It’s been a busy weekend so far. Thank goodness I have the time off of work. I’d be exhausted otherwise.
Wednesday night I recorded audio for my first podcast. The Flyin’ Blind Blues Band played at the American Legion hall just a few blocks awat from where I live. You may have read about them before in my music pages. The lead guitarist is the brother of a friend from work and the lead singer, is a distant cousin. That’s how it is living in a small town.
But they’re a great local band and exactly the type of music I want to help promote. They like all blues bands cover all the standards, but have a real focus on original songs. They won the WNY Blues Society’s Memphis Bound competition last year and their new CD Havin’ Fun Feelin’ Blue won this years New CD competition. They are definitely a cut above your typical bar blues band.
So, I spent Thanksgiving editing the audio files. I recorded with a portable digital audio recorder that puts the audio onto a small hard drive. It’s been a learning experience. First of all, the music was so loud that it overloaded the very sensitive condenser microphone I tried to use. Not a lot, just enough to keep the recordings from being really good. They’re useable, but barely. The other thing that I messed up was I had a setting in the recorder that made it start a new file every 5 minutes. I ended up with almost 50 files to put together before I could edit out individual songs. At least that was a recoverable error.
We had Thanksgiving dinner at home. All my kids were here, even Frank! We even coaxed his girlfriend Julie to come over. nothiing special, just dinner and TV but it was nice to hang out and talk.
Today, I went out to do a few things. I wanted to find a new microwave. Our had quit just before Thanksgiving. Probably in protest of the upcoming work… We decided we wanted one that hung under the cupboard. They are a bit hard to find. I wanted to look in Best Buy, so I drove up there. The day after Thanksgiving is usually the wrong day to do that, but actually, the traffic wasn’t too bad. I went in the back way anyway. But after I left the store (I didn’t like the microwaves they had.) the truck battery was dead. It had been giving me trouble, but I thought I could count on it to last 15 minutes and start a still-warm engine. Nope. A call to AAA and a half-hour wait for a jump followed.
So, I headed home and bought an new battery. The old one was under a warranty and I got the new one for about half-price. It was a lot coldeer out than the last time I changed it, though.
We did get out and bought a new microwave, though. Nice under-the-counter one. Not too big, not too small. Home Depot had one model that came with top mounting holes. So by dinner time, we had a new microwave to heat up our leftover turkey!
Still working on the podcast. I bought a new mike while we were out microwave shopping. Something not as sensitive as the condenser job. I tried it out a little bit ago and it seems like a good mike. Good lows, not breathy at all. I’ll have to play around some more and decide which to use for the rest of the podcast. I’m waiting for one more piece of equipment to arrive to finish up things. It’s on it’s way and UPS says it will arrive Monday. No Saturday deliveries yet, I guess.