24
May
After almost 20 years of playing with myself, I’ve joined a band.
I’ve been twice married, lived in three different states, and had a son since the last time I played music with other people. It’s been a long road to get here, but it feels fantastic (even if a bit terrifying). The band in question is “Phil Rossi and the Awakening”, led by author and hoopy frood Phil Rossi.
We’ve got a live show at Balticon (in … five days! _gulp_) in which time I need to finish learning 13 songs with one full band rehearsal on Wednesday.
Yeah…. live without a net 
Some history for those interested:
I started playing music when I was a kid. I don’t remember the age (probably 8 or 9) but we always had a piano in the house while growing up and I would sit at that piano and perform grand concerts. In my head they were grand, to anybody listening it was probably a cacophony of notes, hand slaps, and howls. My brother was an amazing guitarist and his strumming, singing, and full band rehearsals were a constant in my life.
When I got a little bit older my mom bought me a SynSonics drum pad and I spent countless hours hammering out drum beats. For a short time I played trombone at school before buying a bass guitar. I initially chose bass because everybody wanted to be a guitarist, or a singer, or a drummer. Why jump into something that’s going to be saturated with other people? This has actually served me well since you can usually swing a cat and hit a guitarist, but good bass players are harder to come by.
I came to realize later that I had a deeper connection to playing bass though. I’ve always been drawn to rhythm and percussion and bass is intimately tied to these. In high school I started jamming with friends. I also played around with my friends guitars, figuring out Metallica, Helloween, and Iron Maiden riffs. I had a decent knack for playing songs by ear. A friend of a friend came by my place to hear me play a little bass on a combo amp I had in my garage. He liked what he heard and invited me to try out for the band at his place.
In a classic scenario, I showed up and plugged into the current bass players rig (who wasn’t there at the time) and we played a couple tunes. They asked if I wanted to join the band and called him to come and get his stuff! We played together for several years and enjoyed a decent amount of success. Through circumstances I won’t go into now, we missed out on a possible recording deal and shortly thereafter the band broke up. Well, a member of the band left anyway and the rest of us wanted to start something new, rather than continue on with the old name.
We played together in side projects and substituted in friends bands when they had members out sick or whatever but didn’t make any significant progress. Not to say we didn’t have a great time and write some awesome songs! But we grew up.. and I ended up getting married and moving out of state.
That was the last time I played with anybody. And since bass is pretty damn boring to play alone, I largely abandoned it. I continued to fiddle with music off and on, playing electric guitar, programing drum loops and virtual synth instruments, but it was always a back-burnered activity, falling behind other pursuits.
Lately I’ve been embracing the creative – largely due to urging and inspiration from my wife – I’ve been writing fiction, I’ve been writing music, and I’ve been reaching out to other artists. The opportunity came to play with Phil and though it seemed like things would never line up, I made it over for a jam session and it was exhilarating. I felt like I could barely string two notes together for a bit as I was clearing out the cobwebs, but Phil and his drummer Keith were very encouraging and complimentary and it was a blast.
That’s my story.. no morals, no big take away.. Just, I’ll never forget the strength of a loving partner, and will cherish the communion of a rock groove with a group of like minded explorers. I can’t wait to get to the next practice!
21
Feb
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Just a quick plug for a web event happening next week called The Boom Effect. The event will start on Saturday, February 27th at 10AM Eastern time via UStream.
This charity drive is a live, online auction to raise money for the trust fund of Tee Morris’ daughter who lost her mother on January 5, 2010. There will be at least 5 hours of entertainment hosted by Podcasting’s Rich Sigfrit. We’ll be in the live audience cheering everybody on, and likely on camera on the main feed as well. It’s shaping up to be a really fun time. You’ll be able to bid from the chat room, through e-mail, proxy-bid on the website, and I think via video or audio on Skype or UStream.
And with over 70 items up for auction (so far!!) there is something for everyone to get excited about and bid for! Everything from jewelry, to pictures, paintings by celebrities, custom music, book dedications, food, clothes, signed DVDs and books, knitwear, and even Mozart’s Balls!! Seriously, go check out everything up for auction!
Hope to see you there!
12
Oct
I’m gonna go ahead and delete the Twitter archive posts. I think it just clogs everything up and if people want to see what I’ve written on Twitter, then they’ll either follow me, or see it on Facebook.
14
Jun
During one of our panels at Balticon Thomas Gideon and I were speculating on automated transcription and the idea came out to try Google Voice (previously called Grand Central). I happen to have a GV account, so I agreed to give it a shot.
I had time this morning, so I made some attempts. In short, it didn’t work.
I’m not entirely sure why it didn’t work. As I play back the recordings that were made, the volume seems ample. The podcast recordings come across like somebody on a speakerphone, which I think would be a common practice for somebody calling you from a car.
It may be that Google hasn’t tackled taking on multiple voices yet and simply cancels the transcription process when a certain percentage of the attempt fails. My control recordings show that a short message transcribes well (even if all words aren’t 100%), but when I make up a bunch of words the transcription is “not available”.
It is also possible that it is just the phone I was using. I’ve received a few voicemails from people “in the wild” and the transcription was much more accurate. I’d say around 95%, where even the successful control test totally munged the end of the quote.
Here are the files and results:
- Control recording which was successful
- Transcription text: “hi presented quotes by thomas jefferson a government big enough to supply you with everything you need is the government big enough to takeaway everything that you have the courses history shows that i got a very close to pretty decreases”
- Control recording which was unsuccessful
- ITB recording which was unsuccessful
- TheCommandLine recording which was unsuccessful. (excerpted from his show released May 7, 2009).
If you have an idea of a different approach let me know and I’ll be happy to try it!
With all that being said:
As a traditional voicemail service Google Voice absolutely rocks and the transcription is really cool. Above and beyond the actual coolness of having a transcription of people’s voicemails, the web interface is very slick in how they are presented. The text of the transcript is just below the audio transport bar.
Sample of a Google Voice transcription
Words that Google thinks it got correct are traditional black text. Words that it wasn’t sure of are gray. As you play the voicemail it actually highlights each word as they’re spoken and if you click and drag the progress pointer the word highlights follow the movement. Very slick.
Perhaps Google may shoot off an automated transcription service. I’m sure it would be in support of audio web searches, with inevitable Adwords, of course. It sure would make a lot of podcaster’s lives easier!