I’ve lately been taking a Java programming course at one of Virginia’s finer community colleges. Not to devalue the music, but Grateful Dead live recordings go extremely well with reading and studying for this class. (The Logitech Squeezebox and the Live Music Archive make these especially easy to get to.) You can pay as much or as little attention as you like, but the music is always there, comforting, like water. A few clicks with the Squeezebox remote will tell you whether the show you’re listening to originated from Sony condenser mics and a 770 reel recorder in the audience (AUD) or through a direct soundboard (SBD) feed. My preference has been with AUDs like this 1971 show; they’re gentler on the ear when they’re done well. Either way, you go through an aural time machine. The real treats for me are the shows that happened before I was born.

I’ve been particularly enamored with the Grateful Dead Listening Guide - apparently written just for people like me who are only just dipping their toes in. It’s kryptonite for a frustrated archivist.

Don’t even get me started on the Wall of Sound and how cool their “matched pairs of condenser microphones spaced 60 mm apart and run out of phase” vocal mic system was.

People who had the privilege of knowing him better than I did have written many moving remembrances on the site that his NC friends created to help raise funds for his medical bills.

Cy, we’re lucky to know you.

I’ve got tons of experience shooting super 8 and all kinds of video and really want to pursue a grant to help fund the purchase of 16mm equipment and stock. I have some specific ideas in mind for shooting 15-minute b&w documentaries and I’ve just been checking out the Va Film Office site and the Roy W. Dean Film Grants. Should I be looking for grants from anywhere–not just Virginia?

It starts now! Just got the first roll of 16mm film from B&H Photo. Now begins the fun, impractical and very expensive hobby of shooting 16mm (and syncing sound to it). Next step is to get an old camera.

I recently read something in Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management about “commitments vs. interests”. (I know, I know, another time-management book.) The idea is that it’s easy to have a laundry list of things you’re interested in, but if you want to get anywhere with any of them, it’s good to focus on one (or one at a time) and pour yourself into it with daily effort.

The 15th James River Film Festival–especially the luminous films of Ken and Azazel Jacobs–came along just in time to remind me that what needs real attention is film. And not film that gets converted to video and shown on an LCD projector. Real, fragile, tedious, gorgeous, bright 16mm film. I’ve always stuck with Super 8 and felt like 16mm was too out of my league, too hard to edit, too expensive. No more! Time to dive into it and practice. Until I have the right equipment, “daily effort” may mean selling weird electronic detritus on eBay to raise funds for a camera. Or it may even mean figuring out how to get a film grant so I can shoot some small black-and-white documentaries. A month after the film festival and I’m still obsessed. I hope to post more progress here soon.

I know why. Tape acts as a natural, subtle compressor, smoothing out the highest peaks and bringing everything else up in level just a little bit. It’s not accurate, but good rock music has never been about accuracy anyway. Grit and grunge are good things. Guitar distortion–the star at the center of the rock solar system–deliberately mangles a clean, harmless tone into something warm and dangerous. Didn’t J. Mascis once say that a little hum never hurt anybody?

God knows I obsessed about misaligned tape azimuth and prayed for digital playback in the car long before it became a reality. I couldn’t have predicted that I was actually hoping for the wrong thing. A pretty good cassette system will always out-rock a CD or an iPod. It’ll do all the things you already know that analog tape does: smooth out the high end, give the bass a gentle bump, tame those pesky snare hits. If you think I’m wrong, just try–I dare you–to get all the way through and enjoy any Minor Threat on a CD. It’s too much. If there was ever music that begged for some details to be glossed over, that’s it.

But I know I’m not going back to tapes anytime soon for the bulk of daily listening. I’m far too lured by the easy fix from mp3s, emusic.com, and streamed recordings of faraway radio stations. I only pulled the Sonic Youth out because I had it and the Minor Threat on CD (and ripped to the computer) and wanted to listen to the tape version one last time before I tossed it. No sense in having that many copies of the same thing in an already cluttered house. But maybe that one and a few of the more rockular cassettes are worth keeping for now. It’s only a matter of time before somebody smart creates a tape modeling plugin for the iPod to approximate the gooey analog goodness we’re missing. The irony would be that the technology that got us into this mess could be the best way out of it.

connect the VS-880 MIDI out to the MIDI in on the Midiman MIDISport 2×2.

in the Delta DiO preference pane
> in the monitor mixer tab
>> mute all other inputs except the S/PDIF.
> in the hardware settings tab
>> set the sample rate to 44.1 kHz.
>> leave the “Locked” box unchecked.
>> set Clock Source to S/PDIF Input.
> in the S/PDIF tab
>> set the Input Source to “Coax (RCA)”

on the VS-880, for each song, do this:
> press [SYSTEM] several times until you get to “SYS
Sync/Tempo?”.
> press [YES].
> press PARAMETER [>>].
> the display will show “SYS Syn:Gen”.
> rotate the TIME/VALUE dial and choose “MIDIClk”.
> somewhere else in the VS-880 (i can’t remember where), you have to also set the clock to “INT” and the fps to “30″.

in Logic Express
> Preferences > Audio > Drivers > Core Audio
> [checked] Enabled
>> Driver: Delta DiO
>> I/O Buffer Size: 512
>> Recording Delay: 0
>> [checked] Software Monitoring

> File > Song Settings > Synchronization > General
>> Sync Mode: Internal
>> [checked] Auto-enable external sync
>> Frame Rate: 30 fps

on the VS-880
> enable one audio track, pan it hard left.
> play some recorded audio and set the levels.

in Logic
> select the first audio track to record on.
> make sure that track’s input is set to “1″ (select this in the “Channel” parameter on one of the left panes).
> make sure the track is record-enabled.

> hit Play on the VS-880. you should see some audio in the Logic track 1 meter, and you should hear the VS-880 audio coming through Logic.

> on the Transport window, hold down the Toggle External Sync button and select MIDI Clock Sync.
> make sure Auto Sync In is selected.

> hit Record to put Logic in record-monitor mode.

on the VS-880
> go to the beginning of the track and hit Play. Logic should respond by going into Record and chasing the MIDI clock of the VS-880.
> let the whole track play all the way through the song and then pad it with 10 seconds past the end of the audio.
> press Stop. Logic should stop by itself.

in Logic
> drag the handle for the just-recorded track to get rid of most of the silence. leave a few seconds of padding before the song starts.

> double-click the waveform for the recorded track.
> in the Sample Edit window, go to “Audio > Save Selection As…” to save a copy of this audio selection to a separate folder where you’ll keep your GarageBand audio and project files. you can import these right into GarageBand and they should line up perfectly.

> repeat for each track you need to pull from the VS-880 into Logic.

• google web/image search: “mag film recorder”
  ebay/google web/image search: “Magnasync” or “Magnasync Nomad”
• these guys can transfer digital or analog sound to 16mm fullcoat!
  http://www.scottsoundequipment.com/
• mag recorders:
  http://www.openreel.net/photo3.html
• These places may still stripe 16mm mag film:
  - Technicolor Magnecraft in Hollywood.
  - EMT (or EVT?) Magnetics, near Wadhurst in East Sussex, England
  - Spondon film services, in East Sussex, England near Derby
• Bauer made a 16mm interlock projector, found here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/cinelist.html
  …the Bauer Sonorex P6 Studio 1969 twin:
  http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/bauersonorex.jpg
• Bauer keeps coming up as having made super-quiet projectors.
• Source for cheap empty reels and cans:
  http://members.tripod.com/~Moviecraft/supplies.html
• Kodak still sells 16mm fullcoat!

I can replace “sd” with today’s short date, like “10/13″. You would be amazed how often you have to type today’s date during the day.

I also replace “dt” with today’s international ISO-standard date and a colon (”2006-10-13:”), which I usually paste into text files or logs or my copy of the d3/GTD flavor of TiddlyWiki.

You have to create an autohotkey.ini script to specify your strings and their replacements. Here’s mine:

:*:dt:: ; This hotstring replaces "dt" with the current date and time.
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, yyyy-MM-dd:
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return

:*:sd:: ; This hotstring replaces "sd" with the short current date and time.
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, M/d
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return

::dond:: ; I use this one all the time in email replies. hee.
(
Done - thanks!
phil
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