A look at my first live internet gig

Last Wednesday night, my band November Guest pulled off their first internet gig, on ustream.tv. I thought I'd give some of my first impressions.

I'm Making A New Podcast Theme

I'll confess, I haven't been a regular listener of CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast, but I happened to tune in about 2 weeks ago. At that time, I learned about the Buzz Out Loud Remix Contest. It's a pretty exciting opportunity for me, since I ABSOLUTELY LOVE COMPOSING PODCAST THEMES.

As a musician /composer, I have had a really hard time finding a medium that works for me, due to my quirky background and limitations. These include:

1. My partialness to the underground demoscene sound, which is lo-fi, 8-bitty, and well, sort of unique and special interest (put gently) for the ears of most radio-loving listeners.
2. A short attention span, causing me to lose interest while writing songs with lyrics...
3. " "... songs that last more than 30 seconds or so.

My brother's college buddy had a saying: "there's a butt for every seat". Well, if there's a medium for every artist, I think I've found mine. Podcast themes are short, VERY unique (a requirement, in fact), and generally instrumental.

I've tried my hand a composing/producing a handful of podcast themes, including for such podcasts as Dinosaurs: Before They Were Fuels, as well as Fresh Ubuntu (although you'll not find any credit anywhere on their site indicating so... *AHEM*, GUYS). Anyway, they've been pretty good, if I do say so myself. Without going too deeply into what values I believe a podcast theme should have (I'll save that for another post), they succeed in combining interesting elements from the podcast, personified through my background, into a well articulated, contained, and fairly polished theme song.

So I knew I needed to outdo myself. The BOL podcast has a lot of listener-ship. There will be a lot of competition. Over the course of the last week or 2, I have tweaked, scrutinized, polished, and tuned my composition. I've heard it on my studio monitors, headphones, computer speakers, in the car, in the living room... you get my drift. But now it must be "done" - it's time to present my submission to the CNET team. I'm not taking the chance that something stupid will happen, causing my submission to be screwed up or lost by the time the 5/12 deadline hits.

Whether or not mine is selected for the theme, I can say that it's a step up from anything I've done thus far. I think it represents the beginning of a whole new tier of podcast theme production for me. I'm looking forward to seeing it up on the CNET website, and I'm pretty sure it will at least hold it's own with the "heavy hitters".

May the best podcast theme win! (And let's face it, it'll be nice to have something better than the 4 track Acid loop they have been using until now. No offense, BOL team.)

Welcome to my "New" "Old" Blog

This is about to become a much more special place for me. In fact, it's the biggest thing to happen here since June 6th, 2002, as 2 friends and I were trying to come up with a name for our consumer rant site, and someone shouted out "Scamwagon!". It just rolls off the tongue.

In short, I've decided to consolidate my internet presence down as much as possible. I currently have 3 or 4 blogs, not to mention a facebook, 4 Myspaces, 4 Twitter accounts, and, it seems like, 234,432 websites to maintain. It has come to my attention that these days, the Internet values quality a lot more than quantity (just ask Google!).

So to that end, I am consolidating some of my blogs, etc. as much as possible. The information posted will remain, but new tech-related posts will go on to my (ONE!) remaining blog, Scamwagon, which was formally relegated exclusively to political and consumer rants. Instead of creating separate blogs for each of the crazy interests I have (cars, music, computers, to name a few), you'll be able to find all of my posts on one, single blog site: this one. If you are reading this via Facebook, great. That's another example of how I will consolidate, by connecting mediums as much as possible, so I only have to publish content once.

If you're reading this post, you're already tuned in. Wow, look at the added value already!