Just got done with a long day in the studio with Wil Reeves and Sizable. We mixed the last few songs for this record and he also added some mastering magic all 13. The tracks are basically finished and I'm stoked because it's not quite April. We're on schedule! I'll have a quarterly update when the album is on Spotify.
I didn't even get to watch the last part of the mastering process as I had to jet out to Shakespeare's for a shift but after listening to the products a few minutes ago, I'm very pleased with the result.
Last Saturday I had two interviews: with journalist / anchorwoman / video producer Angie Weidinger and with my High School band director Ray Spiller III. It was a busy day and I spent a lot of time in the car but it was worth it to add two more quality interviews.
I recorded Angie's at "The Market" (restaurant near the sale barn) in Vienna, MO and Ray's at Sput's nearby. And even though they were both in and around Vienna, my hometown, it felt oddly like being in foreign territory. Since moving away from Vienna 10 years ago, I've really only been back to visit family, get my car worked on at my Uncle's place, or take care of some minor finances at the bank and courthouse. I haven't really done something that involved other parts of town and bumping into random members of the community.
I felt even more out of place when I parked my Volt and walked into The Market with a bunch of recording equipment. I saw what seemed to be the entire baseball or track team, one of my older sibling's classmates, some older regulars whose identity slipped my mind, and my Uncle Larry. And despite a part of my imagination evolving a story about a Western where a city slicker walks into a bar and everyone one just turns and stares before someone gets shot, I realized it was all in my head and after a few minutes of catching up with a few folks and "explaining myself," I felt at ease and the rest of the time went great!
Speaking of interviews, PAPIO, the interview platform I'm developing is under major refactors on the backend. Basically I want to allow for clips to be formed from interviews. And in the future, I want to expand to storing not only interviews and clips, but any kind of "talking" media and their associated tags / topics.
I spoke about this last week so I'll simply add that I think I've finally gotten enough knowledge on DynamoDB to rewrite this and early experiments now look promising.
BUT...
I'm gladly getting distracted with a weekend hackathon project.
One of the passion projects I'm working on is a podcast / radio show with my friend and roommate Caleb. We're always talking about adding sound effects but we don't really have the setup to do that easily. What would be ideal is if we had an interface to trigger a bunch of sounds on demand, i.e. a soundboard.
A few "soundboards" exist on the web but they are substandard or take the wrong approach in my opinion and they are usually cluttered with ads anyway. I know I can build something that serves our needs better in a few days so that's what I'm going to be working on this weekend.
I plan on using my "grid hotkeys" idea from years ago combined with everything I've learned about audio and making extremely performant static webapps over the past few years to knock this thing out by Sunday night -- which is our next recording day.
Caleb and I have recorded about 4 of these podcasts so far but we don't intend on releasing anything until we feel like we're making something worth listening to, which may never happen. We're trying different things and every once in a while something happens that make us want to keep experimenting. So that's where we are at. The soundboard is the next inevitable step in our experiment.