wordblog

Today I found this:

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:23:25 +0100

Has it really been so long? So long since I had anything to say, to pass on, to contribute? Sadly, thus is so. Perhaps I might might kick start my sorry ass with these fine words I encountered just a few moments ago:

Dr. King once said:

"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve from all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is LOVE."

All you need is love.

Imagine.

How big is it?

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:46:51 +0100

So, just how big is the net?

Lots. Big. Bigger than you thought and bigger than anything.

Of course we knew that. Everyone knows that. I knew that. I work in the ad game, in media, in the whole culture. I know this stuff and I've been telling my clients about this for years. It made sense, it was true, it's easily backed up - I wasn't lying. But. And there's always a but; but, I didn't really, not really, truly, wholly understand just how big, how powerful,how outrageous the net is.

There's not one of us, not one, that hasn't triumphed the net. I found this, I learned that, I laughed at him, I cried for her... it's all available, it's all out there waiting for us to find.

I stumbled upon Synthasite, and I have trumpeted Synthasite before. They get it, it's easy, it works.

How does it work? Simple.

They have a good idea, a great product, they believe in what they're doing and they support those that get it too.

I was lucky enough to get some support from Synthasite. They liked what I did with Wordnoise.com, I was lucky enough to be one of the chosen, er, picked - selected. Wordnoise was one of five finalists in a recent contest for the 'Best of Synthasite'. Cool, but I didn't win. I was a runner up. But; and what'd I tell you about but? But, while the masses were looking and deciding and voting, the hits on the Wordnoise site went through the roof! After that, things tapered off and although hits were higher, they weren't like when I was in the running. I expected that, and was thrilled by the brief attention my nomination garnered. And then.

And then Synthasite selected my site as a site that utilized the opportunities they provided with their on line tools, looked OK and showed off what they had to offer. They put a link on their homepage. Guess what? The hits went through the roof again!

It's not Wordnoise, honest, I know that. My business is targeted to a smaller audience. Voice work, audio, recording, creative, radio spots, TV spots... a very small part of what everyone out there needs. But those 'S' guys, they're talking to lots of people. Hell, anyone who wants to build a free web site! People like me, and about a million others. Maybe two million, maybe a billion! Lots more!

Then they chose my site to show off what their service can do. The spin off? Tons of visits. Tons. Tons and tons. Sure most people don't need cleaver copy, or great voices, or want to read about what I think. Some though do, just a few for sure, but some do, or so the stats would suggest!

People from South Africa, and Finland, and all over the States and Britain and Argentina and Japan and everywhere. All over, everywhere, the whole planet!, 'cause that's how big the net is. That's how far it goes. That's who the net talks to. Everyone, everywhere.

The net is big. Way bigger than we all think. Sure there are corporations, and companies and planets that know how big this thing is, but for most of us it's at best an accepted concept. We believe the net is big because like me, we 'knew' it was big. Everyone said it was. It must be. Well, it is big, it is powerful, there are lots of people looking, and deciding, and thinking, and changing things. The way we work, the way we act, the way we think. Ask Obama.

We are those people. We just don't know it yet.

wordnoise@live.com

Friends, the Gift That Keeps on Giving

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 23:16:19 +0100

This morning, Christmas eve morning, I received this lovely note from my friend Candace. She's one of the voices that I really like to work with. She's versatile, funny, takes direction well, works hard when she's in the booth and as a voice over artist, I always know that my clients will be thrilled with the end results.

So on to this e--mail I received, and one that I believe in.

Season's Greetings Everyone!

I wanted to wish everyone the best of the holiday season and as we say in my family, Happy Christmas. We all know that Christmas is the season of giving and most of us get caught up in shopping, buying and giving. The stress of spending and whether we have given enough or bought the right thing looms over us. We have created a hierarchy in our giving/receiving relationships, a pecking order that somehow leaves the “receiver” with a lesser status than the “giver”. That “receiving” forces you to give up control and in order to regain your power, you must reciprocate. We are hard-wired to give and have been taught all our lives that giving is better, so receiving has taken an embarrassed back-seat in our social networks. Receiving makes us feel guilty, that perhaps we aren’t worthy of what we get, or that we have to earn what we’re given. I pooh-pooh this! Embrace receiving with grace and gratitude and create strong connections between giver and receiver. Be open to the gifts you receive; the tangible things but also the intangible: gifts of life, love and each other. Take a moment this season to believe that you are worthy of all you receive.

Lots of Christmas kisses and love all year round!

Candace

Nice huh? Yeah, I think so too.
Thanks Candace, and a Merry Christmas to you too!

rob
wordnoise@live.com

Stand By Me

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:23:24 +0100

My friend Neil is a gifted guitarist, and, uhmmm... well; not much of a singer. Not that a silly thing like that would ever deter him, he sings like he wants to and to Hell with you if you don't like it. I admire him for that. He also says the single most liberating experience in becoming someone who can sing regardless of what anyone might think of one's singing ability is busking - simply standing on the street, instrument in hand and singing for passers by who might like what they hear and drop a few coins in the open instrument case. I always, almost without fail, throw a few coins into the open case of hard working buskers. In my book anyone that will stand up and try when it comes to music gets my vote, and my change.

Yesterday, I had a video link forwarded to me that deserves our pocket change. The video was of a bunch of street musicians singing and playing the Sam Cooke tune, "Stand By Me'. A great song, certainly a standard by now, and one of those tunes with a lyric that can find a home in most anyone's life. This version of the tune though was different. This version was put together by Mark Johnson, a filmmaker. Mark's brilliance though is that he was once inspired to do something with an emotion. For him, as he tells it, it all began with the hustle of New York City and two Buddhist Monks singing on the street and captivating both Mark and a lot of passers by. That spark followed Mark through the years, and he eventually found his muse. He would try to bring us all a little closer through music and film. Music from and by musicians from here and there and everywhere on our planet. All of them connecting and sharin' and groovin' and jammin' and bein' free with music.

Mark has succeeded, in fact he has more than succeeded. His web site, 'Playing For Change' ( www.playingforchange.com ) is a culmination of work that began in 1999 and now there's a docu/movie, a foundation, a goal and an audience. Bravo Mark! Good on you and all the others that believe and think and know and feel that music is our most powerful tool in creating a better tomorrow.

Don't believe me? Just try not to feel better about yourself, your neighbor and even our planet as you groove to this: http://www.playingforchange.com/pop.html

There's lots of information about 'Playing For Change' on the site, some mutually responsible affiliates, some background about the people and some. quite literally, world class music.

I bet Sam would stand by this one!

wordnoise@live.com

The Little Engine that Could

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:23:59 +0100

When I was little, very little, I really did have the storybook about the ‘Little Engine that Could’. There was a record too, a 45, it was yellow, called ‘Little by Little' - the song was about taking on a challenge and having the stuff to at least try something. Then there was a train set that my parents surprised the Hell out of me with as a Christmas present one year… and my Dad hadn’t gone to the local toy store and picked out one of those boring boxed sets, he’d gone to the trouble of finding a fellow who was getting out of the HO train set hobby and I was lucky enough to be the benefit of a big box of track and cars and engines and stuff! That was one of my favorite Christmas's ever!

One of those train engines, my favorite, was a little black engine that was modeled after the boxcar shuttles that used to work in the railway holding yards. It was a much smaller engine in comparison to all the others, and I fondly remember trying to get it to pull as many railway boxcars and tankers and flatbeds as I had available. Eventually, ‘Joey’ couldn’t pull any more, but the ‘test’ was always fun.

So the concept of ‘trying’ was instilled in me at an early age, and it would seem that it exists still. When radio threw me out all those years ago (not to worry, radio throws everyone out!) I started Wordnoise. Through good and bad times, easier and tougher, a tiny bit richer and way too poor, I have at least tried to make it grow and prosper and stay alive.

Then I met Synthasite. It was a Stumble Upon find. This was about mid November or so, and Synthasite as I met them, was blogging about “The Best of Synthasite” and offering a prize, and exposure if the site you built (or had built) was selected as one of the best. Now you have to recall that I had just discovered Synthasite, so I registered and started building. I probably put about 25, maybe 30 hours into building www.wordnoise.com. I even blogged the experience in my first post on this Wordblog. I had become a fan, and remain one – these guys are the future of software that builds things - docs, spreadsheets, presentations, web pages – this is what we’ll all be doing in a very short while. Yup a fan - especially today!

Near the end of November, just a few days before the “Best of Synthasite” contest was closing, I decided – “What the Hell” and boldly entered my site in the contest. I had nothing to loose, liked what I’d put out there, and thought that I’d incorporated a lot of the components that the judges might decide were worthwhile. I didn’t expect anything from this. I was pretty sure that all kinds of people, lots and lots of people, 1000's would enter and I’d be lost in the shuffle, but like I said, no harm in trying.

Yesterday I got a piece of e-mail from Synthasite informing me that the finalists had been chosen and giving me a link to the accompanying page on their blog site. At exactly the same time, I had another piece of e-mail from Steve Schwartz, a name I didn’t recognize. His header read: About your website, and that definitely got my attention! I’d get back to the Synthasite e-mail in a minute or two.

Steve's note said that he’d seen my site (and something else, but to that in a moment) but wanted to let me know that I had missed a repeated word in my copy. What!?!? But he was right; I had missed a repeated word. Fortunately the tools and flexibility of Synthasite allowed me to effortlessly correct the error, and three minutes later, I’d updated my site with the revised copy – try that with a web development service!

Now, on to the ‘something else’. Steve had also said, ”…I have just seen you listed on ‘The Best of Synthasite’ – WHAT?! Me?! Wordnoise?!

I was back to their e-mail in a flash, clicked on the link, clicked on the business link and there it was, www.wordnoise.com listed as one of the five finalists in the business category! How swell is that! How outrageously great is that? How personally rewarding! I felt like Sally Fields at the Oscars! “You like me, you really like me!“

So thanks to Synthasite for making it possible for people to do something they've always wanted to be able to do, but didn’t have the tools, and thanks Mom and Dad for teaching me that it's alright to try.

I wonder if it was the book, the record, or the little engine that could?

wordnoise@live.com

Guitar Hero?

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:24:30 +0100

I am a recording engineer, I have always made my living rotating knobs, pushing faders and moving microphones. Long ago, in my radio days, I was the Production Manager of a major market station. These guys had money, times were good and I had a supportive Chief Engineer ( the solder kind of engineer ) who let me have real and meaningful input into the design of our production facilities. Thanks Jack!

We were moving from an ancient facility built in the 50's across the pond to a brand new purpose built building. Three radio stations, three control rooms, a dedicated copy department of five, edit suites, a massive news room and best of all two huge multi-track production rooms. For a radio guy these rooms were magical. I had space, brand new and delicious gear, great mics, and spectacular talent to work with! Like I said, a dream studio.

On the wall above one of the custom made, oak trimmed racks of outboard gear I hung a piece of poster art. Properly mounted and framed - it looked nice. It showed a black and white photo of glossy black grand piano, mics set and ready at the centre of a very large recording studio. A big, beautiful room to record in. I can only imagine how wonderful that piano must have sounded in that gorgeous space.

The caption at the bottom of the photo read: "They say it takes 15 years to learn to play the piano well, I heard that twenty years ago."

I still can't play the piano and that saddens me.

This past weekend I was visiting my nephews and a recent birthday had brought a complete 'Guitar Hero' rig into the family room. Guitar, drums, bass guitar, even a mic! The kids were fully into it, played with the toy almost non-stop throughout my visit. Natually I had to see the thing in action, and dutifully sat and watched the kids and their friends work through dozens of one time hits and standards. They loved it.

While I watched though, I couldn't help but feel a little sad by the experience. You see with Guitar Hero, and I say this for the ancient, old, and completly out of touch among us - a player hears the music, and attempts to 'play' along with the music by pressing color-coded keys on the instrument as a guide track scrolls across the bottom of the screen. So, if the music has a drum track that plays snare, tom, tom, the player should be hitting green, blue, blue on the drum kit. Same with bass, same with guitar. Upon completion of the song, your score is shown on screen - this is judged by the players percentage of accurate 'hits' on the appropraite keys with what was shown on the screen skroll as the song played. You can also be booed off the stage if you lack the skill to press the right coloured buttons in the right order at the right time.

The kids, as I suggested, loved it. Not me though. For me, the problem with Guitar Hero isn't that it's not fun, the kids couldn't put it down! It's that there's no connection between playing the game and playing a real instrument. Sure, to get good at GH probably takes some time, some dexterity, some eye to hand skills, but even after you've become a master, a true rock God, you wouldn't be able to play a single note on a real guitar. Real guitars are hard to play. They're complicated and there's a ton of stuff to learn. You have to learn to read music, you have to tune it, you have to practice, learn technique and timing. Tons of stuff, and even with all those tools well in place, you still may not be much of a guitarist 'cause there's that thing inside, that gift that some have, that need to play, and the ability to translate that need into something organic and whole.

Some would say lighten up, that Guitar Hero is just a game, no harm done. I'd say though that in the long run Guitar Hero doesn't do our kids any favours, 'cause what happens when those kids do decide they want to play the bass or the drums or a piano? There's way more notes than the four colours of GH, there's way more strings, skins, there's keys everywhere. It'll be hard. Really hard. Playing GH, even if you play the game well, get perfect scores every time, will never teach you a damn thing about what making music is all about! Learning to play a real instrument isn't a game, there is no high score, no percentage of accuracy, the only similarity to GH is that even after years of practice and diligence you can still be booed off the stage.

In my favorite musical of all time, The Music Man, Professor Howard Hill scams the kids and their parents with solid silver things, and Marianne the Librarian was right, there is no such thing as 'the Think Method'. I guess my question has to be: Is Professor Harold Hill now working for the GH people? 'cause music isn't a game, it's frustrating, and demanding and difficult and as I read all those years ago, it'll take fifteen years to learn to play the piano well - I heard that twenty-five years ago.

wordnoise@live.com

Sometimes we are apart

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:25:04 +0100

This evening I was having a conversation with a man who had a dog and I happened upon an ad by the Sierra Club. It showed three men in casual attire standing outside. Two of the men were younger, while the third, the man in the middle, was older. There was a calculated ruggedness to the men - these were men that might, when asked, be capable of doing something good, something positive. Their attire was casual, ready, easy. Their expressions compassionate, strong, kind.

The ad was within the pages of 'Mens Journal', ( interestingly my spell checker says that both ways of composing mens / men's is wrong! ) a popular 7-Eleven top row magazine, capable of speaking to millions of men, and certainly influential in younger men's lives. The ad space was a full page, something that in it's simple being signifies commitment, a genuine purpose and money. Quite a bit of money - these pages don't come cheap. Lots of people were consulted about this expense, the magazine, the audience, the copy, the font, the fashion, the models... er, the characters... everything was discussed - I promise, everything. Surprisingly, the last thing that anyone probably talked about was how much the ad would cost!

But, ( and there's always a but... ) but, the thing that struck me, that held me, that made me slow everything down to that place where I have no choice but to concentrate on this single message, this one single solitary thing, was the headline. It read: " My sons and I are often apart these days, but together we are taking on global warming." Nice. Complete. Whole. But the real coup, the real mark of excellence, was that the writer - and appropriate praise to him, or her! - made me stop and read the ad.

Certainly I saw that the ad was for Sierra Club, and I got the look of the ad, I understood the audience, but what pulled me in, was emotion.... and not the 'Hey, let's save the fucking earth!' kind of emotion, that's too easy, nothing more than sub-text. No, it was the emotional connection between me, a father, and my sons. I have son's and we connect deeply sometimes, but we too are apart and that's the brilliance. That's the copy that sticks. That's the kind of simple, to the point writing that says; pay attention. Not to the picture, not to the logo, those are only support to the emotional link between fathers and sons and as these advertisers intended, between me, the reader, and a whole mess of people that have an idea to help our planet. Brilliant.

So, there I am, having my discussion, looking at this ad and.... well, don't you see? They won. That's the goal. That's the point. That's what they had hoped might happen! I stopped and read the ad! Their ad. The ad they made, the ad that cost all that dough! The message they had hoped I would read. The message they hoped that a whole busload of guys ( and some gals - it's a demo thing ) would read and somehow, some way might connect with. That's the ad game, and only a few of us get it. These guys, the guys that put this together get it. In spades.

Good on you fellows of this ad, good on you. That's how it' done.

www.sierraclub.org

...and oh, by the way, my sons and I are often apart these days, but....

wordnoise@live.com

Abbey Road

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:25:54 +0100

A few years ago digital recording giant Digidesign was offering an 8-track version of Pro Tools ( a multi-track recording software platform ) as a workable demo - all for free! My guess is that it was probably downloaded by 700 billion musicians world-wide. This was long before Digidesign decided that they would fall in with Avid, and loose their edge. At the same time there was a forum related to this free down load, and it happened that my friend Martin was reading this very same forum and noticed a comment from a young musician who had decided that 8 tracks simply wasn't enough - "What am I to do with a lousy 8 tracks!" he complained. Martin, in a sudden and an altogether too infrequent stroke of brilliance responded; "How 'bout Sgt. Peppers - Twice?" Hopefully the kid saw the comment and stopped his belly-aching.

Time passes, as it tends to, and about a week ago my buddy Dennis was commenting on a BBC special about Paul McCartney recording at Abbey Road and within the doc Paul shows his audience how multi-track recording works. He strums a guitar and records a little ditty, hits stop and hits rewind. But since he's been around those big old ( wonderful ) analog machines for so long he instinctively reaches out and 'helps' the machine get up to rewind speed with his fingers - we all did that, it helped.

Which leads me to something I stumbled upon today: http://www.sonomawireworks.com/

Sonoma is offering a little app. that works on your i-phone that turns the beast into a four-track recorder. How cool is that?

So now we have this - a four track studio on an i-phone...
My question: What the Hell are we supposed to do with a lousy 4 tracks?!?

Improv Everywhere!!!

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:20:05 +0100

I stumbled upon this site a while back and ever since The Great and Powerful Harvey Ostroff introduced me to improv ( that'd be about 1970 or so.... ) I've kept my eye on what was being done...
These guys have it - what fun!
Check 'em out at: http://improveverywhere.com/

If I can build one....

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:08:53 +0100

Then surely you can too. This is the link to Synthasite. Am online web page building / hosting / domain name reseller that has it pretty well figured out. Quick, easy and you're in charge! My friend Doreen Copeland a writer by profession, built a Synthasite in about a day, and although she's one of the nicest and kindest women on the planet, she's not an HTML wiz! But there she is - out there on the net in a day for free!!! That's gotta be good news!
Here's the Synthasite address: http://www.synthasite.com/
...and here's Doreen's page if you'd care to take a look: http://www.doreencopeland.synthasite.com/index.php