Tag Archive for Zoom H4

Shrinking your life in half

July 23, 2009 Music 2 comments

This week has been all about the moving for this jerk.  For those not in the know (which I know is most of you because it is summer and I am to busy to blog anymore) we are shrinking our space in a effort to not spend preposterous amounts of money.  We are hoping that by January sometime we can be on the hunt to buy a home somewhere. If all goes according to plan we should be able to keep our water street office and have a separate home somewhere else that is completely devoid of all work related things and contains nothing but life type stuff! That is the plan and step one is to give up the second suite that we have here and suck it up and live in the single space again for a while!

So I have been moving us slowly back into the left side, and when I say ‘I’ I really mean Reka the Intern and Darren the Tiger because I managed to pull a reasonably important muscle in my back lifting the very first thing. So props to Reka for making 70,000 hand cart trips to the recycling room and Darren for hauling all my wife’s lead. (when I say lead I really mean lead! She has like 700 lbs of lead type for a printing press) you both rock!!

I have large boxes of Computer parts (most of it/them work even) for free/sale so if you wanna come rummage you are more then welcome to! Come quick though because goodwill is about to receive a multitude of computer craziness!

In other news saw the Weakerthans and Iron & Wine last Friday! Wicked show for them both! I bootlegged it with the Zoom but I haven’t gotten around to listening to it.

Tonight is jam #2 for My Friend Lisa at the new jam space. The Tiger & I have been making noise on a fairly regular basis but this is the second time that the band we be together here. I am going to attempt an off the floor recording of a line in mix of the evenings adventures so we will see how that all goes. The Lrbaggs will rock out for the first time in a loud capacity as well!

We spent the Sunday/Monday on Galiano Island for a wedding last weekend as well. What a genius place to hang in the wilderness. If I ever get rich/eccentric and feel the need to record a solo album with nothing but my mac book in a cabin in some secluded location I am going to do it on Galiano island! Man I Love that place!

I need to collect a case of free Rock Star now so ya!

Multi Tracking is Swell :)

April 2, 2009 Music No comments

Yuppers it is. I am super tired being that i got up at 5ish so you get no explanation other then I was bored and multi-tracked this with Johnathan Livingston the Seagull, Bobby da’ Bad-ass Bass, & Chester the Gretsch.  Super excited for jam tomorrow! Aaron will be rocking out with us!

More Photos of Music Gear!

March 23, 2009 Music 3 comments

While I had a super sneaky weekend hobnobbing with movie stars, but I am waiting to hear from the powers that be if i can blog about it. So you instead get more photos of random kitchen music gear. My Friend Lisa should have a fully functional website soon which will mean this sorta thing can happen there and not every fraking day here :)

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Here we have the guitar triptych! Chester the Gretsch, The Yamaha Electric, followed by Johnathan Livingston the seagull.

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I looked down and saw a rats nest of stands and cables.

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Guitar cases to firefaces!

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The drums in their complete form!

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The main ass recording unit! !

I figure with D buying a place with jamspace, the random kitchen jamspace we have now will come to a close so I must take as many photos as possible while its all here!!

Dude Where Have You Been!?

March 4, 2009 Music 2 comments

So I haven’t had a lot of face time outside of work on my computers this last week so blogging and the like seems to be what takes the hit. One of the main things that has been taking away a lot of my time away from work is My Friend Lisa! I suppose that it is a good thing that I have been cultivating a hobby that doesn’t involve me sitting in front of a computer for a billion hours and/or taking photos of stuff. Mostly because what I do all day at work is sit in front of my computer for billions of hours and/or take photos of stuff, which makes My Friend Lisa a nice change. We set up a nice little jam space in the disused dining room area. It is not disused because we don’t cook but instead because we haven’t gotten a table for the dining area.

My Friend Lisa

My Friend Lisa

My Friend Lisa

My Friend Lisa

Last week was the inaugural jam in this space with Darren rocking out on his new drums and Aaron on bass. We sounded really and truly awful but awful with promise :) Tonight we are headed to Rockspace to really make a bit of noise and the like. In the upcoming couple weeks our goal is to get the website up and running. It is all ready to go on the back end, we just need some important things like… oh i don’t know…. content, which between us all is slowly coming along. We also need to finish the looks part of the site design meaning what we want the website and our stuff to really look like. I was out taking photos this morning to be used for the graphic design part of things, mostly because the idea of using other peoples photos (even if they are creative commons or purchased stock) is sorta making me feel icky :) The other super big thing is to record some really good cuts of our tunes and get them up on our site as well as all the various music websites (Ie: Myspace/LastFM/etc.) We are going to pool together all our equipment and hopefully do this all ourselves, which is turning out to be a really big task but we like challenges :) Between the ZoomH4, Darren’s Fire wire interface, and the smattering of mics we already possess we figure that with a couple of mic rentals/purchases we should be able to do a decent job. The question is do we four track it up, meaning each of us record our individual parts one at a time, which wouldn’t really require a lot of equipment other than what we already have, but would loose some of that played together sound. Or do we instead try and record all of us into our own tracks but while we are all playing at the same time using a combo of firewire inputs and mixers. Which would save that played together sound and would be the ideal recording situation but would require a heck of a lot more equipment then we have going on right now :) We sorta thought that this recording part was going to be easy, but as we are finding it is far more complicated than we originally thought. I guess that is why people do this for a living eh :)

My Friend Lisa

My Friend Lisa

New Music blogging

February 8, 2009 Music 3 comments

When it comes to playing music for other people I am actually extremely shy believe it or not.  It takes quite a bit to bust out and really play my guitar when I am in the company of others. (‘cept when I am loaded then all inhibitions go out the window but then i sound terrible.) I am twenty times better at playing for people than I used to be, mostly because I am constantly forcing myself to take these leaps out of my comfort zones and I force myself to do scary things.  The result is that things are not so scary after a while.  An example of stepping out of comfort zones was at our New Years Party this year,  I was sitting on the kitchen counter playing my guitar when some people decided to go outside to the street to grab some air and watch the no pants crowd stumble about. I decided to join them and I brought my guitar with me.  So here I am playing random things outside on the streets of Gastown with all sorts of people walking by and listening, all of which was fairly tough for me to do, but I did it and I am glad that I did. So now imagine my fear of singing with people around! I assure you it is a ridiculously large fear
Today I was playing with the four track abilities of the Zoom H4 and I came up with this cut. This is me doing a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s The Communist Daughter. It is not a difficult song to sing or play (it is actually supposed to be sung so monotone) and this is not a prize winning performance by any means, but I figure that if we are going to have a band that I need to over come my fear of performing in front of people. Performing to an anonymous internet audience is my baby steps :)

I played one of the Guitar tracks first, then recorded the singing track, followed by a couple of different guitar tracks and then a hint of tambourine. 4-track recording is awesome!!!

Busy Busy Days

February 5, 2009 Breaking Film, Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II, My Friend Lisa, People, Polaroid & Film, Polaroid 600, Polaroid SX70, Vancouver 5 comments

So it’s only one day after I complained that I am lazy bastard and I get to say that I am moving forward. I think that today would really qualify as at least a good step.  In fact it was a super busy day filled with pure awesome (:  The day started at the early hour of 5:30am with a bit of morning driving about while M was at her weekly cult meeting. While they were toasting kool-aid and such I was chasing the sunrise around.

Harry Jerome Statue with with morning in the back ground…

…and my favorite tree in Stanley park.

Next on the list of awesome today was a photo shoot with a couple of new models that I haven’t worked with before – Leanna and Amie. We had a blast shooting with old cameras, vintage clothes, and some old furniture.

Amie out in the wilds of Vancouver and in the studio.

The same place with Leanna. These four shots are taken with my standard run of the mill Polaroid 600 Camera

I took a few rolls of film that I will drop off to the lab as well but these are a few of the digital shoots from the day.

I think we are going to do a whole fashion inspired chair in random place series.  Mostly because chairs in random places = buckets of awesome! And Buckets of Awesome is what I am all about!

Continuing right along with the awesomeness of the day, I had band jam time in which we did a few takes of our favorite songs. I managed to somehow tear my fingernail half off yesterday on the mountain so I was playing with a bandaged finger. Shan played us a hidden track from a band (I forget the name of the band) where they ‘cover’ Guns and Roses. This prompted us to start playing Bon Jovi and well it all went down hill from there. Luckily the Zoom was recording the hilarity that was our version of Dead Or Alive :)

Band Jams and the Zoom H4

January 29, 2009 My Friend Lisa, Photowalk, Vancouver 2 comments

So yesterday was the first revisit of ‘the band’. Yup ‘the band’! You haven’t heard me talk about ‘the band’ in while, mostly because we have all been busy and there was little happening on that front. Well not anymore! We are no longer ‘the band’, we have a name and we are even soon to have a website and everything. (soon being a relative term meaning as soon as I get off my ass and do something productive with that, what I should say is we have a url) Yuppers I would like to introduce you to ‘My Friend Lisa‘
So we got together last night at this jerks studio and sat around my office hashing though the 4.5 songs we have. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it was really hard seeing that we haven’t jammed together since November and most of this stuff hasn’t been touched since then.


You would have some thing to hear possibly if my new H4 had arrived before then. But it did arrive today and i recorded a little snippit to see how well it worked and man alive it is awesome!!
Take a listen that is just in the middle of our living room with the trains rattling on out side and such. AWESOME!!!

Now I’m off to a business function in shorts, tshirt, and weakerthans hoodie. Woot!

Night Time Photo Wanders

January 26, 2009 Instagram, Night Photos, Photowalk 3 comments

So this weekend was fun.  Friday saw me sitting in traffic for hours while trying to hit cypress for a couple of hours before joining peeps at The Black Frog.  I got stuck behind this crazy trucker guy who didn’t know how tall his load was, so he decided to take hours to go under a bridge while police stopped traffic. By the time I got out of that mess I was basically due to start heading back home to meet peeps at The Frog, which was another crazy long time. So there was no snowboarding on Friday but there was eventually the Frog which was good. I drank such copious amounts of coffee that I sorta had trouble sleeping so photo wandering was had.

Saturday was filled with a bit of breakfast at Locus and a bit of work a bit of play, and a return visit to the Frog for a guys night of drinking (ie: a sausage party) where I opted for beer instead of coffee and ended up horribly drunk.

Yesterday was a do not much day. I went to Tom Lee with Darren to check out this Zoom H4 that I was thinking about buying based on a recommendation.

I played with it a bit and decided that it is exactly what I want to record jams with as well as secondary sound for indie films, but I was not ready to pay an extra 100bux because the dollar is low so I bought it online with a bunch of film instead.

Miranda and I decided to drive to Squamish just for the heck of it.

Man the Squamish Taco bell is an adventure to say the least. You have to go in to the store because you don’t get the same experience when you use the drive though. It is a ‘restaurant’ filled with people that normally would be considered to be unemployable, but for some reason they all managed to get jobs there. It is a real adventure you should try it.

quad cam shot of the taco bell

Late last night I couldn’t sleep so hopped in the truck and drove about with an assortment of random cameras and took photos of random places in the dark.