You remember us. You don't remember us? Well we remember you. The absence of clamouring emails demanding further blogs from the intrepid Jaysmiths has been noted, let me tell you. And now, up to one month later than expected, may we present the continuance of the Vancouver-hitting...
Almost everything we've done this month has been music-related, which is good. It might get tedious for you in the details, but frankly, you'd read this if it was the phone book, that's what friends do. So:
Area 52 Designs, 48, Querns Rd, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 1RP, Tel: 07866 970651
AVENUES VETERINARY CLINIC, 22, Garston Lane, Watford, Hertfordshire WD25 9QJ, Tel: 01923 894274
Dan Perkins Nissan Ruislip, 313, Field End Rd, Eastcote, Ruislip, Middlesex HA4 9NT, Tel: 0845 811 0395
Hyundai Bishop Auckland SG Petch, West Auckland Road, Tindale Crescent, Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham DL14 9TW, Tel: 0845 112 5004
... see, you're still reading, ain't'cha? Astonishingly, those are the first four matches for 'panda' at the Yellow Pages website. I'm not totally impressed. And now, back to the music.
When last we deigned to address ye, the adoring masses, we had just performed a 45-minute 'set' (as we pros term the affair) at The Wired Monk in Kitsilano. We were booked not long after that to come back and do it again, and that's where we should have been last night, but David the organiser called us over the weekend to confess that he'd organised it without realising the cafe was closed that day. So we've been rebooked for August 20th.
Meanwhile, these S.M.A.R.T. goals. This is a technique designed to ensure that your to-do lists don't become vague and unanalytical compilations of "wouldn't it be nice if..." / "I should do something like..." / "RULE THE WORLD! (but, er, how?)" and suchlike. Each goal needs to be Specific: "I will do X"... Measurable: "I can tell whether or not I have achieved X"... Achievable: "I have the power to do X"... Realistic: "I can do X quickly, easily, or at least with the application of existing skills and knowledge"... and Timely: "Doing X is a good thing to do now." So, whereas we'd had very vague plans - and yes, they did include "RULE THE WORLD!", but I would make a very benevolent dictator-panda - we switched to having a concrete to-do list on a fortnightly cycle.
And we still slightly goofed it up! But it's worked mostly to our advantage.
The first major goal was: make a good-enough recording of all the songs we've written up to now. This was so we could make CDs to send to the Copyright Office and our friends, and have something to hand out (or sell) at concerts. Fantastic - mission accomplished by July 18th.
Except... up till then we'd been recording in our cupboard, using my laptop, one of our performance mics, and software called GoldWave and Reason. And, while it sounded not-too-bad for something recorded at home, we were a little disappointed that it needed so much work. Sarah can play piano parts directly from her keyboard through a MIDI cable into Reason, which can replay it with a surprisingly authentic piano sample, but the vocal lines had to be recorded into GoldWave (as Reason doesn't deal too well with vocals, being primarily designed for sample-driven music such as techno and ambient) and then I had to mess around with them to get rid of the considerable background hiss and hum. Early MP3s which we sent to a few people still had the twinkling tinkerbell-like effect of my hamfisted workarounds for this irritant. Eventually Sarah found a genius way of removing the hum and the tinkerbell effect all in one, but it cost us some of the richness of our tone, and added a slightly mechanical, razory sound to the vocals. Which was also irritating, but what can you do?
Answer, quite a lot. We had pretty much committed to using the tinkerbell takes, mixed with my slightly rubbish Reason skills to within an inch of their lives, on the basis that, well, we're recording at home, so how good can you really get? The idea was to make recordings we could send to people to sell them on our songs, not necessarily on our performances or our production skills. On July 22nd we dropped into Tom Lee, the big music store on Granville, and asked one of the staff about it.
We came out with a $250 external audio interface and condenser microphone, went home, discovered it wasn't compatible with Windows Vista (my laptop), grumbled and plugged it into Sarah's laptop - and, dear god, the difference! First off, our vocal mike was picking up too much outside noise - the condenser mike somehow, magically, picks up only the sound from a space directly in front of it about the size of your cupped hands. Sarah was standing next to me talking during one of our tests, and she barely shows up in the recording. Then, having an external audio interface plugged into the laptop via USB, with the mike plugged into it, means that we don't get interference from the laptop power supply and other circuitry. Finally, the external interface contains a microphone pre-amp, which laptop soundcards lack, so the microphone doesn't have to be turned up to the max to squeeze a signal into the soundcard.
Result: sounds damn good. Except now we have to rerecord all our songs. Grrrrr...
Oh, in the meantime we went to a new venue, Myles Of Beans, a cool coffee house in Burnaby. This was on, hmm, the evening of Thursday July 19th. We performed Panda, Fireflies, and Henry VIII. (Scurry, scurvy brigands, to our MySpace page, where you can hear some or all of these, depending on when you read this.) That was fun, and we certainly got their attention. They were initially a bit bemused by Henry, but that's hardly surprising, as you'll find out when you hear it, and by the end they were roaring. It's very satisfying to get applause before you've finished a song... it shows not just that the audience appreciates it, but that you've structured it so that they can tell they're hearing the end and they know they can start applauding now, rather than waiting.
So, yes, we had to rerecord everything. This was a bind, but by the cringe, it's produced far better versions of everything, and I haven't had to apply ninja mixing skills to get something listenable out of Reason for each song.
And for the record (ahem) this is what's on our album, which will be arriving with you at whatever date the Post Office or our personal appearance on your doorstep happens to facilitate:
1. I Want To Be A Panda
2. Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad
3. I Gotta Get Me One Of Those Girls
4. Velvet
5. The Six Wives Of Henry VIII
6. Fireflies
7. If Love Is
8. The Night Train
9. The Journey
10. All You Have To Say
11. When You Smile
12. Love, Dance & Sing
13. I'll Rescue You
14. 24 Days
15. Air Conditioning
Not bad! But wait, there's more! While we were rerecording, we were still writing. We decided to stick with those fifteen songs for the CD, but in the meantime songs sixteen, seventeen and eighteen have crept out from the Jaysmith Hit Factory:
16. Titanic
17. Waiting For The Sandman
18. If We'd Never Met
We road-tested Sandman at our second trip to Myles Of Beans last Thursday, but more satisfyingly, Sarah's performance of Too Little, a fierce feminist rebuttal of a man's attempts to get back in with his girlfriend, got positive whoops of delight from the girls in the crowd. Very satisfying!
Producing songs carries a heavy ancillary cost, most of which is, I'm ashamed to say, borne by Sarah. Usually my work is pretty much done once we're settled on the lyrics, although I kibitz the music a bit, and obviously if I have to sing it then I have to sing it. I also do the mix. But Sarah has to compose the piano accompaniment (which she does superlatively, considering how she claims to hate it), play it into Reason, fix it up as necessary, sing it if it's a female vocal, and then produce the sheet music in Finale, which often means playing it again, this time to a click track, and then more fixups. It's a lot of work and we've been forging ahead so fast with compositions and performance that the backlog has almost exhausted her. However, as of tonight we have sheet music for everything except the two newest songs and a couple of the old ones. Amongst other things, this means we can send them to Alexis :)
Thinking about it, that may be all on the music front for now. Which means I can tell you some other stuff.
Sarah has been on the radio! She was taking acting classes on Monday and Wednesday nights in deepest darkest South Granville, and at the end of the course, the organiser, the excellently-named Jay Hamburger, recruited the entire class to assist in his 'drama hour' which goes out on co-op radio (essentially, public access) every week. So Sarah played one of the tailors in George Orwell's adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes, and also wrote a three-minute scene for two of the other actors to take on. So she's an actress and a playwright! Boom!
We finally got around to eating at the pasta place on Davie which so intrigued us last September. It looks like a snazzy hotel and indeed the interior is reasonably decadent, but after some confusion (caused by a deaf panda whose name shall remain mine) we got seats on the lawn and proceeded to scoff some very nice food. I had meatballs and spaghetti in meat sauce, couldn't finish it, got it boxed up, and finished it just now. Delicious. Straight back there for more next week. It's got some way to go before it displaces Sarah's favourite, the Kalypso greek restaurant - who amongst you would have thought that Sarah Elizabeth Jaysmith would be seen eating hummus? - but it has a chance of dragging us away now and then.
For anyone we haven't told: we've booked our flights back to the UK for mid-September. Sarah is coming over on September 8th to Gatwick and then immediately flying on to Ireland to see everyone there. (Well, I say everyone, I mean a subset of everyone she knows, she's only got a week.) She then flies back to Gatwick and meets me, inbound, on the 15th. We spend that week in England, and fly back to Canada on the 23rd. No doubt we will be exhausted, but at least we'll have seen you all, and, most importantly, we'll have given you our CDs ;-)
Culture report: we went to see Julius Caesar as part of the Bard On The Beach festival in Kits. It was good, with the drawbacks of a small cast leading to numerous cases of "wasn't he called something else earlier? Oh, it's a different character..." and the collective Jaysmith decision that this is not an ambiguous play about whether Brutus and Cassius were right, it's a tragedy about Brutus and Cassius being wrong. (For those who don't know the story: Cassius is the sledge.)
Non-culture report: we finally bought a television. And lumped it back from Futureshop to here at great personal physical cost to Sarah! We finally caved in and bought insurance for an electrical good, too. I was extremely tumpy about this in the shop, but the hell with it. It looks good and is very flat. And it's meant we've finally started watching series three of Doctor Who.
Culture report again: we went to see Bobby McFerrin Friday before last, with some of High Spirits. Now this was interesting. I thought I liked Bobby McFerrin. And some of you will know I banged on about his Circlesongs album when I was in Littlehampton. Which is fair enough, because it's a work of genius. However, when eagerly wanting to book tickets for the show, I'd neglected to recall that when I've listened to the other two albums I own by him, I've felt kind of overloaded... and in fact, bored. His vocal technique is remarkable, but it don't half get samey after a while unless he has other people involved. And sure enough, while his interactions with the audience and his scratch choir and dance partners were amusing, entertaining, and sometimes breathtaking... every time he returned to the stage alone, I got bored again. Oh well.
Finally, for those interested in rather late news about small babies: Sarah is once again an aunt, thanks to Rebecca emitting her second child in mid-June. His name is Hugh Thomas Canning, and rest assured, if I have any say in it, his first words will include 'panda'.
They might be giants, baby. Much love, Gil & Sarah.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
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