Palette-Swap Ninja is, as you know, a two-man operation, operating on opposite sides of the country. We are both very busy this weekend working on two songs simultaneously, plus a third project on the side.
Here’s Jude’s home studio, located just outside of Boston.
And here’s Dan’s home music studio, located just outside of San Francisco.
When the tracks come out late, you now know who to blame.
Jude said “I guess I should have put a keytar up against the wall.” I said yes, if only to make me look marginally less like a slob.
Just finished up a new little segment jingle for OXM’s podcast. I think you’ll hear it this coming week on show 156. It was fun, but man, these things always take longer than it looks. An 8-second jingle? That’ll be three hours of your day, please!
If you want to hear it, you will have to listen to KOXM, of course. But if you want to see what it looks like, we’ll show you that much:
The next full song was supposed to be out by now, but that, too, is taking longer than expected. Most of the pieces are here in rough form so they are coming along nicely — it’s just the final assembly and re-recording anything that was too sloppy first time around. I’m having a lot of trouble getting the guitar parts to come out clean. Hopefully we’ll have something in the next week or so.
Jude sent some basic tracks this weekend for me to start playing with. I busted out the Variax and started the very arduous task of recording the guitar on this one. Truth: I’m not a good enough guitar player to play this, but I am going to play it anyway with some digital assistance. I will come clean when the song is out, which will hopefully be by the middle of next month.
People always ask “What’s the next one?” and I never want to say. I mean, come on — that’s part of the fun. If you can guess the punchlines before we even tell the joke, it’s not very funny — and what if your ideas are funnier than ours? It sets everybody up for disappointment. But I will offer another clue: Stratocaster, neck pickup. Good luck with that.
Jude and I are now both working in GarageBand, though we were only in the same version of GarageBand for about two days before I upgraded to ’09. I am used to programs like SoundForge and, to a lesser extent, Pro Tools, but I ditched both so I could go with something friendlier. It makes some of the stuff easier and some of it harder, but again, it’s all friendlier. I can figure it out with a web search or two, if not simply mucking about with the menus. I think I’d eventually like to get Logic Express, since it’s the big brother of GarageBand and can import all the projects natively. Yes, please.
I was on TalkRadar this past week (episode 38), blatantly disobeying my own simple “never appear on TalkRadar again” rule. Last time, I threw a mini-hissyfit, since the recording took something like two and a half hours and seemed to move at the speed of sludge. This time, however, I was prepared; I had a free evening, my wife was away, nobody was missing me at home except the cats — and some listeners said “Why hasn’t Dan been on in a while?” Combine free time with and ego stroke and I’m an easy target.
Of course, this one took three and a half hours to record. More or less.
While there, I once again got “hey, you should do this song” suggestions, including Brett’s Naughty By Nature parody of “OPP” for Little Big Planet as “LBP.” That’s a good one, but I don’t play LBP. I think the worst joke is the joke you force; as someone who doesn’t own the game and doesn’t even like the look of the Sackboys, I think I’m the wrong guy to sit down and pen a high-larious jokey-joke about it. When it comes to parody, you have to go with what you know.
It’s also nice to simply stand behind your own work. Funny or not, the songs we’ve done are creations of Jude and Dan. There are others like them but these are ours, you know? That’s kind of a key part of this project.
I think we have proven that anybody can make a parody song, so if you are one of those people who keeps thinking “You know what would be funny?” then I urge you to go give it a try. Save your ideas, make them your own.
Jude had a few spare moments so he jotted down the highlights of his rig. It’s up on the Weapons page, and I’ll add some photos a little later.
It’s funny, but Jude and I have actually never used the same recording software. Jude’s used GarageBand 2 and 3 on various projects, and while I had access to that, I was more a SoundForge/Vegas guy, until I switched to Pro Tools LE. Now, I have a degree in this stuff — Bachelor of Science, TV/Radio, with an Audio Concentration — but I got that at the very end of analog’s glorious reign. My senior year, the music school (not the communications school) got its first digital audio workstation, and I never had the opportunity to use it. I was busy slicing up 1/4″ tape and learning how to make rock and roll on 1″ Ampex eight-tracks. All the sound theory and stuff about microphone placement still turned out to be very useful, but I taught myself how to use digital effects and whatnot. Even after several years of SoundForge, PT was a disaster for me — highly irritating interface, specialized hardware requirements, and ultimately, my setup wasn’t built specifically for it, so Pro Tools crapped all over it. I finally threw up my hands in disgust and fired up GarageBand, where Jude has been sitting and waiting for me all this time anyway.
None of that really matters, but it might make the next song a little easier to produce. We are hoping for a March release, and as usual, we want to keep it a surprise until a little closer to the time. We have some other plans in the works, too, and I’ll reveal them more when they become real.
At last, the contest has concluded, and TalkRadar has announced the winner. It’s a little past the two-hour mark (you read that right) but SamueltehG33k took the top prize by a narrow margin.
Now, I know he didn’t do the whole song, but he did do it in person, and the repeated takeaway shot was so silly it got me laughing. Jude actually liked my other favorite, 1CrazedPenguin1’s LittleBigPlanet entry, slightly more:
So I turned it over to Chris at Radar for the tiebreaker. He said he thought the guy who actually went out to Wal-Mart with a camcorder should get points for bravery. So there you go. Samuel gets the media player and Penguin gets the Sorry! board game. Chris has both prizes and will probably be sending them your way soon.
I know it was a tall order — video is not as easy to create as, say, a poem or even a Photoshop joke — so I appreciate that people even gave it a shot.
(As for the song ideas that the TDar guys pitch…I recommend they use their fine recording equipment and do ’em their damned selves.)
New contest TBA shortly. This one will be a little easier.
