theStarport / Steve_Savitzky / Albums / bleeding / Xindex.html

Coffee, Computers, and Song! Preorder Extras! Thank you for pre-ordering Coffee, Computers, and Song!! It's going a lot more slowly than I'd like, but here you are: the first installment of the pre-order extras. here you'll find the current track list with ogg and mp3 files of whatever the current versions are. They're all from concerts so don't expect fantastic sound quality. Feel free to send email to <steve@thestarport.org> if you notice any obvious blunders that you think I haven't. Sometime this month I'll have a web form up to add some interactivity; for now we're stuck with email.

Note: The official directory for the album is here. This directory is a copy of the working directory, and it's updated daily. It includes mp3 and ogg copies of all tracks, in whatever state they were in at the end of the day. At the moment, their undisclosed location is only available to people who have preordered the CD. After all, they've already paid for it. The rest of you will have to wait.

Status

See the to.do file.

It's all very ad-hoc and a bit hard to read, but then it's really just for my own benefit. There are additional notes in the individual track directories, but I'm not exporting those yet. (And I'm probably never going to export the actual track projects. For one thing, it would take a very long time. For another, I don't have enough space available on my ISP's system. Audacity projects are big.)

All you really need to know to read one of my to.do files is that "o" marks an unfinished item, and "*" marks a completed one. "-" marks an alternative, and eventually "->" marks the one chosen. "~" marks something I've decided not to do. Most of my directories have to.do files; for example, this is the one for my software tools directory.

Additional status-like information on each track can be gained from some of the listing files pointed to by the directory-header file, conventionally called HEADER.html. You will find one in every one of my directories; they're very handy for navigating around a directory tree using a browser.

Tracks

Warning! These are automatically generated from the most-recently exported .WAV file in each track directory. They're not necessarily in any shape to be heard!

1	[ogg]	[mp3]	Ta(l)king Preorders (1:23)
			My first--and possibly last--advertising jingle. Performed at Loscon 2006.
2	[ogg]	[mp3]	Cicero in the Twenty First Century (2:11)
			Performed with Callie Hills at Baycon 2006. Yes, I left the flubbed verse in there on purpose, in part because I like the way we recovered from it without losing the beat.
3	[ogg]	[mp3]	The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of (5:05)
			I wrote this for my father a few months before he died; he went to grad school with Isaac Asimov, and introduced me to folk music, computers and science fiction.
4	[ogg]	[mp3]	House Carpenter / Demon Lover (7:38)
			I wrote a story back in the late 1980's (you'll find it in the Fiction directory) that involved a hacker/songwriter and an AI built into a Martin guitar. Can't imagine how I came up with that... This pair of songs comes from their first gig together.
5	[ogg]	[mp3]	The World Inside the Crystal (2:44)
			My first serious computer song. You can always tell the programmers in the audience. They've been there, and they know.
6	[ogg]	[mp3]	Bound For Hackers' Heaven (2:23)
			Inspired by Jordin Kare's launch-laser song, ``Kantrowitz 1972'', and closely related to the backstory behind ``Demon Lover''.
7	[ogg]	[mp3]	Silk and Steel (3:41)
			Another song about the AI guitar. I still don't know the full story behind this one--there's a big gap there.
8	[ogg]	[mp3]	The Rambling Silver Rose (3:23)
			Very loosely inspired by Cindy McQuillin's songs of spaceships, spaceport bars, and hard-drinking, independent-minded women.
9	[ogg]	[mp3]	Keep the Dream Alive (2:35)
			Written in 1986 shortly after the Challenger blew up on takeoff. Revised, unfortunately, for Columbia in 2003.
10	[ogg]	[mp3]	Cicero in the Twenty First Century (2:06)
			Performed by Tres Gique at Consonance 2007. I think we did pretty well considering that we'd only been a ``group'' for about a week.

Performers

• Steve Savitzky -- vocals and guitar.
• Callie Hills -- vocals and flute on "Demon Lover", "Silk and Steel"; flute on "Cicero in the 21st Century" and "World Inside the Crystal".
• Joyce Uggla -- vocals, guitar, percussion (Worldcon tracks)

Other Credits

• Label Artwork -- Bob Daverin of Eagle Unlimited Enterprises
• Label Printing: -- ProAction Media -- awesome.
• Disk Duplication: -- my house full of minions.
• Putting up with me, and occasional nagging as needed: -- my long-suffering family.
• And, of course, fans and pre-order customers like you, without whom this album would have been neither possible nor necessary.

Equipment

• Guitar: My gigging guitar for anything I can drive to is "Ruby", a red-topped, thinbody Ovation CC-057. Ruby is Ovation's name for the color scheme; it seemed appropriate. I bought her in Guitar Showcase's consignment shop shortly before my Interfilk gig at GAFilk, and though she came with a hardshell case she usually lives in a RoadRunner gig bag these days.
• Recording equipment:
  • The Baycon concert was recorded by Harold Groot on a pair of video recorders: one hand-held, and one tripod-mounted and recording off the soundboard.
  • The Worldcon concert was recorded by Steve Savitzky using a Griffin stereo lapel mic pinned to the back of a chair, a Griffin iMic USB interface, and a Macbook Pro borrowed from work. Don't quit your day job, especially if they're willing to buy you good toys.
  • The Loscon and Consonance concerts were recorded by Steve Savitzky using a Behringer C2 stereo pair of condenser mics, an Edirol UA25 USB interface, and the Macbook Pro again.
• Editing: All editing is being done on a homebrew Linux box, currently with an AMD CPU in a very quiet Antec P150 case. At one point I was using a fanless 1GHz VIA C7 CPU, but although it did a good job of recording scratch tracks, it didn't have quite enough computrons for overdubbing. The soundcard is an M-Audio OmniStudio 66.
• Software: The recording machine's OS is mostly Debian Etch, with a low-latency kernel from DeMuDi, the Debian Music Distribution. All recording and editing are being done using Audacity.