Tag Archives: Captured by Robots

News

Put the kazoo down, man! We’re producing here!

They say you go to war with the army you have. (I don’t know who “they” are, but they seem to know all about it.) It’s the same with making an album, friends. You make the record with the tools available to you. When Bach made his first album, all he had was an organ. Bet you didn’t know that.

As I’m certain I’ve said before, Big Green typically makes their albums using the equivalent of stone knives and bear skins. Have you met our production budget? Let me introduce you to a little guy named ZERO. And I don’t mean Zero Mostel – I mean nothing, zip, zilch, nada, bupkis. That said, there’s enough to afford a second-hand kazoo, a discarded grade school violin, and at least one maraca.

The tools at hand

The first question is always a practical one – do we have what we need to get started? Maybe yes, possibly no. Sometimes the tools are mismatched with the project. Picture a butter knife in the hand of a hard-rock sculptor. Not that recording and mixing an album is anything like sculpting or painting. God, no! We don’t wear any smocks, and our hands are clean as a whistle. (Trouble is, the whistle is filthy as hell. And that kazoo is disgusting!)

Hey, look …. we’re making modern music. You know – the kind the kids really dig the most. Songs that feature electronic pluck-string instruments, plastic keyboards, and invisible drums. Of course, when I say “modern”, I don’t mean music like what Captured By Robots records and performs. But then we are not oppressed by malevolent automatons set on enslaving us against our will. That kind of thing can kill your buzz super easy.

The show so far

Despite the limitations of our budget and our instrumentation (to say nothing of our musicianship … or lack of same), we’ve come quite a long way on the current project. How long, you may ask? Glad you asked. As I’ve reported previously, we have recorded all of the songs and are now deep in the Pon Farr of mixing. The musicians amongst you will know that mixing is an iterative process – in other words, taking multiple passes to get to the “it” that you’re looking for. (Ergo, it-erative.) How long will the blood fever last? No man can say.

Joe attempting to take the lime back out of the coconut.
Joe attempting to take the lime back out of the coconut.

I can tell you that we’ve done preliminary mixes on about 19 songs as of this writing. We have a few more to plow through, then we’ll assess, review, mark the suckers up, and take another pass. Early on, I set up a spreadsheet to keep tabs on our progress. I of course abandoned the thing within about three weeks, as I HATE being organized. Everyone knows Big Green craves chaos. At least, everyone who knows Big Green …. which amounts to almost no one. But I digress.

Next stop: stopping!

Aside from mixing and mastering, there are a few details we need to tie up. Little things like coming up with a name for the project, developing album art, etc. With us, the biggest challenge is knowing when to stop. My guess is that the work will end kind of abruptly, sometime this Fall, and we’ll drop the album like a load of bricks. Either that or we’ll put it in a time capsule and leave it for future generations to ponder.

What’s your guess? Let us know at [email protected]!

News, Recording

It’s the time of the season for mixing

Damn, it’s hot out there. Hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum, as Monty Python used to say in a mock-Aussie accent. Mind if I call you Bruce, just to avoid confusion?

Well, it is, after all, summer in the northern hemisphere, which means balmy weather for the lot of us. But for your friends in Big Green, this year the solstice means that the season for mixing has arrived. Yes, brother Matt (a.k.a. “Mr. Ears”) has left the premises to keep a keen eye on his Peregrine Falcon charges … but not before recording his final tracks on our upcoming album, titled [INSERT WORKING TITLE HERE]. After two years of tracking, it’s time to start pushing those faders. (And, of course, pulling them occasionally.)

The job ahead: hard as f#ck

Make no mistake, we have a big project ahead of us: making sense of between 20 – 25 new recordings and arranging them in the general shape of what is still somehow called an “album”. But hey, Big Green has faced challenges before. Remember when we were almost captured by Captured by Robots? No? Well, perhaps I imagined that. Nevertheless, it hasn’t always been an easy road for us. Sometimes it’s uphill, sometimes down, but there are always plenty of potholes and no freaking shoulder. (Not mention the fact that it’s a toll road.)

Getting back to mixing, we try to keep things in perspective. Like all modern DAWs, ours has a virtually endless number of tracks and tools to work with. And yet, our favorite albums are mostly from the analog four, eight, and sixteen-track era. Multitrack recording was mucho expensive in those days, and most non-famous bands had zero access to it. In the 1980s, we got into a proper studio maybe three or four times total; the rest of the time we were bouncing takes between stereo cassette machines while playing kazoos into live mics. (Ah, those were the days.)

Placing the lime inside the coconut

Anyway, despite the distinct technological advances we now enjoy that weren’t available in the 1960s, we rely heavily on our musical forebears for inspiration. In other words, if they twiddled a dial a certain way to get a certain effect, that’s good enough for us. If they put a speaker and a mic in a big closet to get reverb, well …. maybe we won’t do that, but perhaps we should. The one thing they did that we won’t do under any circumstances is work super hard. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them, we have other principles. (Shout out to Groucho.)

Now, that doesn’t mean that we want to imitate the previous generations. I mean, there’s no point in putting the lime in the coconut again, right? That’s been done. We have to break new ground, like any other band. Maybe put the plumb in the artichoke, then mix them all up. (See illustration.)

Unpredictable prognostications

Okay, I’m not going to be irresponsible enough to predict when this album is going to be finished, released, etc. All I can tell you is that [INSERT WORKING TITLE HERE] is fully recorded and on its way to completion. Looking into my magic crystal mixing bowl, I see a Fall release on the horizon. Fall of what year? No man can say, but Fall is a good bet. TO THE MIXER!

Usual Rubbish

The fate of Ned Trek: A Mystery

Get Music Here

Where is it? Well, I can’t tell you. I was looking at it. I was looking right at it, and then it just wasn’t there! Stupid Internets!

Ever have one of those days when you keep losing track of things? Yeah, well I’m having one of those weeks. First I couldn’t find my shoes. Then my bag of marbles went missing. (That’s right – I lost my marbles.) Next it was my reading glasses. I couldn’t even look for those because my distance glasses were missing too, and I can’t see my reading glasses without my distance glasses. And then there was the bank deposit, but never mind – you can read about that in the papers.

These are all trifles when you come down to it. The big thing that’s missing is a web site. The Ned Trek web site, that is – it disappeared without a trace last week. Of course, so did last week. I mean, last week is gone for good, right? And sadly, it has taken Ned Trek with it.

Home for wayward clowns

Some of you may know Ned Trek as an occasional segment on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. We would gab a bit, maybe play a stupid song or two, then play an episode of Ned Trek and call it a night. Of course, the show was buried in a lot of even more inane nonsense, and we felt that people needed an easier path to the oasis that is Ned Trek. After all, some might only want to hear bad imitations of vaguely famous people and a seasoned naturalist imitating a sit-com horse from the nineteen sixties. (There ARE people like that, you know.)

With that in mind, we built a separate site for Ned Trek. (Here’s the cached version of the site on the Wayback Machine.) There we just posted the shows, gave a little explainer about the premise, etc., and put up some ridiculous pictures that drove people mad. Every other episode of Ned Trek was a musical, so we had a separate WordPress post category for those. It was a whole thing, and it got tens and tens of visitors until …. well, until earlier this year.

Who the hell would ever hack THIS masterpiece?

Things that go boom

You’ve heard the not-so-old saying, “boom goes the dynamite”, right? Well, this is a case of boom goes the web site. I went there one day, nothing better to do, and I got the white screen of death. I tried all the patented WordPress hacks to resurrect it, but it was no good. But I think the real issue is …. what the hell happened? Did we get hacked by Captured by Robots or someone?

Maybe it was Desilu, in retaliation for lifting their show concept. Or maybe it was Desilu in retaliation for murdering their show concept. Fortunately, the show files are still there, so we set up a temporary page until we can figure out what the hell is going on. (Did I hear Trump just now?) Then there was that one-armed man spotted leaving the scene. We’ve got to find him before Richards does! (Damn it. Now I’m mixing up my bad sixties television shows.)

Calling all engineers

Hey … if you’re an engineer (i.e. not someone who drives a train) and you know something about WordPress, do me a favor. Call up WordPress central and tell them that their bloody platform just dumped years worth of pointless activity … I mean, backbreaking work. We demand restitution!