Some (recording) sites I don't want to forget about.

Michael Gilleland, whom I have read with admiration for a long time, wrote of his Laudator Temporis Acti: In case you haven't noticed, this blog is my private file cabinet, and Google is its index... I would continue to blog for myself even with no readers.

It's amazing that, for whatever reason, blogger is free, and therefore I can reasonably hope that, for the indefinite future, when I want to find one of my favorite recipes or jokes or cartoons or internet sites, I'll be able to search my own blog and find it.

Hannah and I have been pretty quiet this summer. She's in love, and has just secured a new job for next year; I've been absorbed in learning how to do good-quality recordings and editing/mastering on my laptop. I find that with my excellent old (30-40 years old) AKG mics, an interface box by M-Audio called Fast Track Pro, Soundforge (I own quite an old version and don't need newer bells and whistles), and the magnificent FREE multitracking/recording program, called Audacity, I can now pretty much do anything I need to do. It's not fast and efficient as a more professional and expensive setup would be **if I knew how to use it** (there is a horrendous and non-intuitive complexity to most of them), but it gets me there.

I told Zed it's like punching holes in notebook paper without a hole-puncher - you can use a knife to make little circle chads, and the pages will eventually go on the rings, but it takes quite a while.

The huge advantage of this home recording setup, besides its being free and right in my living room, is its immediacy. When Zed was going to his internship at WCOM-FM's "Roots Rampage" program the other night I was able to run him off a cd of the brand new song I had overdubbed and mixed just half an hour before and he played it over the air! I listened to it, thought: "That sure needs a lot more work," and revised it later that same night.

When Bob and I work on a new song, we can record a practice version and I can email it to him while he's still sitting there with the guitar in his hand!

Remind me of this when I complain that the world is not what it once was...

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