From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V11 #5 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Monday, January 9 2006 Volume 11 : Number 005 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Alloy: Concert in Anaheim [Elaine ] Re: Alloy: Concert in Anaheim [Russell Milliner ] Re: Alloy: Concert in Anaheim ["Keith Stansell" ] Alloy: It's not easy being green. ["Crackers" ] Re: Alloy: Memmmories...Dolby-related, of course! :^) ["Crackers" Subject: Re: Alloy: Concert in Anaheim Hi, you guys! I'm so excited that Russ is coming, too! That's fantastic! Keith and everyone, I don't remember precisely, but I'm pretty sure I made dinner reservations -- for whatever maximum they'd give me -- for 5 p.m. on Friday and 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. I'll look it up and post tomorrow. It's 1 a.m. and I'm glad I thought to check my email as it is :) I know some of you are planning to go to Disneyland on Saturday. I hope you have a wonderful time, but I have a been-there-done-that attitude toward the Magic Kingdom. I live in Southern California and have two kids under 10, so ... :) If it weren't so expensive, sheesh. It's a Small World, one that can afford retail. It's probably a good idea to take a serious headcount at this time. Does anybody need transportation in the L.A. area arranged? My plan is to hit West Hollywood on Friday afternoon, and leave Anaheim on Sunday mid-morning. I have a car and all the time in the world, in the meantime, save for when we'll be singing along with Thomas. Let's all shout! Russ - 2! Keith - 1! Me - 2! oh shoot I need to break it up by nights. Okay, sing out. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 12:40:42 -0500 From: Russell Milliner Subject: Re: Alloy: Concert in Anaheim I'll send out my phone number to Elaine and Keith in a spearate email. We're staying at the Disney Paradise Pier hotel Thurs-Sat and taking the long flight home to Florida on Sunday morning. I know what you mean about the been-there feeling toward Disney. We live only 30 mins from Disney here in Orlando. I've never been to Cali, and I am curious to see the different things at the Disney there. Sounds like we should all be able to meet up some time on Friday. - -Russs On 1/8/06, Elaine wrote: > > Hi, you guys! I'm so excited that Russ is coming, too! That's fantastic! > > Keith and everyone, I don't remember precisely, but I'm pretty sure I made > dinner reservations -- for whatever maximum they'd give me -- for 5 p.m. > on Friday and 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. I'll look it up and post tomorrow. > It's 1 a.m. and I'm glad I thought to check my email as it is :) > > I know some of you are planning to go to Disneyland on Saturday. I hope > you have a wonderful time, but I have a been-there-done-that attitude > toward the Magic Kingdom. I live in Southern California and have two kids > under 10, so ... :) If it weren't so expensive, sheesh. It's a Small > World, one that can afford retail. > > It's probably a good idea to take a serious headcount at this time. Does > anybody need transportation in the L.A. area arranged? My plan is to hit > West Hollywood on Friday afternoon, and leave Anaheim on Sunday > mid-morning. I have a car and all the time in the world, in the meantime, > save for when we'll be singing along with Thomas. > > Let's all shout! > > Russ - 2! > Keith - 1! > Me - 2! > > oh shoot I need to break it up by nights. > > Okay, sing out. > > - -- - -russell milliner milliner@pobox.com http://www.tmdrfan.com/russell/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 15:15:57 -0700 From: "Keith Stansell" Subject: Re: Alloy: Concert in Anaheim Hi Elane I pre-purchased super-shuttle passes from the airport to my hotel - so I'm good there. I figured everything else is pretty close so I'll just taxi or shuttle it around to Disneyland / HOB whatever. I may reconsider and get a car - but for now, I think I'm just going the shuttle route. The last time I was at a Disney theme park was Disneyworld in 1976 - so I don't have a been there done that feel. Except for the its a small world ride - I think I got enough of that in 1976. I need to look at the web and make out some plans for the weekend. Except for HOB on Saturday, everything is up for grabs. - -Keith - HOB Saturday - 1 - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Elaine" To: Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2006 2:14 AM Subject: Re: Alloy: Concert in Anaheim > > Hi, you guys! I'm so excited that Russ is coming, too! That's fantastic! > > Keith and everyone, I don't remember precisely, but I'm pretty sure I made > dinner reservations -- for whatever maximum they'd give me -- for 5 p.m. > on Friday and 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. I'll look it up and post tomorrow. > It's 1 a.m. and I'm glad I thought to check my email as it is :) > > I know some of you are planning to go to Disneyland on Saturday. I hope > you have a wonderful time, but I have a been-there-done-that attitude > toward the Magic Kingdom. I live in Southern California and have two kids > under 10, so ... :) If it weren't so expensive, sheesh. It's a Small > World, one that can afford retail. > > It's probably a good idea to take a serious headcount at this time. Does > anybody need transportation in the L.A. area arranged? My plan is to hit > West Hollywood on Friday afternoon, and leave Anaheim on Sunday > mid-morning. I have a car and all the time in the world, in the meantime, > save for when we'll be singing along with Thomas. > > Let's all shout! > > Russ - 2! > Keith - 1! > Me - 2! > > oh shoot I need to break it up by nights. > > Okay, sing out. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 17:18:21 -0500 From: "Crackers" Subject: Alloy: It's not easy being green. With envy! ENVY! Envy of all you alloyites who are able to get together to see Thomas performing live. ENVY!!! *sigh* Well for us southern Ontario Canadians perhaps we can console ourselves by at least seeing one of Thomas's old keyboards performing live. I'll be playing at the Corktown here in Hamilton on January 20th with Science Ninja Big Ten. We're opening for Carole Pope which is going to be pretty cool. So if you're in the neighbourhood you can at least come see Thomas's old Casio AZ-1 rocking out on stage. Incidently Thomas, that keyboard is truly amazing the way it sips on batteries. I get a couple of months of heavy duty play out of it on a single set of batteries. Truly amazing. I suppose it makes sense since the biggest power draw would probably be in amplification of the audio signal and since the AZ-1 is just a midi controller with no audio engine it wouldn't require as much juice. Even when the low power warning flash begins I can still get a good long spell of usage out of it. I've been absolutely loving the heck out of this keyboard. Hey, who else here on Alloy snagged some of Thomas's gear during the Great Dolby Garage Sale? I know someone grabbed his D-50. How have the rest of you been enjoying Thomas's old gear? Someday we'll have to all get together and put on a show. I wish I had had the money to snag up that PPG. Crackers ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2006 17:07:07 -0500 From: "Crackers" Subject: Re: Alloy: Memmmories...Dolby-related, of course! :^) - ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 10:45 PM Subject: Alloy: Memmmories...Dolby-related, of course! :^) > > Hello dere, as my Lorikeet, Chedder, would say. :^) > > I've been reading the voluminous archives of Alloy, and of course marvelling at the intelligence and musical knowledge of you guys, :^) and I read something about how Thomas got his nickname of "Dolby" as a teenager, when a friend or two read the brand name of the tape-recorder he was forever fiddling around with. > > That reminded me of something: had I had more observant friends (instead of the sort of gals who were only interested in teen idols and soap operas) ;^) , my own nickname might well have been "Panasonic"!!! ;^) My Dad bought me this glossy red Panasonic tape-recorder in the early '80's as an attempt, yet again, to buy my love--we didn't get along, let's just put it that way. I wore the darned thing out, recording songs off the radio, my own ramblings about whichever boy I was in love with that week, ;^) bits of songs which I never finished, and which were royally embarrassing when I listened to those tapes years later, recordings of my friends and I hanging out, you name it. Oh yeah, and of course my pitiful attempts at imitating Dolby's genius on my own synthesizer, which my Mom bought me after I begged, pleaded and cajoled for it. > > Gawd, I must've spent YEARS fiddling with the settings on that thing...I had this one really awesome sound (among many, brag brag) ;^) which I called "Electric Crystal". Sigh...but then the synth [which I named "Synthia" believe it or not] :^) fell backwards off a table, which wrecked the power jack, and, after years of intermittent power and the plug being held in with string and Scotch tape, into the garbage "Synthia" went. It never occurred to me to try to get it fixed... ;^) > > Just thought I'd pass along my own, Dolby-related, silly memories!!! :^) > > Love and green tea, Kara You know, that story was very sweet. I never had a real synthesizer as a kid. *sigh* But I did have a Commodore 64 and I wrote a program to play it like a synthesizer from it's keyboard (it was basically a modified version of the keyboard program in the back of the manual but allowed for polyphonic play, ADSR control and the pitch was corrected). I too had a Panasonic tape deck (a ghetto-blaster type with detachable speakers. I still have it and it still functions to this day). I had read about how in the early days of tape recording they didn't use "multi-track" recording but instead something called "overdubbing" (the two terms have kind of melded together to mean the same things over the years as multitrack technology has replaced overdubbing technology). The way an overdub worked was the erase head on the tape deck (an electromagnet that erases the tape before it gets to the record head) was switched off and a new part would be recorded directly overtop of the old recording. If you fucked up then you ended up losing everything you had recorded previously because there was no undo and the new recording wasn't on a seperate track that could be re-recorded. So before a part was overdubbed they would make a "safety" recording of the previous tracks. If they fucked up on the overdub they'd just copy the saftey track. This made overdubbing a pretty slow and labour intensive proccess which is why it was replaced with multitracking. Anyways. Not having multitrack technology available to me at the time it occured to me I could simply hook a switch up to the erase head on my tape deck and disable it when I wanted to overdub. But my parents wouldn't let me experiment with my shiny new panasonic tape deck so I had to do it with this really crappy old 1970s desk top mono tape deck from radioshack. I was able to get it to work, but the deck had no line-in so the only way to record with it was through the crappy built in condensor microphone thus the audio quality was extremely full of suck since you ended up picking up a lot of the motor noise of the tapedeck itself. Even though I had proved the viability of my experiment my dad and stepmother still wouldn't let me crack upon my panasonic deck and fiddle with it. I did have a number of cassette tapes, none the less, full of different musical experimentations either solo or with a bunch of my musician friends. They're embarassing indeed, but there was a kind of sweetness to the young unpolished enthusiasm that makes me wish I could find them again. So what type of keyboard was Synthia? I hope she was just a common, run-of-the-mill synth and that you didn't end up chucking some rare vintage collectable out simply for a broken power connector. Crackers ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V11 #5 **************************