by Ron Johns | Jan 11, 2009 | Blog, Music on the side, tech stuff
If you’ve heard the song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk, then you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, Jeremy enlisted my help in doing a version of this song for a youth conference coming up this week. He already had an instrumental track so all we needed to do was record vocals with the new words that fit the theme of the conference and apply the right vocoder synth sound. Simple enough right? I figured a couple hours of work, but it ended up taking a weeknight and most of yesterday. At first, Jeremy actually tried to sing the part. Well, I wouldn’t actually call it singing. In fact, I was very tempted to post the audio of that first take, but Jeremy would probably kill me. After trying that a couple of times, we realized that with the vocoder synth, you just speak the words and the synth does the rest. Well, it’d be that easy if there was a MIDI track of the song anywhere in existance, but there isn’t – at least not on the WWW so I had to record it myself. Once the MIDI track was done, I broke out the EVOC 20 PolySynth that comes with Logic Studio 8 and started tweaking. I literally spent hours trying to come as close as possible to the original and learned quite a bit along the way. Here are the settings I ended up with:
Another key is to use lots and lots of compression on the original audio track as well as the software synth track. I’ve read somewhere that distortion on the original track can have a nice effect as well. Oh yeah – and don’t forget about your EQ – you can really manipulate the end result with an EQ. If anybody out there is interested in acquiring the MIDI, feel free to drop me a line. I’d be happy to share it. Here is how it turned out:
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by Ron Johns | Jan 4, 2009 | Blog, Music Posts
Happy new year! I was going to do a seperate “happy new year” post, but never got around to it. For the first podcast of the new year, I used the songs “Your Name”, and a little bit of “Thy Word”. I know I’ve played “Your Name” in a previous podcast, but we did it for church this morning, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The rest is original. “…Pray without ceasing!” 1 Thessalonians 5:17
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:04 — 66.6MB)
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by Ron Johns | Dec 28, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. The songs I used this week are, “All Over the World”, “One Life to Love”, and “How He Loves”. They may not be very recognizable, and I kept wanting to go from 4/4 to 6/8. In fact, most if it ended up being in 6/8. This is the last podcast of 2008! Until next year…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:16 — 67.0MB)
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by Ron Johns | Dec 21, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
The only song I used this week was “Mighty to Save” somewhere in the middle. The rest is original. I kind of got in the habit of picking songs out of The Connection Church worship set list, but since we’ve been doing mostly Christmas songs the past few weeks, there hasn’t been much to choose from lately. I actually recorded yesterday but decided to edit, mix, and post today. This podcast is the closest I’ve ever been to 30 minutes. I could do a special podcast of Christmas songs. I actually have a little bit of time on the 24th for this. If there are at least 5 comments to this post requesting a “Christmas Podcast” by the end of the 23rd, I’ll do it. Otherwise, my next podcast will be a week from now. I hope all of you have a blessed Christmas!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:05 — 42.4MB)
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by Ron Johns | Dec 19, 2008 | Blog, Site Updates, tech stuff
First of all, sorry for the downtime today for those of you who couldn’t get the podcast, download, or play from the website. This was due to me attempting to switch hosting providers. I ended up switching back since I couldn’t figure out why the podcast was breaking. I don’t think I’ll be trying to switch again for a while – so much time wasted on this. Since the change involved playing around with DNS, reaching the site may be a little sketchy for the next 24 hours until the proper DNS records get propagated all over the world.
With regards to the “Play Now” feature – I discovered that the problem had to do with the 48k sample rate of the podcast so i had to go through all 19 previous podcasts, convert them back to wav format with a 44.1k sample rate, then back to MP3. It took a while, but it’s been done and the pages and posts have been updated. The good news is the file size will now be a little smaller with no noticeable loss in sound quality. All future podcasts will now be posted with a sample rate of 44.1k. Wow – I had no idea that maintaining a website could be so much work! 🙂
by Ron Johns | Dec 17, 2008 | Blog, Family
I just had to share some of my favorite pictures of SanBan over the past few months. He is the CUTEST kid in the world. Of course, I’m a little bias. I hope you enjoy them. They play in chronological order.
by Ron Johns | Dec 16, 2008 | Blog, Site Updates
This has actually been broken for a while. Some of you may experience garbled audio if you try to use the “Play Now” feature available in the MTPB Blogs, downloads, and archives. This appears to only affect Flash Player 10. A workaround would be to either use the “download” link, subscribe to the podcast, or downgrade to Flash Player 9. I’ve tried this version on both a Mac and a PC and it works fine. I hope to find a solution soon and will let you know when it’s fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
by Ron Johns | Dec 14, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
Even though I only missed 1 week, it feels like a lifetime. It really felt great to sit down at the piano and worship today. I kept the podcast original this week with the exception of a different variation of the song “Love Inside” that Jeremy introduced to me yesterday. I’m just blown away at how great God is and by how He can love us the way He does!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:04 — 28.6MB)
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by Ron Johns | Dec 14, 2008 | Blog, Music on the side
Jeremy came over today and we did a really rough “unplugged” recording of two new songs he wrote. I used the R-09HR to record them – the same device I use to record the MTPB blog. The piano seemed to bit too loud in both songs… We tried to compensate on the second song by moving the recorder closer to Jeremy and the guitar, but that didn’t help much. We only played through them a few times before the final take. Today was the first I’d heard them and I really like them both! Soundwave will be recording these songs and more in either 2009 or 2010 for our new album. It’s gonna rock! Please let us know what you think:
Love Inside:
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Run:
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There was quite a bit of stuff going on today so I decided to do the podcast tomorrow. I’m sure there’ll be a little bit of the new Soundwave song “Love Inside” in it. It’s going to be a good one – stay tuned!
by Ron Johns | Dec 9, 2008 | Blog, Non-music Posts
What is there to do in Sonora, TX you might ask?
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zakPhlJf6Cw
Even though I decided not to take this big guy down, I did have a great time with the family.
by Ron Johns | Dec 3, 2008 | Blog, Non-music Posts, Site Updates
I was able to search through the text of a database backup from a month ago and replace the PodPress settings record in the corrupted database! I don’t know why I didn’t think to try this last night/this morning. At any rate, the iTunes Store has the podcast cached from when things were broken so if you try to subscribe through iTunes right now, it probably won’t work until they update the podcast, but things should be good to go by tomorrow. The “play” and “download” links on the website are working, and if you use anything other than iTunes for podcasting, you should be good to go as well.
On a side note – you might be wondering what kind of vacation could possibly be had in Sonora, TX. Well, I’ll be sure to blog all about it when I get back. 🙂 God bless!
by Ron Johns | Dec 3, 2008 | Blog, Non-music Posts, Site Updates
Last night around 8:00 PM, I was trying to fix the MTPB WordPress Stats. It hasn’t been working since I updated to 2.6.5 a few days ago. I read something about modifying the theme to fix it. When I did this, Podpress broke and began complaining about the same thing. I worked on it until 4:00 AM this morning and tried everything I could think of including restoring the website completely from a backup. I’m pretty sure it has to do with a corrupt database entry which I do not have a recent backup of. At any rate, I am completely exhausted and fed up with Podpress. I have totally run out of ideas so I will ask around and try to get some help on this. Unfortunately, I leave tomorrow with my brothers out to Sonora on vacation and will have very little time to work on this till I get back next week. In the meantime, the podcast directory where you can manually play and/or download the audio files is here. I’m really sorry about this. Also, there won’t be a podcast this week since I’ll be out of town.
by Ron Johns | Nov 29, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
Once again, this week is all original. The same thing happened again where the recorder wasn’t actually recording for the first 10 minutes which was very frustrating since that probably would have been the best part of the podcast. I hope my frustration doesn’t show through in what was actually recorded. I ended up making more mistakes than usual which increased the editing time, but I think it still came out okay. On a positive note, I think I’ve found the best way to mic. I barely used the EQ and this has to be the fullest sound I’ve gotten out of the R-09HR. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:37 — 29.6MB)
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by Ron Johns | Nov 23, 2008 | Blog, Non-music Posts
Today at small group, I had my first experience witnessing the deep frying of an 18 pound turkey. Jason Hooton did the honors. I learned a lot from him today. First, the best type of oil to use is peanut oil because it has a flash point that is much higher than other oil – 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Second, the oil should be at around 350 degrees before putting the turkey in the deep fryer, but no hotter than 375. Lastly, and most importantly, you lower the turkey into the oil as slowly as possible. If you don’t, things can get messy I’ve learned. Also, the formula for how long to cook is 3-4 minutes per pound. We cooked ours for about an hour and it came out beautifully.
by Ron Johns | Nov 22, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
This week is completely original. I didn’t use any songs. I also used a different position for the mic. It still picked up some lower frequencies better than the mids and highs, but I was able to fix this with an EQ. I know that I’ve been bad about blogging even though the election is over. Quite a bit has been happening at work lately. We found out shortly after the election that AT&T decided to buy the company I work for – Wayport. Since then, our department has been preparing for when the deal closes likely in December. It’s pretty exciting, but it has also been quite a bit of a distraction. Please keep Yoko, SanBan, and I in your prayers. We truly appreciate it!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:56 — 30.6MB)
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by Ron Johns | Nov 16, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
The songs used this week are “You are my King (Amazing Love)”, “Enough”, and the rest isn’t really any particular song. I realize I’m a day late this week. It’s because there was a network outage yesterday at work and I ended up working from 11:00 AM till 1:00 AM this morning. Just a heads up – I may try something new this week. I think if I just sit down for 5 or 10 minutes every day this week and record a small portion of the podcast it may turn out a little more creative. I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens. I hope you all had a wonderful Sunday. I know I did! You can check it out here.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:23 — 31.6MB)
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by Ron Johns | Nov 8, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
Wow – another day of problems, but at least there is a podcast to post this time. I’ve never had anybody come to the door and ring the doorbell while I was recording, but that happened today. I hope I wasn’t too rude to the visitor dropping off cookie dough that Yoko bought from her for a fundraiser. Also, the batteries in my audio recorder died before I was done so this week is a little short again – a little less than 2 minutes shy of the 30 minutes I normally try to do. It would have been a little longer if the batteries would have lasted just a few more minutes. Because of this, the ending is cut short pretty abruptly – my appologies. From now on I won’t trust the battery indicator on that thing and just swap out the batteries every month. One day I will have thought of everything and will post a perfect podcast every week! Um… well… actually… probably not, but it’s worth a shot. God bless!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:14 — 27.7MB)
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by Ron Johns | Nov 2, 2008 | Blog, Non-music Posts
Here’s what happened:
It’s Saturday noonish, and I have a Soundwave gig in a few hours and need to get the podcast done before then. So, is the microphone positioned perfectly in the sweet spot with input levels properly adjusted on the R-09HR?
Check.
Music picked out to play in case a song is needed?
Check check…
Ice maker turned off?
Chiggidy check…
A/C turned off?
That would be a….. CHECK!
Cell phone on vibrate?
Big Phat Check!
Dogs outside?
Diggidy dog check!
Parrot upstairs in the study?
….that would be affirmative
Yoko and SanBan upstairs in the bedroom keeping quiet for the next 30-40 minutes?
ccchhhhheeeeeaaaaaakkkkkkk!
Everything is ready to go so, I hit record on the R-09HR remote and begin to worship with music. I just had the piano tuned and it’s sounding beautiful! I feel the Holy Spirit fill the room and find myself thinking, this is going to be the best podcast yet! I finish the last song thinking that has to be right at 30 minutes excited about mixing since this was going to be the first podcast right after a tuning, and I look at the R-09HR and see this:
I know it’s blurry, but it says “standby”, which means the entire time I was playing, the recorder was waiting for me to press “record” one more time! DOPE! In the past, I’ve always checked to make sure it was recording before starting. This time, I was so excited about getting started that this was the ONE thing I completely forgot to CHECK! As you can imagine, I hadn’t been that frustrated in a very long time. But after a few minutes of banging my head against the wall, I realized that it was by no means a waste since my LORD heard every note played, and that made all the time spent in preparation and playing totally worth it. I pray next week will be even better!
by Ron Johns | Oct 25, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
The songs used this week are “He Reigns” and “Hosanna”. I think I’ve done “Hosanna” before, but this should be a different variation. If you listen to the podcasts very much, all of it may start to sound similar. I hope this is okay, and if used as intended, prayer will be the focus rather than the music. I’m listening to it right now and it’s obvious especially in the octives that tuning is definitely needed. It must have something to do with this last cold front that came in. As soon as I’m done with this post, I’m going to call the tuner and make an appointment. Also, I apologize for not blogging more. I’m pretty wrapped up in the elections right now so that is pretty much eating up a majority of my spare time. I should be back to my old blogging and twitting self a week or so after November 4th hopefully. 🙂
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:06 — 27.1MB)
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by Ron Johns | Oct 18, 2008 | Blog, Music Posts
Today I used the following songs: Great God, You are My King, and Day after day. I haven’t been blogging much the past few weeks, which should change in the next couple months. A quick note on the tuning – I checked it today and the grand seems to be holding tune okay. I think it has a lot to do with mic placement, which should be resolved since I took more time to work on this today, and I believe I’ve found the right spot.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:22 — 29.2MB)
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