Well hello dear readers if any. Did you have a good Christmas?
My Christmas … let’s just mention one thing. On Christmas eve at around 9pm I turned off a kitchen tap. The tap would not turn off. I turned harder. The tap would not turn off. I hit the tap with some vehemence. The tap would not turn off.
I had to turn off our water supply for Christmas.
Currently, the tap is ‘turned off’ with a mechanism built out of a house brick and a monkey wrench. We can now shower. Sometime when the shops reopen I will order a whole new sink unit, seeing as they don’t make parts for sinks from the 1970′s any more.
Now the great thing is, this was not the worst thing that happened to me this Christmas. It’s not even the second worst thing that happened this evil season. But I am not here to whine about my karma. No, this is a happy story. I think.
I mentioned a few whines ago that it’s becoming easier to find the origin of sound samples. So instead of everything being from Lassie Come Home I can now find the exact phrase I am looking for, who sang it or what movie it was from and so on. The problem is that once I know where a sound came from I just can’t use it ever again. Which is a problem if you need to rerecord something, and that’s exactly what I want to do for an upcoming concert.
I have a track (and I would like to keep this vague because who knows if echelon is monitoring this blog) which features a sample that was playing on the easy listening station that time (God bless 2CH and all who sail in her). I named the song after the phrase being sung and no one has complained in 18 years.
But so help me, I bit into that apple of knowledge and there it was – the song, the singer, the composer. The people are dead, maybe I could fudge it again but a lot has changed in sample land. I’d have to find a singer that would sing that one phrase and record that and y’know it could be done but it’d be kind of half assed. Just add that to the joys of the goddamn season.
But JUST THEN it occurred to me – homeopathy. Go back online and do what caused the problem until it fixes the problem. And a thousand flowers blossomed. This is not one person’s song – every single crooner, wannabe, opera singer on a bad day or trained seal with horns has a version of this one song. It’s a goddamn standard. There are 278 different people singing this song on YouTube alone. I can have 20 people sing this one phrase, mix them up, splice them, layer them, I can create a UBER CROONER that is all guys in suits as one.
This is the best gift. And it’s like the TV alien talking scene up the end of Zack Parson’s Insidious Beast. The signs are good, the birds fly the right direction, the entrails are sweet. This will work.
Update: The composers are well and truly dead and although I will triple check it, dead so long that copyright has expired. The sound bite I used in 1992 was in copyright, won’t be much longer but anyway I have found a version that will do just as well, it’s 78 years old!