I Fixed It Some

About "The latest video."
The video that I posted 2 days ago, I wound up going back into and fixing up a bit, especially the vocals, which had glitches.

I had sung through the song 3 times and was picking and choosing the best phrases from each and mixing and matching them, which led to a couple of voices stepping on each other, and the last note of the song being just plain off pitch. I was kind of like the runner who starts slowing down before he has actually crossed the finish line. This resulting in some fellows losing races by a nose to a guy who is going all out, full steam, and who lunges past the guy and grabs the tape first.

The musical analogy would be me falling flat on the very last note of the song, where the guy sings "...when I was young."

The original vinyl recording had a little vamp at the end, where the song goes to the major key.

It is (of course) in a minor key because it is a lament over wasted youth. But, youth is normally wasted on the young, and so, I guess the sentiment expressed by the major chord at the end is: "oh, but wasn't it great back then," and greatness has to be represented by a major chord.

I also forgot to put some kind of guitar solo in the thing, which I will probably do, by making the verse that ends with: "All the conversations, I can now recall, concerned themselves with me, and nothing else at all" repeat itself once. Then I will mute the vocals and play the guitar solo there instead.

There is a guitar solo on the Eddie Arnold record, but it is kind of antiseptic, and I think I can play a better one, bringing to issue everything I have garnered out of the evolution that guitar solos have undergone since that song came out in 1966(?)

I was also able to learn a thing or two about the Openshot video editor.
You have to wait for each action to complete itself before trying another one. If you are patient, then in twenty seconds to two minutes, whatever you instructed the program to do will complete in front of you. If you start clicking on the button repeatedly, or if you figure that the program didn't do the thing and then go on to try something else, that is when Openshot will crash.

I went to export a file and got the message "Openshot is not responding" with the choice to "force quit," or wait, and I clicked on "wait for program to respond," went back to my Grisham novel, and about 2 minutes later, I looked over to see that it was exporting and was already 44% into the process, or something.
So, feeling more secure about the thing not crashing, I was emboldened to try to change the pictures that displayed while the song played, moving them around so they would fall more in line with the verses, and have more to do with the lyrics, etc...

I believe that I have mastered the art of making average videos (up from kind of ragged) and reached a plateau whereby, through following the techniques that I have developed, all my future stuff will be at least this good.

Having a metronome program on my smart phone as I do now, I can set it to the exact tempo of the song and do more stuff like the 11 second live clip of me actually playing the song that is nestled among the still photos.

Going through the uploading to Youtube process again, after having only made minor changes to it is arduous, and then having to delete the inferior one (that will never really ever go away, especially if anyone "shared" it) is even more work.

I was fatigued enough after having stayed up all night working on the first one, so that I concluded "good enough" and put it on Youtube. I hadn't discovered the method of giving the Openshot editor up to 2 minutes to complete an action in order to keep it from crashing and so I felt lucky enough to have even gotten the song to play while the pictures showed, and figured I had better post it before I lost the whole thing in some kind of unrecoverable crash.
I am actually more than half satisfied with the above video.

The Actual Post

It is just about pool season, for Lilly and I

Workaraound: A Set Of Missing Keys

I went looking through other documents for instances of the characters that I am missing on my keyboard.
I cut and pasted them all (90687%*) -including the parenthesis- into a separate document.
So now, before I write, I cut all the missing characters out of it. When I need one of them, I hit "paste" and then delete out the ones that I don't need.

So, I guess I don't need a new laptop or a repair, after-all. I wonder how many years I can go using this method...

• 55 Dollar Saturday Afternoon/Night
• 48 Dollar Sunday Night
• Monday Off To Make Video (top)

I was determined to go out and busk in broad daylight Saturday, after having rotated my sleep schedule by staying up from after I got home Thursday night, all the way into late Friday, reading a Grisham novel, for the most part, interspersed with peeks at other books, and listening back to some of my own music.

I think I have gotten my videos to the level of "average," up considerably from "raggedy," and I am pretty excited about the next few projects, now that I have a method. Plus, I have the incentive, given my upcoming trip to New England, to focus on special music for the trip. There are at least a few people whom I am making custom music for, to play for them once I'm up there and they ask: "So, have you recorded anything?" Some of them are musicians, whom I intend to astound by hitting the play button and having one of their own compositions done by myself, issue forth from the speakers.

I have come up with a system for producing stuff that comes out at a consistent level, by adhering to certain rules. Laying down a metronome track first is vital. It becomes the glue that holds the whole thing together. You can't really play a song until you can do it in steady time.

Taking a section where I nailed the chords just right and then making that riff repeat, using the aptly named "repeat" effect, is part of the system. Why try to play mistake free throughout a nine minute song, when I can take the perfectly played part, and make it repeat digitally for nine minutes?  Then I can play the second instrument along with that, and only need to hit a stretch where they mesh perfectly, then, isolate that section and repeat. Then, repeat the process until you wind up with a dozen voices all in sync for the whole nine minute song. Yup.

And, it won't sound repetitious, because I will layer a bunch of live, spur of the moment stuff over the repeating stuff.

The way I look at it is, when a tourist buys a CD from a busker, he wants it to sound just like what he is hearing on the sidewalk so that, after he gets back from his vacation and is thrilling the neighbors with his slideshow, he might get around to: "Then we saw this guy, playing on the sidewalk..." part and be able to pop in the disc at that point and say: "Yeah, that's him!"

In a perfect world, it would be the same song that he has a snippet of on his phone, which he shot on the sidewalk. Just minus the traffic noise and sounding like it was done in some kind of recording studio.


But, I'm not going waste a lot of energy pursuing an even better sound quality in my studio at home.

Anyone would expect that the guy playing on the sidewalk saved his pennies and bought studio time somewhere, and if it sounds like not the most professional studio, then it would just fit in to what the tourist might expect that the busker would be able to afford.

I slept all day Sunday, after having had the 55 dollar Saturday. There is a whole different world of busking at the Lilly Pad during daylight hours.

There are typically a lot more people, but they are typically one or two dollar tippers. Nobody is going to sit and swap stories then leave me with a hundred and seventy-five dollar tip amidst the bustle of activity; that's the way it goes, but there is money out there, in the afternoon; a comforting thought, should I ever need to play for eight hours to catch up on bills.

Waking up at 9 PM, after having missed another Berta dinner opportunity, I decided to go out, and made another 48 bucks in 2 and a half hours.

I think about Howard Westra every Sunday morning, and his standing invitation for me to join in what is a traditional dinner, prepared by Berta, served every week on that day, "after church."

The last time I was there was probably 4 months ago, and every Sunday morning, after I get back from busking, I look at the clock to see if I can squeeze in eight hours of sleep and still be over in Gretna in time for the dinner.

But, so far the past 4 months, I have wanted more to stay up and do things, feeling that my weekend had arrived, after having played Thursday through Saturday.

Also, I really wouldn't want to be going over there with food primarily on my mind; it would have to be out of wanting to see Howard and it wouldn't faze me if he were to say: "Oh, wow! The one time you show up, Berta didn't cook. She had to take the turkey to the vet!," or something.

But, today I missed it again, having probably just laid down as Berta was ringing the dinner bell.

Mr. Know-it-All

Ken would be there, of course. Howard confided once to me that, had he known that Ken was "like that," he would never have moved there.

Ken is, like, a smallish guy with the grizzled look that certain rednecks who grow up in swamps get, wild hair for blending in so ducks won't spot you, and some kind of tattoo work and a missing front tooth that say "I hung around some pretty mean redneck bars when I was younger," and Ken has the annoying habit of being an expert on every subject.

Howard told me that it was nearly impossible for him to cook a meal in the kitchen without having the task wrested from him by Ken, who becomes adamant about showing Howard: "how you cook a chicken," because guys who grew up in swamps like him, have it down to a science.

Howard had been informed by Ken that he was doing it all wrong in each case.

And, each time, Ken had ruined the meal. His chicken had come out dry and stringy, Howard said. But in Ken's defense, he had nodded off off, drunk, and had left it in the oven a bit too long.

Howard had been too much of a pacifist to have resisted him, I guess. Maybe with a polite: "Beat it, pal. Get your hands off my chicken!" or other gesture.

Now, Howard just buys sandwiches to bring home and eat during the week. Sad, having a Mr. Know-it-All around...

When I was there to pick up the bike that they gave me for Christmas in February, Ken was dressing me down on every adjustment I was trying to make, telling me, of course, that I was doing it all wrong, then giving me erroneous instructions after assuring me that he has worked on "hundreds of bikes," infamously insisting that the bike had 24 inch tires when they had 26" stamped right on them. "I see what you mean (about him being a Mr. Know-It-All)," I whispered to Howard, at one point.

But, Ken would be there, on any given Sunday, to detract from the experience of the big dinner after church.

Howard described him as the type of alcoholic that you can schedule yourself around. At a certain time each night, in between beers eight and nine, perhaps, he becomes obnoxious, and retreats to his bungaloo in the back yard. If he should, for some reason, not retreat to his bungaloo once he reaches this stage, then, Howard has learned to withdraw to his own bedroom -draft dodging pacifist that he is...

When Ken drinks hard liquor he becomes a physical threat, especially to Berta, who is supposedly his girlfriend, but who sleeps in the house while Ken goes to his mobile home sized place in the back yard where he has his own TV.

I have seen some people there whom I have been introduced to as good friends of Berta's who wound up walking out with some pretty good portions of food, at Berta's insistence. She had foisted a small bag of leftovers on me on my way out, the few times that I had been there.

These visits were way back, during football season, almost 4 months ago.