Month: August 2004

So I’m sitting down to my computer to handle a little electronic mail this morning. It’s my usual tradition, and as usual, Elijah (my two-year-old) watched me type, hung off my arm, and did two-year-old things.

He saw the colorful display of my mail reader, “Mutt” (a text-based email reader that is basically immune to viruses, very fast to use, with a steep learning curve), and said “Daddy, what’s that?”

“Well,” I replied, “it’s a program I use to read my electronic mail. It’s called ‘Mutt'”.

Well, whaddya know, the rest of that session before heading off to work, every time he’d see me pop back to that text window with its colorful text, he’d shout “Daddy! Mutt!”

That’s my boy.

Las Vegas is a city of sparkling expensive gambling delight, but many of my most memorable experiences in Sin City were had not withing the chiming money pits, but in (and above) the lighter side of Vegas.

Matt Barnson has acquired a reputation for being an thoughtful, responsible adult, a father, and nothing resembling the Matt who in my younger years liked to introduce me to mortal danger. No.. this time, it would be different.

We met at the Star Trek experience, but opted against Quarks bar because their menu was expensive and non Atkins-friendly. After a diner lunch, Kelly and Christy headed to the Venetian to do some shopping while Matt and I gleefully took his three kids to Circus Circus to ride the fun rides. We departed the Hilton going the wrong way on the Monorail, just to see the sites, but soon opted against that idea, as the other passengers started shooting Cyclops powered death looks toward JJ’s insistend dissatisfaction with the tour so far. Traveling back, we consulted a map, deciding on the final stop to walk across the street to the amusement park.

After a twenty minute trip through the smoke filled casinos, Matt pushing a stroller and Sara squeezing my hand with stars in her eyes, we made it to the front door, finally discovering that this was too far to walk, and being advised that the Monorail stop we wanted was the Las vegas hilton – where we had started out.

Impulsively, I grabbed a Taxi, we piled in, and were soon in the land of Circus Circus. I couldn’t wait to jump on a few rides and glefully be a kid again. After getting lost in the video arcade, we made our way through two broken escalators, And into ADVENTUREDOME. Matt decided to let me ride with the kids, but I soon had to illegally hand over my armband to matt, when JJ vehemently insisted that no ride would be acceptable far from the loving arms of his Father.

After a few hours, we headed back to the Hilton to enjoy the Buffet, which was filled with Pasta, pizza, Desserts, Chinese food, and for Matt and Christy, lots and lots of meat. After dinner, and a lesson in slot machine odds for Matt, it was time for me to face the most fearsome part of my trip… the STRATOSPHERE.

The stratosphere is the tallest building west of the mississippi.. a tower that rises high above the rest of the casinos. On top of this tower is another 10 story tower that holds a ride that pulls you up 90 feet, bounces you as you look over 1000 feet straight down, and then drops you, weightless, toward your doom, before saving you at the last minute when you have fallen 90 feet… it is also important to note that I’m scred of heights.

After an endless wait to go to the top of the tower, there I sat, waiting for the ride to fill.. Matt screaming like he always did at 18.. the responsible father.. “Look down there.. holy crap!” – Meantime, my heart is pounding in my head.. my breaths are shallow and quick. I hear the girl in th booth start a 10 count countdown, but she launches us at number 7.. and then.. she says “Thanks for riding!” and people start getting off the ride.

Matt is laughing, people are shaking and yelling. “Wasn’t that AWESOME?!” Matt yells. I’m just calm and confused.. not afraid at all.. but wondering – did I miss something? I looked at the computer captured photo.. and my face is dead and attentionless.

I had blacked out……

We rode again, of course.. and this time, I did indeed experience the ride.. and it was fun. And we got a great picture. But it was a familiar sensation, sitting next to Matt, fearing for my life, and being a little concerned that i had bitten off a bit more than I could chew.. almost a mile up.

When we parted company that night, the barnsons and the Timpanes agreed – this must become a tradition. I hugged Christy goodbye, marveling at her patience, her family, and her ability to put up with Matt and I bringing out the.. umm.. best/worst in each other. I promised Sarah, the sole remining awake child that I would see her again soon, and I just laughed as I slapped Matt on the back. Somehow, we had conquered yet another city, and completed our mission.. “Don’t Die”.

I apologize for loyal readers that barnson.org was down from Friday through Sunday morning. I had some strange database weirdness that I still haven’t entirely corrected; I’ve just worked around the problem for the time being, disabling the “top posts” block on the right-hand side. Some of the issues should go away when I upgrade Drupal.

My wife, Christy, is in Nashville, Tennessee attending a conference this week, so I get the two youngest children. My mother-in-law has the older two. It’s all right hanging out with these guys, and a Sunday afternoon is quiet enough that I can get some recording done. The noise of my PC has really increased over the last few months, though, and I’ve found it’s fairly loud in recordings. I can deal with the noise by using a noise reduction tool, but what I’ve found is that doing so leaves a “hole” in instrumental sounds that I can hear clearly when I compare to the original source track. It’s just a little bit of aliasing, but it causes guitars to sound just a little more tinny, and voices to lose some high harmonics. I’ve gotta come up with a better solution for a quiet studio, that includes somehow getting the PC behind a wall, away from my microphones.

I also finally played with making a “pop filter” to help eliminate the harsh sound of “P” and “T” in my vocal recordings. On a tip from a fellow musician, I drafted an old metal coat hanger to the cause. And, whaddya’ know, it works! You pull an old stocking (yes, panty hose) over the coat hanger, shape it into a rough resemblance of an oval or circle, and then figure out some way to strap it between your mouth and your microphone.

Oh. Christy. In case you’re reading this, umm, I hope you didn’t want that old knee-high in the bottom drawer anymore?

I have to kind of work to forget that I’m singing into something that until recently frequently did duty hugging my wife’s legs, but I’ll manage.

Anyway, it’s made a really nice difference. I can get closer to the microphone without popping all over the place, and I don’t need the massive chunk of foam inside the mic that resulted in muffled recordings. Small, cheap, and helpful.

The two kids are now quietly in bed for their afternoon naps, and I’m torn: do some more recording, or go take a nap? JJ, our six-month-old, is teething, and, as is the usual with teething, is experiencing an ugly runny nose, fever, crabbiness, etc. He seemed to develop a cough along with it, though, so instead of heading to my mother’s house for dinner this Sunday, I’ll be hanging out at my house, just chilling with the kids, making music, updating my web site, and making sure they get enough snuggles, particularly the little sick one.

Being a dad is fun.

Oh, right, anyway, I’ve made it a habit of posting “rough draft” songs on the web site. Here’s the latest. Like most of them, there are still glaring errors; when I realize a finished version, they’ll be corrected. Notably, I missed several notes both on the guitar and with my voice, knocked the guitar case a couple of times in ways that stand out, and a terrible entrance on “Remember”. For those interested, this was a tune I wrote while on a mission for the LDS church some time between 1992 and 1994. Though my religious philosophies have changed a lot in the intervening years, I still think it’s kind of a pretty tune.

For those interested in the technical details, for this recording I used a cheap pair of OSM 800 condenser mics spaced about two feet apart, positioned over the twelfth fret and nut of the guitar, at about 24 inches from the mics. I had to yank a lot of noise out using a noise reduction plugin, which made the guitar and vocals a little harsher than I’d like, but I was able to soften them up with a light reverb afterwards.

Here it is (as always, you’ll need an ogg-vorbis compatible player, like the free WinAMP to play this tune):

You can download prayer.ogg (ogg vorbis format), download prayer.mp3 (mp3 format), or stream the mp3.