% of registered Republicans to say that George Bush has all the moral values of a rutabaga. The point is that drilling for oil in ANWR or any other protected land is a complex and sensitive issue that deserves more careful handling than the tactics Bush has resorted to.

How lunatic are the people who want to drill in ANWR? Here’s a guy who claims that “those who are opposed to this plan are, in actuality, supporting the terrorist regimes that plot to destroy this country.” Yeah, that’s me all over. Go Osama!

Take action here: email your representatives about Arctic drilling to make sure they know what you want.

“I’ll be right back,” said the technician at the blood lab. “I’m going to get some help.” I didn’t hear that last part. It’s just as well; I’d know soon enough that she was an incompetent hack.

We needed to draw blood from my 8-day-old son, to make sure his yellow tint wasn’t jaundice, but rather due to his parents’ predilection for curry. I expected no complications from the procedure, for he’d had a blood sample taken the week before in the hospital and barely whimpered.

Our technician returned. She was a portly woman with lots of makeup, where by “lots” I mean “more than I think looks natural” as opposed to “enough to cover the moustache.” She’d retrieved a senior technician, although the lab-coated senior tech simply stood in the background to supervise. I think our technician, who I dubbed Vampira, was an intern.

What is it with the healthcare industry that interns learn the trade on live patients? Don’t they make cadavers for this sort of thing?

She poked Raphael in the heel with one of those spring-loaded disposable pinprick devices. He didn’t even flinch. “That was smooth,” I thought, until after ten seconds of increasingly confused foot-squeezing, Vampira stammered that no blood was coming out. She’d been holding the pinprick device backwards. In a fairer world, she’d have stabbed herself in the hand with it.

On her second attempt, with guidance from the senior tech (“You’re holding it backwards!”) Vampira drew blood and a scream. Then she began wringing my son’s foot like a rag. This went on for five minutes! In spite of ample evidence to the contrary, I assumed she knew what she was doing, and I let her continue. Finally, though, the tiny wound had healed, and Vampira had failed to collect the three drops of blood she needed, although she had somehow managed to smear blood all over her gloves and my son’s foot. Her aim is as bad as her lancing technique.

“In the hospital,” I offered, “they had little chemical heat packs for this. The heat brings the blood to the surface of the foot, making it easier to collect a sample.” Unlike Vampira, I’d seen this done once before.

“We don’t have those,” said Vampira, flustered, aware that my baby’s agitated state was entirely of her making. But a moment later she noticed a stack of little packets bearing the label “Infant Foot Warmer” on a nearby shelf.

Vampira then failed to activate the warming pack and lamely offered it to the senior tech, who, after a moment’s wrestling, also failed, and took it down the hall in search of competent assistance. To be clear, neither of the technicians on duty was capable of using a device designed to make their jobs easier.

At this point, my son was inconsolable. He’d been stabbed in the heel, had his foot bruised by five minutes of incessant squeezing, and now had to endure the whole procedure a second time because the half-sample they’d collected was beginning to scab over.

The senior tech returned with the warming pack, freshly activated by someone down the hall in possession of a clue. They warmed Raphael’s heel, stabbed him again, and Vampira started up her wringing.

“You would probably collect more if you’d hold his foot below his heart,” I offered. Vampira hadn’t mastered the idea of gravity yet, although from the wheezing and panting after she’d bent down to retrieve a dropped band-aid I would have thought she could extrapolate some of its other properties.

With that correction, the procedure was completed relatively quickly. Vampira was rightfully ashamed and if I had to guess seeking a transfer to a part of the hospital where she’d be less likely to inflict damage on anyone (e.g. the morgue). Raphael recovered as only babies can. But I felt like the world’s worst father as I washed the dried blood off his foot.

For what it’s worth, here’s the right way to collect a blood sample from an infant.