If you’ve been wondering how the HNiC theme has been coming along, well, you’re listening to the right podcast, because I’ll tell you. We’ve also got some new gear to talk about and some new drinks to drink. But first, a few words on the software I use to put this show together.

I’ve been a fan of the work of Dr Gerhardt Lengeling for close to 20 years now. I’ve had macs for as long as I’ve been able to afford a computer, but before that I had an Atari 1040 ST, which I used almost solely for music. The software I was using at the time was called Notator, and the company that made it was C-Lab. Eventually Lengeling left C-Lab to start a company called E-magic, which continued to produce what then became Notator Logic, and then simply Logic. And of course Apple eventually bought Logic.

At first this buyout felt like when two of your good friends meet and hit it off. But then Apple killed one of my favourite Emagic applications, the awesome nearly-universal sound editor and librarian SoundDiver – for no good reason that I can imagine other than Apple doesn’t make hardware synthesizers, and therefore doesn’t feel the need to support an application devoted to their care and feeding. And because Apple is the black hole of information that we know it to be, anyone inquiring about SoundDiver on the Apple site found themselves at a page which was only marginally more expository than your average 404 message.

And why would you need hardware synths anyway? Look what Apple does for you – they bundle all the previously a la carte soft synths, samplers, drum machines and emulators into Logic Pro, so you don’t need hardware synths after all. You just need a faster Mac to run all these processor-hungry instruments. I knew what they were doing to me, because I was watching, and listening, to them do it. But I like the gear. So not long after I upgraded to Logic Pro, I bought a dual 2 gig powermac for my studio. I still have it, and it has suited me just fine, with processor headroom to spare, for over two years. Considering the fact that I also have a UAD-1 plugin board for boutique-style processing, there’s absolutely no reason I should need to upgrade in the near future. Unless of course I upgrade to Logic Studio, which I’m going to do eventually. Aren’t I.

Okay listen. Listen. Here is a virtual piano, recorded from an Audio Unit virtual instrument in Logic 7, which I so cleverly left on my drive. Ha-HAH.

And here’s one from the instrument library in Logic 8.

If most of you say you prefer the Logic 8 version I won’t fault you for it, because the first one comes out dry, the way God intended, and the second comes with multiband channel EQ and a nice convolution reverb straight out of the box. And if you leave all that stuff on every virtual instrument you load in, two things are going to happen: you’re going to end up with a really muddy mix, and you’re going to max out your processors – unless you have a dual quadcore or something like that, with virtually limitless processing power, the kind of supercomputing capacity that would be right at home at CERN, but which is perhaps overkill in the basement studio.

I don’t want to sound like I’m taking sides in an Apple-versus-anyone-else debate. I’m not going to stop using Macs. I’ve got three right here in this room with me. But make no mistake, the polished hucksterism of Steve Jobs and the blinding whiteness of his irresistible gadgets belies a brand of radical opacity that makes the competition’s website seem like two-for-one biscotti night at the knit-and-sip.

Now on to our ongoing hockey night in Canada theme song entry. I’ve pieced together some of the sketches you heard last time into a single compositional entity:

And that’s how it sounds on a digitally reconstituted piano. You’ll notice the stacked fourths motif was drastically altered from its previous state. After repeated listenings I couldn’t distinguish it in my head from the old theme for the channel seven eyewitness news with Irv Weinstein, so I’ve replaced it with something that has a more definite harmonic resolution. At the moment it just resolves back into the intro, which I think is a bit of a letdown. I hope to add a new melodic section in there for a few bars before I send this one in.

I’ve also mocked this one up with a synthetic horn section, and thrown in some marching percussion to make it a little more sporty – so now it sounds a bit like half time at your high school football game.

See what I mean about the recap of the intro? Doesn’t really add anything, does it. I’ve been advised by friends that the CBC isn’t going to award $100,000 to anything that isn’t ready to air, so I’ll probably end up in a studio with real live musicians before the end of August. Oh well, you have to spend money to make money I suppose.

I did promise to say something about the Flock browser last time, and if you like distracting yourself with a browser that’s more distracting than the internet is all on its own, you owe it to yourself to download the mozilla-based Flock browser. This application is a real boon to anyone with a flickr account, as it creates an automatic carousel-type display of thumbnails from one of your flickr friends on demand. In fact, it provides you with this very slick media thumbnail view for a number of media sources including YouTube.

I was pretty surprised at not only how many social networking-type sites Flock supported, but also at how many I was subscribed to. When I started up, I was prompted for log-in information to facebook, flickr, twitter, youtube, delicious, livejournal, and my own wordpress installation. I actually run four wordpress installations, and can honestly say the wordpress widget is the least useful of the lot – the blog-posting utility that flock provides is not nearly as robust as the current wordpress dashboard. But I suppose it would have seemed weak to include a wordpress login without at least a gesture toward some kind of utility.

The Flock browser is nothing if not ambitious, and it kind of falls down when it comes to RSS aggregation. I was happy to find that it imported the opml document that I exported from NetNewsWire with folders intact. But it was quite slow in pulling this document in, and two out of three attempts seemed to stall, leading to a lot of deleting and re-importing. Flock’s refreshing schedule is a mystery to me, and it could benefit from a big “refresh” button that impatient folks like me could pound on once in a while, not just for RSS but for status on all my accounts.

I had a bit of an on-again off-again relationship with Flock due to that issue, but the relationship is definitely on at this point – though I’m allowed to see other applications. Flock is now the default browser on all three of my computers, but I’m hanging on to NewNewsWire, which I believe to be the fines RSS aggregator for the Mac. But if the makers of the Flock browser address the speed issues in the next release I may reconsider. On my wish list for Flock is some kind of online synchronization, akin to what NewsGator does for RSS, and ideally with as little fuss and in as little time. And after installing Flock on three separate machines, I was already hoping that version 2.0 would include extending synchronization to encompass the status of my various accounts, so that a notification I’ve responded to in a particular service doesn’t show up as [Edit: unread] when I fire up my browser on another machine. Overall I’d give Flock a seven out of ten, and they could easily gain another star when version 2 is released. Check it out.

And now it’s time to find out the answer to that burning question, “What were we drinking?” Well, I have to be honest with you, we were drinking a lot of Rosés, because it’s summer. When your food is suggesting a pairing with something big and chewy like a cab sauvignon, merlot, or shiraz, but you just don’t think that’s going to suit the above 25-degree heat, it’s good to know that there are a pantload of decent rosés around. Firestick is a vibrant ruby rosé made by Australian label Poole’s Rock from Shiraz grapes, and in spite of the “my first photography contest” lightning bolt image on the label this one is quite tasty, with a not quite bone-dry level of sweetness tempering sour fruit notes. This one pairs well with grilled red meat and is well-worth the $16.85 the LCBO is asking for it. We’re also growing quite attached to the lighter and slightly sweeter Pink Pinot Grigio offering from Italian house wine favourite Folonari, available in the regular stock section of even moderately well-appointed liquor stores in Toronto for around twelve dollars.

But because there’s not much to say about how you can fix yourself a glass of Rosé, I’ll throw in the recipe for our house favourite, the Whisky Collins. Some years ago I attended a Johnny Walker-sponsored tasting event which had an open bar serving nothing but drinks that contained Johnny Red. I opted for what was sold as a Whisky Sour, and have been fond of them ever since. Unfortunately I can only really enjoy them at home for two reasons: 1) I’ve come up with my own recipe that I prefer above all others that I’ve tasted; and b) what they were serving that night was in fact not a Whisky Sour at all, it was a Whisky Collins.

There are really only two significant characteristics that distinguish the Whisky Sour from the Whisky Collins. The Whisky Sour doesn’t contain a carbonated mix, and the Collins does. More importantly, the Whisky Sour appears on the International Bartenders Association list of cocktails and the Whisky Collins does not. So you can order a whisky sour and if your bartender doesn’t know how to make it, he or she will apologise and look up the recipe. If you ask for a Whisky Collins, your reward could be a blank stare and a bad reputation.

In the face of those odds, my best advice is for you to stay home and make one for yourself. You’ll need some whisky of course. My preference is a scotch blend, like Johnny red, but I suppose you could use Rye whisky, if that’s all you have, or if you’re trying to make some kind of point. You’ll also need half a lemon, some simple syrup, some ice, and some fizzy water. So. Juice your lemon half, splash in some simple syrup to taste, add one and a half to two ounces of scotch, shake with ice, and if you want to be really classy, strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. I suppose you could insist on a collins glass, but honestly, who has collins glasses. What you have in your glass at this point is a Whisky Sour, until you top it up with your favourite soda (we use the PC knock-off of Perrier here), at which point you have a Whisky Collins. Everybody happy now? I should think so.

I grew up in a smallish city of 50,000 and we had one music store that covered keyboard items in a halfway respectable fashion - the rest were guitar stores, with reams of guitars hanging from the rafters, and piano stores with plenty of boxy-sounding apartment-sized acoustics and racks full of poorly-transcribed PVG arrangements of FM-radio favourites. Musicland, as it was called (I don't know if it's still around) didn't have all the cool gear that you could get in Toronto, but it did have some interesting bits and pieces. One of them was was the Korg VC-10 vocoder. Part of me wishes I could tell you what the asking price was, but part of me doesn't really want to know — because my gainfully-employed present-day self would just become angry with my shiftless teenage self for not scraping a few hundred dollars together to purchase one.

A vocoder takes harmonic slices of an input sound, and applies the various envelopes of those slices to a carrier sound. Typically, the input sound – also called the modulator – is a voice, and the carrier sound is a synth pad. It’s the audio equivalent of making a meatloaf in the shape of a pork chop, in that the result is still undeniably meatloaf, but you also get a mental impression of a pork chop. The output sound is a very characteristic robotic sound, and this meant that vocoders popped up wherever anyone wanted to get across the idea of robots talking, whether that was the original Battlestar Galactica cylon voice or Kraftwerk’s classic “We are the Robots”.

There is a bit of confusion when it comes to identifying vocoders in pop music. A particular use (or mis-use, many would say) of the Autotune plugin, whose purpose on this planet is to correct wayward pitches in an otherwise useful vocal track, is often misconstrued as a vocoder. But if you listen to the two side-by-side, you’ll never mistake one for another. Allow me to demonstrate:
Vocoder. Autotune. Vocoder. Autotune. Get it?

Now we’ll move on to none of the above: the Yamaha PLG-100 VH vocal harmony board. This plugin is compatible with a number of Yamaha instruments. But we’re going to be using the Motif ES7, because I have one.

The PLG series of plugin boards are discreet synthesizer engines that you can add to your Yamaha keyboard – unlike typical voice cards they do more than just add waveforms or patches. They add polyphony and synthesis models that the original keyboard is not capable of producing.

The PLG100-VH has more in common with a vocal harmonizer than with a vocoder. Unlike a typical vocoder, you can’t just use anything as a carrier, you’re limited to three notes. This limitation tips you off to the possibility that the card is using its built-in voices to simulate a vocoder effect. If you’ve heard Kraftwerk’s TransEurope Express then you know what it sounds like to just mash your forearm down on a vocoder’s carrier keyboard. Well, none of that shenanigans with the PLG100-VH.

This is the vocoder effect that simulates a traditional vocoder sound.

This is a harmonizer effect that adds three voices above the note that I’m singing, based on an analysis of the chord that I’m playing on the keyboard.

This is supposed to sound like Barry White.

And that’s about all we have time for today. If you have any comments or questions about today’s content, you can post in the comments section of Episode Two at SteveCastellano.com. For transcripts, visit Steveoftheweb.com slash podcast. Thanks for tuning in.

Hello and welcome to the Steve of the Web podcast. It's Monday, July 7th, 2008, and I'm Steve.

I'd like to thank you for downloading the inaugural episode of the Steve of the Web podcast. It would be nice for me to imagine that you're right here listening while I record this, but it's more likely that it's taken 57 episodes for my listenership to pass the two dozen mark, and one of you has finally become overwhelmed with curiosity and gone digging through the archives to find out what I sounded like when I started out.

Well I sounded something like this.

I don't have a reputation as a rabid hockey fan, but being Canadian I do understand the game on some kind of weird genetic level. I've never played it, though I may have played some kind of floor- or street-hockey variant in a gymnasium at some point, under pain of expulsion or failing grades or humiliation. I've tried to block most of those high school memories out, with fair to middling degrees of success. For tips on how to block out memories, stay tuned for the "what were we drinking" segment which will be up a little later, and we'll discuss how to abuse your brain with some widely-available brazilian cachaça.

But any Canadian, hockey fan or not, would have to have been living in a yurt for the past month to not be aware that the iconic Hockey Night In Canada theme is no longer the iconic Hockey Night in Canada theme. After 40 years, the Canadian Broadcasting Company failed entirely to come to a licensing agreement with the composer, Dolores Clayman, and her publishing company, the imaginatively named Copyright Music. This failure was due in part to an asking price of somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million dollars. The CBC is purported to have offered in the neighbourhood of $1 million to buy the rights to the theme in perpetuity, which Copyright Music claimed would barely cover their legal fees. If you know how I feel about corporate lawyers, you can imagine how high that kind of justification flies over here. $1 million bucks is pretty steep for a couple extortionist phone calls. But then again, the price of extortion is always going up.

On the other hand, as a composer I'm happy with whatever makes Dolores happy, and the best indicator of what the value of a thing is is what someone will pay for it. And CTV, ever anxious to steal the CBC's lunch, particularly in the realm of sports broadcasting, swooped in to purchase the rights for an undisclosed but easily estimated sum as soon as word hit the street that negotiations had fallen through — ostensibly out of spite, as they don't have the rights to broadcast the program with which the theme will forever be associated. I believe they are planning to write lyrics for it, consisting of the phrase "neener neener neener" over and over again.

I'm not planning to pad this podcast with two-week-old news stories, of course. I have had several people ask me if I am planning to submit an entry into the CBC's recently announced Hockey Night In Canada theme-writing contest. My initial response was a) who would want to be known as the composer of the replacement theme, and 2) not counting Kiwanis festival competitions in which there were never more than two competitors I have never won a composition or songwriting contest, so I can easily come up with more entertaining ways to waste my own time.

But those conversations must have preyed upon my unconscious, because one morning I heard myself humming something new in the shower, and it sounded kind of like this:

and I knew immediately that it was part of my Hockey Night In Canada theme song entry. It soon had a myxolidian melodic motif:

and a stacked-fourths fanfare-style break in compound meter:

and eventually a bridge, or what you might call a trio section if you were using 19th century terminology, something more melodic in three:

So while that's going to be a bit of a mixed bag with all the metric changes — for you non-musicians, it's going to be tough to square-dance to — if you hear it with big drums and low brass (i hope to have a sample of that kind of treatment whipped up by the next podcast episode), you can easily end up with a piece that has the same structure as Dolores' theme. A rhythmic ground that breaks for fanfare-type melodic phrases, performed by a brass choir with a big drum kit. The same song, if you will, only with different notes. So in spite of the time changes, you could essentially slip it in before any sports or news program and it wouldn't seem too terribly out of place:

Anyway, I'll mess around with that some more and let you hear how it's going next time I talk to you.

—–

What you're listening to now is a recording of a real-time performance on the Sequential SixTrak. The SixTrak is one of the earliest examples of a multitimbral analogue synthesizer, which means it is capable of playing more than one different sound simultaneously. You could, for example, play a bass sound and a lead sound and a comping sound via MIDI — it was also one of the first MIDI synths, as Sequential's founder, Dave Smith was one of the fathers of the MIDI protocol — or by using the onboard loop sequencer, which you're hearing used in this example.

You could also program six different mono sounds and then stack them together, for one extremely complex lead sound.

The SixTrak was an entry level synth and priced accordingly. A few corners were cut in order to reach this goal. For example, it uses only one oscillator per voice, which means that if you are using it as a mono-timbral six-voice polyphonic synth it might sound a little thin — it doesn't even feature an on-board chorus such as those favoured by Roland around the same era. And the lack of real-time control in the way of individual parameter knobs means that it's less tweaker-friendly; in order to program it you select a parameter using the numeric keypad, and then use a single rotary dial to adjust.

Even so, considering the polyphony and patch storage, and the fact that you can pick one of these up for about the same price as a Pro-One monophonic synth (or possibly less), the SixTrak is a good deal for anyone looking to own a piece of analogue synth history without spending a lot of money.

In fact, I'm featuring the SixTrak in this episode's GearPigging segment because this particular unit is up for grabs, complete with original box and manual. If you're interested, please visit steveoftheweb.com/gearforsale (all one word) to find out if it's still available and what the current price is, and then e-mail podcast@steveoftheweb.com with an offer. If you don't hear back, try again with a better offer. There are a few other cool things listed on that page, synths, mixers, odds and ends, so if you're a gear pig please check it out. All items listed are for Toronto, Ontario pickup only.

I hope to start a tradition here of taking every instrument I feature in the GearPigging segment and doing something interesting with it — so now let's hear what the SixTrak sounds like when I run it through the Metasonix Scrotum Smasher.

Oh yeah that's the stuff. And I'd sell my little sister before I sold any of those Metasonix boxes.

Okay, I don't have a little sister. But if my folks were planning on adopting, I'd tell them to get some Metasonix gear instead.

—–

Now it's time for a segment I really like to call "what were we drinking?"

And this week, you may have guessed from my earlier hint, we were drinking lots of caipirinhas. This drink could also be referred to as a caipirahna — because like the tiny and vicious salt-water predator, it's got a bit of a bite on its own, but can be quite dangerous in larger numbers.

This drink is becoming staggeringly popular in North America, with strong emphasis on the staggering. The recipe is fairly simple, and you can find some extremely clear and dogmatic instructions for its construction on YouTube. You need four ingredients: lime, sugar, ice, and cachaça.

Cachaca is made from distilled, fermented cane juice, and so is a cousin of rum, though descriptions of cachaça as an artisanal form of rum are somewhat misleading.

We're using Pitu brand cachaca, for the simple reason that it's the only brand available at our local LCBO - which we refer to colloquially as "Canada's Wonderland". In spite of its stature as the flagship liquor store in the province, it currently only carries one brand of cachaca — and only two are available in the province.

Pitu is easily recognized by the bright red lobster on the black label. Apparently in Brazil one identifies a tasty, refreshing beverage with an oversized sea-bug commonly consumed drenched in butter. I don't know if it's any good, as cachaca goes, but let's be honest, you could put a shot of battery acid in a glass with half a lime and two teaspoons of sugar and it would probably taste ok.

I'm getting ahead of myself. The manner in which you would expect a bartender to fix you a caipirinha is to muddle half a lime, likely cut further into four pieces, with two teaspoons of refined sugar, add two ounces of cachaca, fill the glass with chipped ice, shake briefly, and serve garnished with a lime wedge.

Of course if you're at home making one for yourself, and not being graded, you can take a few shortcuts. A shaker is one more implement to wash, so we're going to try to do this in one glass if we can. But if you're not shaking it, you want to deal with that layer of granulated sugar somehow. And if you're using chipped ice, you either need block ice in your fridge, and who has free space for that? Or else you're bashing ice cubes in a tea towel with a meat tenderizer, and, well, come on. So we're going to suggest a simplified version that gives you the same taste but is a little less pretentious in its preparation instructions — let's call it a Caipirinha Americana.

You've cut your lime in half. Nevermind slicing it into four eighths, that just cuts into valuable drinking time. Turn the lime half pulpy side up and cut down into it three-quarters of the way. Now when you put it pulp-side down in a tumbler you'll get the same results as muddling four eigths — that last cut we made lets you avoid the dreaded toilet plunger effect, where all your lime juice is suction-cupped to the bottom of your glass.

When you shake something with granulated sugar, you end up with a wasteful sugar sludge full of flavour and tasty booze in your shaker instead of your glass. So use simple syrup instead. If you're serious about cocktails you already have some of this in your fridge. Muddle a splash of syrup in the bottom of a tumbler with the lime half, toss in some ice cubes, add two ounces of cachaca, and swirl. If you keep your cachaca in the fridge or freezer, your ice won't melt as fast — but as the original calls for chipped ice, we can figure they expect some melting to cut the booze. And fair enough, without it we've essentially got lime aid with 80 proof alcohol instead of water. So feel free to top up the Americana with soda, seltzer, or your preferred equivalent if you feel it's a little too stiff as is. And of course screw the garnish.

—–

Now that you've got a tasty refreshing cocktail in your hand, you might be looking for some light entertainment. There are plenty of places to go on the net to get a good chuckle, whether your tastes turn to the onion, icanhascheesburger, or somethingawfuldotcom. But I'm seldom happier online than when I find what Farkers would call a "comedy goldmine" in an unexpected place. And today's hidden gem is english.Pravda.Ru.

I grew up thinking that Pravda was the voice of a superpower, as refined and well-researched as I imagined the guardian or the globe or the Times to be. Of course our trust in the journalistic integrity of these institutions has been shaken lately. But if you're the type that found humour in the bat-boy stories of the now-defunct weekly world news, you want to check out the english-language online version of Pravda. It's like the National Enquirer as written by ESL students, made funnier by the fact that it's masquerading as the news source of the largest country (by area) in the world, and a former superpower.

Here are a couple of choice excerpts, each within one or two clicks from the front page:

from "Women who dislike football are stupid"

Statistics says that about 40,000 people died of extensive myocardial infarction during the recent 20 years of broadcasting football matches. It goes without saying that it would be better to let men scream, shout and swear at the top of their lungs. Let them yell how they want to slay a referee or a goalkeeper. A woman may use this opportunity to do something for her own pleasure – shopping, reading, etc. It would be stupid for women to see only the negative side of football.

There is no other sport that can unite so many men in their common passion. The majority of men are indifferent to biathlon, tennis or rhythmic gymnastics. It is because a game of football is a game copy of a war battle. It is like a struggle between two armies on the battlefield. The winner takes it all.

and from "World’s Most Beautiful Girls Live In Stockholm, Sweden"

Traveler’s Digest, a magazine for travelers, has made a list of countries and cities where world’s most beautiful women live.

Sweden with its capital, Stockholm, is the most attractive place to go for male tourists, the authors of the research believe. The abundance of beautiful women in the city gives you an impression as if you have found yourself in a reality show about top models.

Argentina and Buenos Aires takes the second place on the list. Many young Argentinean women look like models because Buenos Aires is inhabited by descendants of Italian emigrants. South American women were distinctive for their exquisite beauty in the past too. The winner of the first-ever beauty pageant held in 1888 in Belgium was a girl from Guadeloupe.

Russia is the home of world’s most beautiful women. [this doesn't feel like an edit at all, does it] “The number of beautiful girls in the Moscow metro may exceed the number of beautiful women in the entire USA,” the magazine wrote.

It is worthy of note that Israeli girls join the army at the age of 18. If a man cheats on an Israeli girl, he may be sure to have severe problems afterwards. Beauty girls from Montreal are attractive for their fluent French, which definitely makes them more charming.

—–

I'm sincerely sorry to say that brings us to the end of episode one. In future episodes I'll give you more updates on the ongoing Hockey Theme project, play you some more obscure electronic instruments, fix you some more cocktails and… oh my god i didn't get to talk about the flock social browser, how apple makes you buy more apples, and if there are any developers listening I do want to talk about web apps that we need to see and contextual menus that I need to have developed immediately for mac os 10.5 — and I will happily buy a beer for anyone who does. When I see you.

If you have any comments or questions, please email me at podcast@steveoftheweb.com. If you have the wherewithall to send me a question or comment in audio format, I will try to splice it in somehow. I'm Steve Castellano, and you can read what I have to say at stevecastellano.com or check out my online portfolio of music and images at steveoftheweb dot com. You can also get up-to-the-minute updates on steve of the web activity by following steveoftheweb at twitter—but God help you if you have nothing better to do.

When new episodes come out, I'll post an announcement at SteveCastellano.com, and if you have comments you are more than welcome to post your feedback there.

Thanks for listening.