Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in The albums of the MandleBear: News' LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
11:59 pm [chaoswolf]	PING: Artists -- We Want You! Hey. You with the sketch book. You with the camera. And yes, you with the laptop! mdlbear wants to start gathering fan art for his music. It can be a creative interpretation of a quote. It can be an icon. It can be an image directed at a song. Anything artistic you can think of. If you got the skills, he would love to gather art. The purpose of this stuff is for future shwag -- want to see it on a t-shirt? A hoodie? Something tangible? Unknown what the shwag will be at this time, but it will most undoubtedly be given away*, **. * If you are an artist that would like your work sold as part of a mdlbear_albums shwag item, please include a "Yes, I would like you to contact me about royalties" line or similar to the effect into your submission. That will let us know who to contact for this sort of thing when we're ready to. ** If the above line is not there, then whatever we do with it shall be placed on an object and distributed as a freebie shwag thing. Remember, this is fan art. The intent is to spread the word about mdlbear's music, and selling albums is a nice bonus. Please post your art here when you have some! (Tags with royalties/freebie might make it easier to sort, as would song title.) Current Mood: artistic (Comment on this)
8:56 pm [chaoswolf]	Latest News -- Amethyst Rose As many of you are aware, mdlbear released Coffee Computers and Song at my urging. What he hasn't told you is he's recently recorded scratch tracks for Amethyst Rose. This has an estimated release date of (I think) 2011 sometime. He has also been in negotiations w/ Tempered Glass about releasing an album, but status of this project is unknown. (cross-posted to mdlbear_albums, chaoswolf on Dreamwidth) (Comment on this)
Monday, January 1st, 2007
9:54 pm [chaoswolf]	Attention --- Coffee, Computers & Song Now available through Paypal! Now available PayPal purchasing capability of mdlbear's new album! (xposted to lots of places) Current Mood: accomplished (1 Comment |Comment on this)
4:02 pm [chaoswolf]	Album pre-order! mdlbear finally has the mail-order pre-order form live. Newness. Go for it. I reccomend it. (x-posted to my LJ, filk, filkhaven) Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 24th, 2006
1:53 pm [mdlbear]	Tracks Finally got off my tail and finished the last little bit of editing for "The Programmer's Alphabet" -- cutting off the end and inserting a little bit of white noise. Audacity is quite happy to generate white noise, so that worked fine. At this point the track count stands at 19, with only 8 marked as having problems that need to be fixed or parts or effects that need to be added. I'll need to go over the whole damned thing again, of course, to make sure. And that's not counting final mixing and mastering. Meanwhile I've commissioned the artwork, and started thinking seriously about pre-release samples, advertisements, and release parties. Also in the mean time, I have a half-hour web album of my Worldcon-2006 concert available for download. Feel free to comment. Current Mood: accomplished (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
4:52 pm [mdlbear]	Tracks! Finally got off my tail and recorded a clean take of "Little Computing Machine". Also fixed a too-loud chord in "Silk and Steel" that was making it impossible to balance the guitar and vocals. I think that I now have reasonably clean versions of all the tracks on the album. So here's the tail of the to-do list: add track details to the */notes files -- this is stuff like key, tempo, etc. that I need to make sure I don't put two too-similar songs next to each other unless I really mean it. cleanup, sound effects, etc. Reverb on background vocals. figure out final track order At that point it would be possible to put together a dump or demo. It may be necessary; even Worldcon is beginning to look dicey, because of: text for insert, cover, disk artwork, layout final mixing -- this may require re-doing some parts. mastering Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 17th, 2006
4:58 pm [mdlbear]	Tracks Made an attempt to put down clean tracks for "Little Computing Machine", using the old track as a guide. Started out pretty good, then fell apart completely at the end. Some really weird things were happening with tempo; couldn't tell whether it was on the guide track (which did have problems), Audacity having trouble keeping up, or just being generally out of it. Made up for it by laying down a clean take -- or at least it will be when I've edited out the mistakes. I've learned that it's much easier to repeat a messed-up verse than to stop and try to match it on a second try. Hey, I'm new at this! Current Mood: annoyed (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 15th, 2006
8:46 am [mdlbear]	Album covers Over the last couple of days the subject of album artwork has come up. Since this is a fairly specialized topic, I'm putting it here in mdlbear_albums. I have a pretty good idea of what I want for the cover of Coffee, Computers, and Song: a picture of me as a street singer, with a laptop on top of my guitar case and a cardboard sign saying "will hack for food". On the graffiti-covered brick wall behind me, the words "Wine, Women, and Song" with the first two crossed out and the obvious replacements written in. I expect this to be a photoshop job; I'll post the base picture (i.e., without the graffiti) sometime soon. There are a couple of other projects in the near future, which I think about when I'm trying to avoid working on CC&S: Amethyst Rose, the long-planned second album. This will be mostly family- and fantasy-related songs. No idea what the cover art should be like (I'll be happy to discuss it in comments or email), though I know what I want on the disk itself, and will grub through my sizeable collection of rose photos for the best one. Hackers' Heaven, mostly space and computer songs related to some (still unpublished -- can you spot the trend here) stories I was writing a decade or so ago. This is the world that "Demon Lover", "Bound for Hackers' Heaven", "Can't Get it Up", "Silk and Steel", and a few others came out of. This one will definitely be a CD-ROM and will include a useful amount of software in addition to the music. The demo album, Sufficiently Advanced?, may very well not happen, since the schedule for CC&S has slipped as far as it has. I note in passing that I also have to think about back-cover and inside artwork, typesetting, and the like. Current Mood: awake (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 25th, 2006
6:25 pm [mdlbear]	Coffee, Computers, and Song! No, not the album -- that's still very much under construction. But the album's web page is, at long last, finally up. My concert 7pm tomorrow night at Baycon will feature many songs from the album. And stick around for the Steve and Callie Show, bridging between our concerts. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
10:00 pm [mdlbear]	Bugs After much pestering, I finally recorded chaoswolf saying "nice try" in the last verse of Bugs. You can hear the result [here]. Not bad. Life would be easier if Audacity had a way to replace the selection with silence, instead of always inserting it. I thought you could do that, but either I was mistaken, or they changed it. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 26th, 2006
2:37 pm [chaoswolf]	Progress See his progress here! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
8:49 pm [mdlbear]	tracks Demon Lover [ogg] Silk and Steel [ogg] I honestly can't tell how these came out -- there's a lot of background noise that I don't think is there in the mix, but whether it crept in during the encoding or it's an artifact of my soundcard or speakers is hard to say without a comparison. Feedback, please. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 20th, 2005
8:27 pm [mdlbear]	Tracks! Put down preliminary versions of Guilty Pleasures and Silk and Steel. Neither is anywhere near good enough to keep, but I'll put up oggs later this weekend for those interested. And I need to put up a version of Demon Lover, and a scan of the sheet music, so folks can practice against it. Shocked to discover that the last tracks I put down were sometime in March. Lazy, we are... Current Mood: accomplished (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 27th, 2005
12:12 am [mdlbear]	Flute track cflute is in town for Baycon, and came in a day early (on Wednesday, always a dangerous time). She stayed at the Starport last night, and this evening she put down a flute track to "Cicero in the Twenty-First Century". Sounds good; I'll try to have an ogg up soon, but I've been a trifle busy. Current Mood: exhausted (Comment on this)
Monday, March 7th, 2005
8:36 pm [mdlbear]	Setlist for Consonance 2005 test album One copy of this test burn was sold in the Interfilk auction; the rest are being used for "promotional purposes." Sorry, you can't buy one. ( setlist ) Current Mood: tired (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 1st, 2005
10:36 pm [mdlbear]	Tracks Recorded "Bigger on the Inside", and exported it and "I Wanna Be a Webmaster" to ogg, mainly because I wanted to be able to refer to them online. Wannabe, in particular, is needed for www.mydotsite.net/. Current Mood: slightly accomplished (Comment on this)
Monday, February 21st, 2005
6:23 pm [mdlbear]	tracks! Day before yesterday: "Cicero in the Twenty-First Century" and "Stuck Here in a Starship for a Hundred Years Without No Body Blues". Today: "Someplace in the Net" (which for some unguessable reason I had fogotten about) and "Can't Get It Up". Both are somewhat marginal; I probably need a couple more takes each. Also had chaoswolf listen to my microphone placement test tracks, which resulted in some improved placement. I needed somebody with young ears to listen to them. I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to get back into the swing of things. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
11:06 pm [mdlbear]	An Actual Almost Album Track list for Is This Thing On? 2005-01-05: Keep the Dream Alive Daddy's World The Programmer's Alphabet I Wanna Be a Webmaster Vampire Mega-Byte TEOTWAWKI v2.0 High Barratry The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of Bugs The World Inside the Crystal "Is This Thing On?" is the permanent title for test CDs by Steve Savitzky. All are qualified by the date they were burned, since the contents varies. Most of the songs on this particular instance will eventually find their way to the first *real* album, "Coffee, Computers & Song", due out sometime in 2005. There are three copies of 2005-01-05: for the Interfilk auction at GaFilk, combined in a 2-disk set with the latest install disk for DeMuDi, the Debian Music Distribution, which contains all the software used in the production of this CD. Installation instructions can be found at <http://www.demudi.org/> for my mother, combined in a 2-disk set with The Open CD, a collection of open-source software for Windows. the archive copy, to be waved around at GaFilk and occasionally played for people who probably have better things to do than give me badly- needed advice on mastering. Current Mood: accomplished (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 29th, 2004
6:22 pm [mdlbear]	Not available in stores OK, I now know that my toolchain works. I have succeeded in burning a playable CD (8 tracks, 22:49:08 total; the :08 is blocks) with the working title "Is This Thing On? Testing..." Sounded decent, modulo a couple of tracks where the volume was too low, and a couple of flubs. The toolchain involves a Perl program that reads song files, locates the corresponding .wav track data files, and builds the disk TOC, cdrdao, which burns the CD based on the TOC file, and a makefile that ties it all together. So it's a one-liner: cd ~/albums/test; make cdr Code on the web, coming soon. Update: the darned thing skips; a test read confirms that it's full of CRC errors. Possible solutions include using the faster CPU and buffering the track data locally instead of shipping it over the network from the fileserver. Current Mood: accomplished (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 25th, 2004
10:05 pm [mdlbear]	Wav's When nothing much was going on in the living room today, I ducked into the office and did minimal editing on the tracks I've recorded so far, and exported .wav files. I'm not going to have time to burn a test CD tonight, but things are looking hopeful for later in the week. All told there are 21 tracks; of these 4 are total losses for one reason or another, four or five are good enough ship, and the remaining dozen are perhaps OK for a demo but need to be redone for the album. Note that no album is going to have 21 tracks on it -- 12 is closer. But there were some songs that I really wanted to have either on SA? or at least on a special for my Mom (e.g. Rainbow's Edge and The Stuff that Dreams are Made of) that won't be in C,C&S. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)