StinkFight.com

Back when I was in college with Skip Lunch, in Jamestown, NY, Skip moved to Omaha, Nebraska (!) to “make it big in punk rock (!). He went to live with some women who ran a zine called BEEF, and played in a band with them. Band was called BEEF. HERE is a kick-ass 80s punk rock song by Skip with him on guitar and singing, called “Smell The Shit”. Check it out.

When Skip got back from Omaha, returned to the town he swore never to see again, I interviewed him on my college radio show on station WTJU. I said, excited, “So? How was it, man?” He replied, “Well, Michael….I slept on the floor a lot. Can I say ‘lesbian’ on the air?”

————

Here, in Skip’s own words, is the story:

The recording was done in a bedroom on an 8-track Tascam cassette recorder. (I thought surly Skip meant “Tascam 4-track”. I’ve never heard of an 8-track cassette recorder. He said, “Nope. 8-track. About 3 grand in 1982.”

Skip continues: I had a vision. Made 6 songs for a demo. Sent them to bars across the country and every night at 5:30 PM I’d break into _______’s dad’s business and use the office “Watts line” (old-school business phone line) to call all over the country. Then we travelled to the last gig in Portland …where the van died.

Here’s the thing: I approached the whole thing like an instant gestalt. I got a daily planner and went to work while I was on welfare in Jamestown sleeping on the couch in a 17-yr-old runaway rich kids house. From the moment I committed, it all JUST HAPPENED , like an EST forum or a “Create Your Dream” seminar or something. I mean, I formed the band at that moment for that purpose and then just MADE IT HAPPEN.

Oddly there was no pressure or stress, just inspiration and free phone calls!!! (I remember breaking and entering, very spiritual!) The point is, it was all done from conception to finale in 3 MONTHS!!! Completely positive energy just rocking the whole time, like MAGIC. I’m sure some of the members fell from the perfect grace along the way, but not much.. We rocked Portland along with bands like POND.

And actually the most intense thing was this…before the eureka moment , I asked myself “What do I want to do with my life?” “Dunno” I said to myself “Well if you can’t make a long-range plan, choose a short-term one, and by putting ENERGY into that, the future will reveal itself.”

Well, it did. In Portland at the end of the tour, I met a Jamestown friend from the early 10,000 Maniacs there and he was in acupuncture school. (I now do acupuncture) *bing0! Whole thing was the point in my life actually and inspirational too!

–Skip

P/S My guitar on that recording was later stolen from me from the building where I made my free phone calls. Karma rocks!

I had Debra Jean read the Constitution of the United States. I produced and engineered (and used our wonderful new piece of rack mount creamy goodness.)

Her reading of it is available as a high-quality MP3 download here.

Anyway, Cory Doctorow blogged it on Boing Boing, here, and we’ve gotten about a billion zillion downloads of it today.

Posted by Cory Doctorow:

Debra Jean Dean has done a wonderful, expertly engineered reading of the US Constitution, one of the most inspiring documents ever penned. The reading is released under a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, We The People…!)

Debra Jean Dean reads the US Constitution:
http://www.debrajeandean.com/constitution/index.htm

Free Creative Commons audio book.

United States Constitution (with all amendments), read by Debra Jean Dean, engineered by Michael W. Dean

Audio file covered by Creative Commons, feel free to share and link.

“The best recording with the best voice of any free, non-DRM audiobook of
the US Constitution, anywhere.”

Get Episode 0062 of Clone The Homeless. (You must be 18 or over to listen to this episode!)

Mon, 14 Jan 2008

77 min.

HOW TO DIRECT ACTORS (part 1 of 3)

There’s no right or wrong way to direct, it’s a matter of choice and intuition. But in the first installment of this three-part series, MWD and wife have a tape recorder running in the room as they direct voiceover actress Estrus Godspeed in playing a number of sexy characters for an upcoming cat cartoon Podiobook of “Plump Buffet”.

(taglines:

“50 women aren’t 50 times the fun, they’re 50 times the hassle. And one of them always feels like killing you.”
and
“The Plump Buffet is “Fritz the Cat” meets “Showdown at Waco”.)

There’s some damn good stuff to absorb here, people.

Fire up your pod, sit back and enjoy being a fly on the wall (or a kitty in the corner) as this husband and wife enjoy telling some cute girl what to do, all night long, baby.

(Ignore the slight background noise, I forgot to turn the H2 settings to high, so had to boost a lot. The stuff we recorded directly to the computer sounds GREAT, as you’ll see when the actual Podoibook comes out. But this is a perfectly listenable document for learning.)

Review is here. From the River Cities Reader newspaper. (Paper serves Quad Cities, which is Davenport, Iowa, Moline, Illinois, Rock Island, Illinois and Bettendorf, Iowa).

excerpt:

…518-page tome sharing lessons from his hard-knock years touring with his band Bomb and the 12 records he’s created. Taking this further than his documentary film D.I.Y. or Die: How to Survive as an Independent Artist, his new book $30 Music School is just that – an all-inclusive exposé and explanation of the music business for the up-and-coming artist who wants to pull his own strings.

Ya gotta love it when a book that came out four years ago is still getting favorable reviews. Buy the book on Amazon.

Above: Diagram I made of how we soundproofed the window in our studio. It’s not only a useful document, it’s sort of my current view on the world. (Image covered by Creative Commons. Feel free to share.)

So, Debra Jean and I soundproofed the one window in the 10 x 10 foot room that we dedicate to our recording endeavors, and also use as our office (with side-by-side matching laptops. And now that we’ve got the rack mount gear blinking between us, we feel like we’re piloting a jet plane!)

We call our little studio “Casa de Llama” and “The Inter-Nest”.

Our neighborhood is mostly quiet, WAY quieter than where I lived in Echo Park. And we live alone in the house - no roommates (except cats, and they’re pretty quiet). But the studio window faces out to the street and there are cars…also occasional barking dogs, kids playing, and other detritus of suburban life.

The window is the one weak link in the chain of us having a quiet room to record (and think) in.

Above: BEFORE pix

We did some research and found that, other than a foot of concrete, the best simple way to make soundproofing is dead air between layers of wood.

We went to Home Depot and bought two pieces of 1/2-inch plywood. We had it cut to be 1/16 of an inch smaller than the inside of the window frame. We also got one piece of plywood five inches larger in both directions than the inside of the window frame.

We started by stapling the window curtain to one side of one of a piece of plywood:

This is so that from the outside of the house it looks like normal window with curtains:

(rather than the meth lab / crack house look you get with raw plywood.)

Above: someone’s house, but not mine.

We left little pull tab pieces of fabric in case there’s ever a fire or earthquake and we have to get out fast.

It would be nearly impossible to get in from the outside (and we have an alarm, we left the contact inside the window and ran the wire in), but I could pull this thing apart from the inside out in less than a minute with the claw hammer I keep hanging on the wall. We had to razor the bottom side off the fabric so the board would fit. Man, did it fit tight. Had to push it in slowly, tapping all around it with a rubber mallet.

SO…then we put weatherstripping all the way around the inside of the window frame, touching the back (studio side) of the first piece of plywood.

This provides sound deadening, as well as being the thing that will hold the next layer of plywood in place.

Then we put in the second layer of plywood, and more weather stripping on the other side of that.

We put synthetic, fire-resistant pillow batting in between the last two layers of plywood. We don’t have pix of that actually getting done because it took four hands. But here it is before we put it in:

It looked like a sheep exploded.

(Don’t pack it TOO tight, or it will actually TRANSMIT sound, not block it.)

This was followed by taking the piece of plywood that was larger than the window frame and nailing it into the window frame and wall with three-inch nails.

And over that we nailed carpet.

Voilà!

Looks like hell, but keeps out about 98% of the noise. We love it.

(Note, it also keeps OUR um…noises…IN. Nice. We make some odd noises sometimes.)

TOTAL COST: 60 bucks.

I believe this technique could be applied, on a lager scale, to an entire wall or even a whole room. You would have to build some wood frames, but it should work.

——

We also laid carpet on the floor and nailed it to all the walls and the ceiling.

TOTAL COST: 40 bucks. (We dumpster dived clean carpet remnants from behind a carpet store, and only had to buy the carpet glue, some nails, and one blanket to cover the closet.)

What we did to the window is soundproofing. What we did to the walls inside the room isn’t really soundproofing (it’s quiet in the rest of the house, we don’t need soundproofing inside), it’s sound conditioning. That is, it cuts out reverberation, and makes a nice dead-sounding room….Which is nice for recording. You can always add reverb later, but you can’t take it away. You want the purest sound you can get, that gives you more control if you wanna mess with it.

And if you don’t wanna mess with it, it just gives you a good sound.

(Also check out our quick-n-dirty sound treatment of our bedroom with our H2 bedcast setup).

–Michael W. Dean

So…..I have been lusting this piece of studio gear for some time:

I have a lust for rack-mount gear. Every time I see some in a documentary about scientists in their lab, in a sci-fi movie, or any time I’ve been in an actual high-end recording studio, I’ve had to excuse myself to masturbate.

A few months back I bought my first piece, a Furman power conditioner. It helps remove noise from the power in my home studio, but isn’t a signal processor. I still wanted some stuff to sweeten up the sound.

Enter the SM Pro Audio TB202 two-channel rack mount tube preamp / compressor /EQ with phantom power. I finally decided to buy one the other day (they’re only 225 bucks). But EVERY online retailer was back-ordered a month or more. Guess Santa delivered too many and has to have his elves make more. So I went on Craiglist and found one used for $125. We drove up to Santa Barbara (an hour each way), tried it out, and bought it.

When I got it home, it sounded good, but was a little crunchy on my mixer whenever we talked loud. So I ordered a new Tungsol 12AX7 tube for it, only 20 bucks with shipping. That made it sound GREAT!

First, the tube in it was old, but the guy swears he only used the unit on Sundays to record a little old lady in Pasadena at church. I have to wonder though, if that’s true, why is all the red paint worn off the front plate? That usually only happens from finger oils, from touching gear daily for a long time.)

(The guy didn’t seem particularly greasy to me. In fact, he was well groomed, and was a very polite young man.)

But the tube included by the factory is a generic Chinese 12AX7 tube. The Tungsol is a superior name-brand tube, manufactured in Russia.

When I opened the TB202 up, I was surprised to find it only has one tube in it. I think it’s interesting the manual says “hand tested 12AX7 tubes used” and it only has one tube. For two separate channels.

It looks like there’s a space on the circuit board for a second tube, but no socket for it.

I wrote the company and found out that the 12AX7 (the most common tube still being manufactured today) is a STEREO tube, with two-channel capability in one unit. The unit is made with only one tube. And both channels work fine.

Damn cool.

So, I recorded a test without the unit, and then with it. It makes a good difference, warms the voice, makes me sound more like the “voice of god”….creamier, and the compressor function clips the peaks without sounding unnatural. For only $145 bucks outlay (along with a $150 Alesis USB8 mixer/digital converter, and a $225 Rode NT1-A microphone), I have the capacity to do stuff at home that sounds like a high-end radio station. (Well, with all that gear, and my modest amount of voice and engineering talent.)

MP3 TEST IS HERE, with both before and after, back to back. (File is eight megs, 320 k 16-bit stereo MP3). You’ll really hear the difference with headphones, but it’s there on speakers too.

A FEW SUGGESTIONS: ***Use the XLR cables (not 1/4 inch cables) in and out. Will eliminate noticeable noise. Run your mic (or mics) directly into the unit, and then run the unit’s out into your mixer or digital converter. ***If you’re plugging it into a mixer, turn off the phantom power on the mixer, it might fry the TB202. The TB202 has switchable phantom power, so that will power any mics plugged directly into it that need them. ***Turn DOWN the input on your mixer. The TB202 has a pretty powerful preamp in it. ***Don’t use too much compression, it will sound unnatural. Start at about 1/3 total, and experiment. I put the attack and release boost buttons on (pushed in). ***Plug the unit in, turn it on and let it run for 10-30 minutes before recording. The tube has to warm up.

ANYWAY, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the SM Pro Audio TB202. Order it now, get it new, when they start shipping in a month…then you’ll have the warranty, and also, it will look spiffy.

This unit is so cool, it will extend your lifespan.

–Michael W. Dean

DJ had a week off. We don’t party. So we just made a lot of sweet sweet love, and also created six killer episodes (two of one podcast, four of the other.)

Then:

DECEMBER 28: Cleaned the house top to bottom, including vacuuming and dusting everything.

DECEMBER 29: Went through all our receipts for the year, organized for taxes. Created spreadsheets to give our accountant in a couple months.

DECEMBER 30: Backed up everything on both computers to disc AND to backup drive. Shredded old backup DVDs. Virus scanned and defragged computers.

DECEMBER 31: Did spring cleaning. Removed EIGHT GARBAGE BAGS OF old clothes, old dishes, and other assorted crap….some of it from DJ’s first marriage, when her now-adult offspring were little kids.

Drove garbage bags to dumpster drop at Catholic charity, three towns over. (Our town is too snooty to have a charity. Might attract “the wrong element”.) The car was so full we looked like the Beverley Hillbillies driving it.
Shredded two garbage bags of decade-old tax records, crap from when we were in college and even from when we were kids…and assorted newspaper clippings, old bills, etc. etc.

Some of this cleaning, sorting and shredding was kinda emotional, but felt good when we were done. Like the house (and us) had taken a HUGE dump. (And at one point, our big industrial shredder gave a warning message: “Overheating. Please discontinue use for 30 minutes”, so we did. Was fine after the wait.)

Now we’re all ready for the new year. Yay us!

We’re staying in. I hate going out on New Year’s Eve. It’s dangerous and full of drunken fools.

In AA, they call it “amateur night”.

Download episode 0061 of Clone The Homeless

Sun, 30 Dec 2007

Interview about homelessness / and Podcast Expo interviews (2)

Michael W. Dean is interviewed in his home by the Homeless Movie Guy about homelessness. Then we hear chats with podcasting rock stars, (In order): Michael Butler of PodShow, Grammar Girl, Tim Street of French Maid TV, Tee Morris, Tim Bourquin and the Joel Mark Witt (MarylandZoo.TV)

They all expound at length on the past, present and future of portable media.

Entire episode recorded on location at the 2007 New Media Expo in Ontario, California, on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder. (Except Homeless interview with MWD, recorded at MWD’s home on the H2.)

(Small excerpts of these were used in the O’Reilly podcast report I did, but these are the whole, brilliant, uncut chats.)

I was listening to the “Lovesucker” record tonight. I fucking love it. It’s the best-sounding Bomb release, IMHO.

It’s our lowest-selling album ever. It probably sold 500 copies (I never saw any accounting), mostly because the label, the aptly named Wingnut Records, went out of business…But not before the owner, Josh, received mail orders and never filled them. To his credit, he didn’t cash the checks, so it wasn’t stealing, but it was very flaky, and pissed off our fans. But hey…without him, this CD never would have happened, so I can’t be too mad. Also, this record was recorded in 1999 during our three-gig reunion, we never played or toured after that, and touring helps sales. A lot.

I was thinking tonight about the recording processes of our complete discography:

* To Elvis In Hell, Boogadigga LP, (1987)
* Hits of Acid, Boner Records LP & Cass, (1988)
* Happy All The Time EP, Boner Records, LP & Cass (1989)
* Lucy In The Sky With Desi, Boner/Revolver CD & LP, (1990)
* Personal Jesus single (Raid Records, 7″), (1991)
* Hate-Fed Love, Reprise/Warner Bros. Records, LP, (1992)
* Lovesucker, Wingnut Records, CD EP, (1999)

To Elvis In Hell was engineered by Dave Bock. He’s a good engineer, but was less experienced at the time. He had mostly been assistant engineer on other sessions, not the main engineer. The session was sort of an experiment for Dave.

Bomb was new and hadn’t toured much (touring makes bands TIGHT). The studio (Hyde Street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco) was one of the best in the world, but we were working late at night, often on short notice when a paying client canceled. And the band members were all drunk and doing speed throughout the recording. Was recorded and mixed in about five nights, spaced out over about a month.

Hits of Acid was recorded too quickly. (All our albums were. A review in UK’s “The Face” magazine said of Lucy In The Sky With Desi: “…given 10,000 pounds and an extra week in the studio, this would have been one of the best records of all time.”) Hits of Acid was recorded on tour. Touring does make bands tight, but that’s best exploited by touring, then resting, THEN recording. And there was speed and too much drink (and some pot, I think) in the studio.

Hits of Acid was engineered by Eli Janney of Girls Against Boys. I kinda felt gypped by that. I’d booked the time with studio owner Don Zientara, who had done great things quickly when engineering my work with Baby Opaque and The Beef People. (He also did Minor Threat and most of the rest of the Dischord stuff.) But when we arrived at Don’s very adequate home basement studio in suburban Arlington, Virginia he said, “My new assistant Eli will be doing your record. I’ll be upstairs hanging out with my wife if you need anything.” The session was sort of an experiment for Eli. He’s a nice guy, and is NOW a good engineer, but he was not nearly as experienced back then. It felt like bait & switch to me. But we were troopers, so we worked, and worked hard. We recorded and mixed in about three long days.

The “Happy All The Time” EP was done in three nights at a small studio (Razor’s Edge in San Francisco….It’s in the house where Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice takes place. The studio is now owned by Fat Mike of NOFX.) Jonathan Burnside engineered “Happy All The Time”. He did a decent job, and Doug Hilsinger actually helped a lot with the producing, which made it better, but the gear was merely adequate, I was on heroin, and again we were in a hurry to beat the clock of our budget.

The “Personal Jesus” single (us covering the Depeche Mode song on one side, and doing the acoustic version of our song “Nineteen” on the flip) was the first recording with both Jay and Doug on guitar, so they were still working that out. We weren’t on drugs, but we were on tour, and it was recorded and mixed by an inexperienced engineer in six freezing hours in a very minimal 8-track studio at an unheated warehouse in Berlin. And Tony and I were arguing about some thing or another the whole day. (We argued a lot in Bomb, but we were professional enough to usually check that shit at the studio door. But not this time.)

(Lucy In The Sky With Desi is simply a best-of CD made from Hits of Acid and “Happy All The Time”.)

Hate-Fed Love, the major label record, was engineered by Bill Laswell, one of the most renowned producers in the world, in his high-end Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn. It’s the disc we spent the most time on (a month), but Laswell didn’t really care (he told me this), and turned it over to his engineers to do much of the producing. Also, we “trusted the process” too much by letting Laswell bring in a “drum doctor” who tuned Tony’s rented drum kit like a normal drummer, which didn’t work. (Tony always tuned his drums really LOW.) And Laswell isolated the guitar amps in big soundproof boxes, which reduced the bleed (I think bleed actually helped Bomb’s other records), reduced the vibe, and eliminated Jay and Doug’s feedback interplay and sustain. (All the feedback guitar on the record was overdubbed later.)

And Laswell was still setting up his studio. Boxes everywhere and stuff laying out all over. The session was sort of an experiment for him and his engineers.

And again, there may have been heroin involved with me and Tony. Not in the studio (at least not me, I don’t know about Tony, but at least one assistant engineer was high). We copped after the sessions, at night, and when you’re mind’s “already out the door”, it’s hard to work. Also, I got mugged copping in Alphabet City, got a knife held to my throat, which kinda made me sing badly the first day.

A month should have been more than enough. Laswell finished the mix by the end of week three, we thought it sucked. Tony and I flew back to San Fran to do drugs and fuck women. Jay and Doug, ever the consummate professionals, stayed in NYC for a week, went into another studio and tried to fix some of Laswell’s dead mix, doing what they could with the hand we’d been dealt.

The “Lovesucker” EP was recorded and mixed in one 24-hour session at Toast studios in San Francisco. (The studio is currently known by its original 1960s name, Coast). Despite it’s smallish size and skid row address (8th and Mission streets), Toast is great. Nice live drum room, comfortable environment, vintage Neumann microphones and a Neve console. Toast is the studio where bands like REM, who have done many multi-platinum records at 1000-dollar-an-hour places, go when they get to that point where they feel like “Let’s get back to our roots for the next record. But not TOO far back…we still want it to sound great.”

This record was engineered by the truly excellent Jason Carmer, who has twiddled the knobs for records by Third Eye Blind, The Donnas, Mark Eitzel and more. (Jason also played guitar in 9353.) Again, Doug helped out on the production. So did Jay.

“Lovesucker” sounds amazing. The four tracks recorded at this session, “Painglorious”, “Die” and “Head in Hands” and “Whore Love Song” sound glorious to my ears. (The three “fill out the length” cuts on the album, “No Color in Utah” “Personal Jesus” and “Nineteen”, were recordings from previous albums. We took all of them directly from the vinyl, on a turntable at Toast.)

Sure, some of the vocals on “Painglorious”, “Die” and “Head in Hands” are mixed a little low for my taste (they’re fine on “Whore Love Song”), but everything else sounds huge, tight as a nun’s cunt, and hot as the Devil’s whore. Playing is inspired, guitars are bright, full and swirling. The drums sound hella live, the bass throbbing, and the vocals are creamy yet hard.

Plus, I was completely sober and the band wasn’t wasted. Well, Tony did get drunk and step outside to cop heroin, but not until AFTER the drums were all tracked. He tried to get really pushy with the mixing, as usual, but something I’ve never seen happen happened. Doug basically said, “Tony, go lie down on the couch and nod out”, and Doug, Jay and Jason did magic with the mix.

Also, we were older, had more experience playing together (and apart), the two guitars were more gelled than ever, and the vibe was nice. I think there was a feeling of “This is the last time we’ll ever do this guys, let’s make it fucking wonderful.”

So, in my humble opinion: “Lovesucker”: BEST-SOUNDING BOMB RECORD, EVER.

Download Bomb’s “Lovesucker” EP free, HERE.

(From The XLog):

The right to use sex toys is getting an activist in Alexander City, Alabama, all hot and bothered.

Loretta Nall, a gubernatorial candidate in 2006, is steamed at Alabama’s Attorney General Troy King over his intent to prosecute adult shop owners for selling sex toys. So she’s taking matters into her own hands by asking touchy Americans to deluge him with sex toys.

Nall has organized a “Sex Toy Drive” and is asking all masturbators to get off their Purple Penetrators and hit King where it hurts, by ramming his mailbox with sex toys in protest.

“King is pushing this thing, but he doesn’t need to be sticking his nose in people’s business,” Nall said. “He’s making Alabamians look like backwater rednecks.”

It seems to be working. The naughty novelties have already starting penetrating King’s office, with ball gags, rectum plugs, and Hello Kitty massagers creating a stir with the stiff conservative.

Nall is practicing what she preaches. “I personally sent him a penetrable pink pig,” she said. “I was thinking of dressing up as a penis to his next appearance, but then people would confuse me for that big dick.”

Love it. Almost makes me wish I lived in Alabama (what am I saying?!) so I’d have a reason to send in a contribution.

In a general, hands-off-me way, I kinda like the idea of government. Good mechanism for providing roads, education, food and pharmaceutical safety, international treaties, things like that. Heck, even a defensive military isn’t a bad thing. But when government comes into my bedroom I get testy.

They can have my sex toys when they pry them from my slippery, dead hands.

-DJD

Get episode 0060 of “Clone The Homeless”

Most humans should be ground into cat food. (A very special holiday episode of Clone The Homeless!)

Sun, 23 Dec 2007

The Deans go out shopping for studio soundproofing materials, two days before Christmas, and decide that all humans who buy into the holidays and aren’t useful for manual slave labor or pleasuring the king should be ground into cat food. Then they talk about turning your cat into a tribble, in a way that the cat doesn’t mind.

They talk about how to prevent identity theft, Ogling the asses of MILFs and GILFs at the mall (in front of your wife, much to her amusement), fashion tips for suburban slobs, misanthropy at the mall, Hugh Hefner’s bitches, genesis of Colbert and The Daily Show, mall punks, “It’s whore-ible!”, pervertibles, how Christmas contributes to global warming, soundproofing your home studio, and protecting the nest.

Entire episode recorded on location at some mall with the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.

Why I love the Zoom H2 digital recorder (review and info)…..

Someone posted today on the Yahoo Podcasters Board:

What do you all think about the Zoom H2?

I replied:

I absolutely love the Zoom h2.

I also own an iRiver (and the Live Oak mic), but the H2 is MUCH better quality, records for longer (I got a 4 gig card also) and records CD-quality WAV. It’s easy to use, comes with a pop filter and two great handles (a “studio on a stick” lollypop holder, and a “H2D2″ table stand.)

Here’s my review, with links to audio samples:
http://tinyurl.com/29t59o

We own some really nice mics (Rode NT1-A and MXL M3), have a decent mixer and a sound-treated room dedicated to recording, and barely use that stuff to record podcasts anymore. We only use that stuff for paid voiceover work. We use the H2 for almost all of our podcasting, because it requires no setup, is much more spontaneous, and sounds almost as good as recording in our home studio.

We’ve put blankets up behind the bed, to cut reflection so we can lie in bed and podcast without much room reflection.
http://www.stinkfight.com/2007/12/21/h2-bedcast-setup/

and we also go outside and record podcasts “in the field” (usually actually a mall or something, but sometimes an actual field, park, or the woods). The H2 is great for getting a good sound close up, and still picking up ambient sounds nicely, in stereo.

The Zoom H2 will extend your life span. I paid 200 bucks and pre-ordered it to arrive the day it came out. For what it does, I consider what I paid to be a bargain. If you can find one new now for
150 bucks, by all means, GET IT. Make it merry Xmas to yourself.

Here’s the settings I use on the Zoom:
http://tinyurl.com/2tw84z

–MWD
“Clone The Homeless”
Michael W. Dean’s podcast that remembers when sex was safe and music
was dangerous. (Free, and no iPod is needed to listen.)
http://www.clonethehomeless.com

(our new printer posing with SnowBound, the bondage snowman.)

Our Epson printer was costing too much to run, and was sort of dying. Mainly, I hate it because most printers that can print color do this really sleazy thing: They mix color ink in with the black even when you’re just printing black. It’s how they make money. You can undo this in the preferences, but it undoes itself. Fuggin’ thieves. I figured out that our old printer cost 11 cents a page to print black text. I NEVER print color, and every couple months, still had to buy the three expensive color cartridges along with the black cartridges. The printer won’t print if any of the four cartridges are empty.

Our awesome new monochromatic printer is a Brother HL-2040. It ONLY does black ink, and does it better than the color printer did black. It is loud, and when on, makes the studio lights flicker, but we kinda like that. It’s fun. And we turn it off when we’re not using it.

It costs only one cent per page to print black text, and it’s a lot better made than our old one. We kept the old one because it also has a scanner, and we’ll just use it for that.

We got the Brother HL-2040 on NewEgg.com for 70 bucks with shipping. And we ordered it yesterday, and it arrived by UPS today, LESS THAN 24 HOURS AFTER WE ORDERED IT! And we didn’t even pay for rush shipping. (To be fair, NewEgg is in Orange County, not far away, but I’ve NEVER ordered anything before and gotten it the next day. Ever.

Photo of how we use the Zoom H2 recorder with a mic stand for hands-free lazy bedcasting.

Padded blanket on wall behind bed reduces reflections, for that “studio sound”. Blanket was 30 bucks at Target. Mic stand was 20 bucks from MusiciansFriend.com

My new vlog is called “Pettin’ Cats and Talkin’ Back (with Michael W. Dean)”

Here’s me telling the LSD bus story

Please post a comment there (and here) if you’d like

MediaGeek 2007-11-07: Anarchy, Integrity and the Digital Marketplace - Interview with Michael W. Dean. From the very cool MediaGeek podcast (which is also re-broadcast on a lot of radio stations.)

http://radio.mediageek.net/?p=300

Direct MP3: http://mediageek.net/sound/2007/mg20071207.mp3

Interview with me starts at 11 minutes 40 seconds. (Though there’s some great stuff before that.)

Was done as a “double-ender” podcast, that is, we each recorded our own end of the conversation only, then I FTPed my file to him and he sewed it together. Makes it sound great, like we’re both in the same room, even though we were thousands of miles away.

We spoke on Skype, but I didn’t record with my computer. We could have been talking on the telephone and still have had great sound, because we were recording our own ends only, not the conversation over the wires.

I used the Zoom H2 to record, and just set it on the table and I sat on the floor. (To get away from the sound of the fan on my computer.)

As I often say, “Most of the Internet sucks. It needs more of me on it.”

Here’s two things folks sent me tonight:

Bomb at the reunion show September 11, 1999, at the Cocodrie in San Francisco. doing “All My References Are Dead ”

Two-camera shoot from my friend of nearly two decades, Michael Woody.  “Shot by Woody and Huge for an un-aired episode of RealityCheck TV.”

Also:

Great instructional video on filmmaking on YouTube, by Glen Parkinson. At the end, he fixes himself a nice cup of coffee, and relaxes with a copy of $30 Film School.

I’m now using a really cool Flash-based MP3 player on my voiceover site. I love it. Check it out and try it here.

The player is free from http://www.premiumbeat.com (who also have royalty-free music). You can also pay a little bit more and not have their logo and link on it. I have it like that on my page.

Prices vary from $19.95 for the mini Player to $29.95 for the Multiple Player with menu. The regular single track player and the Multiple Player without the menu are at $24.95.

A cool, well meaning dude wrote me an e-mail critiquing my new voiceover resume site, www.michaeldeanvoice.com.

I won’t reprint his e-mail here, because I didn’t ask his permission, and he took a lot of time with it, and I don’t want to look like I’m slamming him (I’m not). But here’s the reply I sent him:

—-

Hey sir,
I appreciate you doing this offlist, and for taking all the time to critique it. Some good comments here.

First, please look at the site again, I believe I already changed it before you wrote your letter…My podcast link is gone, the font colors are changed, and there are Flash players so you don’t have to leave the page.

As for the “1997 design”, well, I learned HTML in 1996, perfected my style with it in 1997, and actually haven’t changed a bit since then. But I like it. I think it looks good in this day and age, and not like most other sites. You think StinkFight looks better, but it’s a Word Press template, and looks like all the other Word Press sites. People often tell me to update my Web sites’ look, but they invariably suggest I homogenize it into the latest flavor. That’s not for me.

Yes, having a YouTube video seems “below the fold”, but that video has gone viral, it’s had 127,000 hits in about ten days. I’d like to think my voice contributed in some small way to that.

I’ll look into the site you suggested, Voice123.com, I did briefly a few months ago, but it seemed like a lot of wannabes to me. I’ll look at it more closely though, and consider buying space to put a reel on there. But I’m generally offended by sites that “talk to me” when I load them, and the voices that load at me as soon as I go to that site, the ones put there by the site’s owner, sound horribly generic to me.

I sound like a stoned surfer with a slight lisp. I’m not going to get work doing dog food or hemroid cream or Chevy truck commercials. Nor would I want to, even if it paid a lot. But a lot of people really love my voice, and keep asking me to do free work, so I think there’s a demand for me to get more paid work. I just don’t want to do it the “normal” way. I never do anything “the normal way.”

Basically I make a living making media, and I mostly do it my own way.

Check out the CV link I’ve added to the page. None of it is “below the fold”. I do a lot of different things: writing books, making films, producing and creating music, writing for different media sites, and I’ve done paid voice work.

Usually when I’m starting out with new things, people tell me to “do it the way everyone else is doing it”, I don’t, and end up making a name for myself doing it my way anyway.

Most of the work I get from any of the many different things I do for pay is from referrals from people I know anyway, so I’m not that concerned with looking like the latest flavor.

Respectfully,
MWD

My new voiceover resume website, www.michaeldeanvoice.com

Michael W. Dean: high-quality work at reasonable rates, years of experience, full-service in-house recording facility, and a smile.

We bought a new shredder yesterday. I’ve wanted one for a while. The old one I had (gift from Lydia) worked for a long time, but could only do three sheets at a time and didn’t crosscut, and couldn’t do plastic.

The new Staples SPL-QW120D one was $120 bucks (before rebate), can do 12 sheets at a time, turns paper and credit cards into tiny little diamonds that would be damn hard to put back together.

We thought it looked boring, so we put some stick-on lights on it as eyes. We think it looks a little like R2D2 now.

50 sheets of paper, four credit cards and five CDs:

Download “Clone The Homeless” episode 0058

Mon, 18 Nov 2007

Interview with A-list podcasters Tee Morris and Matthew Wayne Selznick, recorded in the Deans’ hotel room at the 2007 pod expo.
Matt and Tee talk about Podiobooks, “Brave Men Run“, “Podcasting for Dummies“, iTunes, Creative Commons, and the future of new media.

Entire episode recorded on location with the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.

(From the “Clone The Homeless” podcast, Michael W. Dean’s educational podcast that remembers when sex was safe and music was dangerous.)

DIRECTOR’S GIVEAWAY OF AN ENTIRE COMMERCIAL FILM,
ENCODED IN HIGH QUALITY, WITH NO DRM

“D.I.Y. OR DIE: How to Survive as an Independent Artist”
Free on Zune Marketplace and Zune.net

Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace launches Tuesday, November 13, 2007, and Zune.net launches the week after. Both are giving a high-placement feature to the documentary film “D.I.Y. OR DIE: How to Survive as an Independent Artist“. Film info: http://www.diyordie.org

(Download the free Zune software on Tuesday. No Zune needed.)

Director Michael W. Dean is giving away the entire film as eight episodic chapters over eight weeks’ time, one per week as free video downloads, in the “podcasts” section of Zune Marketplace and Zune.net.

These free downloads are encoded in high quality (30 fps, 900 kbps MP4 files, 640 x 480 size, with 128-bit audio, and no digital rights management or copy protection). It looks great on a Zune or other portable media devices, and damn good full screen on a computer. The entire film will stay online until at least April 2008.

Seven extras from the DVD (including interviews with Ian MacKaye, Steve Albini, and Lydia Lunch) will also be available for free download, one per week, after the final chapter of the film posts.

FILM DESCRIPTION:
This film is a celebration of the artistic underdog! FEATURING interviews and performances from: Lydia Lunch, Ian MacKaye (Fugazi), J Mascis (Dinosaur jr.), Jim Rose (Jim Rose Sideshow), J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus), Mike Watt (Minutemen), Richard Kern (Filmmaker),
Ron Asheton (Stooges), Madigan Shive (Bonfire Madigan), Dave Brockie (Gwar), Craig Newmark (founder Craig’s List) and more.

Directed by: Michael W. Dean.
Edited by: Miles Montalbano.
DVD architect: Blaine Graboyes

Director Michael W. Dean says, “People keep asking me, ‘Why are you posting the whole film when it’s still selling on DVD? Are you CRAZY?’”

Dean’s reply (in part): “It’s my gift to the world. People write me every day and tell me the film got them off their ass. I made the film to spread a message, not make money. And somehow, it still made money. That’s how I do things - it’s how I pay my rent on planet earth.”

“Many people have also asked me (often in an accusatory manner), ‘DUDE, how come there’s a copyright notice at the end of your film? Why isn’t it Creative Commons?’”

Dean replies: “Well, first of all, Creative Commons had just launched when I finished the film, and I hadn’t heard of it yet. But mainly I copyrighted the film to protect against uses I wouldn’t dig….someone putting a beer ad in the middle of it, or large-scale commercial bootlegging. But I’m pretty free and easy with people sharing it. Hell, the DVD is called DIY or DIE: Burn This DVD, and I’ve always encouraged people to make free copies to give to friends.”

Michael W. Dean’s full explanation of his reasoning for this giveaway: http://tinyurl.com/39u6ur

(Also see related article “How I Invented Creative Commons“.)

—–

Hi-res press photo of DVD cover: http://files.dvdnote.com/images/300dpi/dr-4347.jpg
Web-res press photo of DVD cover: http://www.kittyfeet.com/DIYDVDCoversmall.jpg
Print- and Web-res stills from film: http://www.kittyfeet.com/DiyPromo.htm

Download episode 0057 of Clone The Homeless

THE FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THE BECKY CHAT TETRALOGY!

Fri, 9 Nov 2007

Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean have a chat with our special little friend, Becky Haycox. (Part 4 of 4)

Why Becky enjoys the lusty pleasures of life, why gelato is almost as good as sex, if you live alone and die and have cats - they will eat you, why we like saying “Yessssssssss”, “Jill had touched the chick”, why women like gay porn, Judith Krantz, why everything should be digital, all about the “Urban Food Log group”.

Photos of the day here.

Entire episode recorded on location on the street in Ventura, California on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.

Smoke is not only bad for humans, it’s bad for condenser mics. Coats the element with tar, makes them sound bad over time. And unlike humans, mics don’t regenerate when they sleep.

We were putting the mics away all after each use, but it’s a lot of work (we will sometimes record three or four short sessions, and one longer one, in a given day.) And it’s more wear and tear on the mics.

Our solution is so simple, yet it works. We now leave the mics on stands, but drape a towel over them when we’re not using them. Keeps the smoke out, but far easier to get ready to record than taking them them out of the box in the closet and putting them on the stands and hooking up the cable. All you have to do is pull the towels off the mics.

It really works! No smoke smell on the microphones, and the mics stay happy. Also keeps dust out. Great if you smoke, also great if you run a studio and find that you get more clients if you allow smoking (some studios do).

I would recommend tossing the towels in the wash once a month, but make sure they’re totally absolutely dry before putting back on the mics.

Download episode 0056 of Clone The Homeless

Fri, 2 Nov 2007

Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean have a chat with podcasting OGs (”original geeks”) Stephen Eley and Evo Terra.

These two cats were two of the first ever people podcasting, and they are (young) elder statesman of the craft. Stephen Eley runs extremely popular sci-fi audiobook podcast, Escape Pod. Evo Terra co-wrote Podcasting For Dummies, and runs the extremely popular audio book podcast Podiobooks.com.

Both guys expound at length on the past, present and future of portable media.

Entire episode recorded on location at the 2007 New Media Expo in Ontario, California, on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.

(Small excerpts of these were used in the O’Reilly podcast report I did, but these are the whole, brilliant, uncut chats.)

The other interviews I did that week will be going up soon.

This is unreal……

Check out the bass cabinet behind the trumpet player in this photo of this very cool new trance-garage-psychedelic band in San Francisco called “Wooden Shjips” (Chronicle photo by Liz Hafalia above, article here.)

I bought this SVT cab and head in 1986 to play in my band Bomb. It was already old then. I bought it from a place called “Black Market Music” for $1000 (including tax) for the combo, which also included a red Anvil road case case for the amp head. I stenciled the band logo on the sides of the cab, the backplate of the head, and the road case as soon as I bought it.

This thing was more than gear to me, it was my heartbeat, to myself and the world, for seven years.

I toured America six times playing through this Ampeg SVT combo….and up and down the West Coast a lot and in San Francisco constantly…over 500 gigs. I played it on all the Bomb records except the Laswell one (I used his SVT) and the “Personal Jesus” single (was in Germany, used the SVT of the band we were touring with.)

This song, “Bigger Than Fun”, is the amp turned up to about 8.

I lost it to a pawn shop on sixth street in 1993, soon after Bomb broke up. Some guy bought it from them.

I got clean in 1994, bought it back from the guy in 1995. My friend Bean used the amp for two years in our band Slish. Then Slish broke up and I used it for another year with my friends Cliff and Squid. I sold the combo to my good buddy Newt in 1998. He later sold it to our friend Warner.

I moved to LA in 2001, Warner passed away, I forgot about the amp.

Friggin’ unbelievable.

–

Anyway, hey Wooden Shjips: Your music sounds great, amp still sounds great, glad it kept rockin’ longer than I did.

———————

(Thanks, Tania Skevos!)

Get episode 0053

Thurs, 25 Oct 2007

YUP! IT’S BEEN ONE YEAR TODAY!

EPISODE 55

976-BeckyChat! (3)

Michael W. Dean and Debra Jean Dean have a chat with our special little friend, Becky Haycox. (Part 3 of 4)

Checking out womens’ racks over your wife’s shoulder, sexism, ominsexual people, San Francisco, how to deal with your boyfriend working at a strip club, feminist strippers, couples who like the same pornography, taking your girlfriend on a date to see the strippers, why women like romance in their sex, other ways that women differ from men, why these chicks hate male bashing, sleeping with more than one person without being a slut, how to get rid of a panhandler, why there’s no such thing as spare change, seeing the Sex Pistols in San Antonio on January 8, 1978 at Randy’s Rodeo, Pink Floyd never murdered anyone, Syd Barrett rocks, and how to freak out the youth of today.

Photos of the day here.

Entire episode recorded on location on the street in Ventura, California on the Zoom H2 portable handy recorder.

Instead of bragging all the time about how cool it is to be a privileged White-boy in Red China, this kid quit teaching English and took a job here in a local barbershop. Why? He wanted to see for himself what the lives of the Chinese people are really like. Bravo! I now step down from my yellowed ivory tower to present:

BEN, a Midwesterner in the middle Kingdom. http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56

He crunches some numbers and makes some interesting comparisons:

Teaching English in China: 919 hours per year (230 work days)
American job: 1936 hours per year (242 work days)
Job in Chinese barbershop: 3542 hours per year (322 work days)

So there you have it. My job in the barbershop requires me to put in almost twice the hours I would put in had I been working in the US and nearly 4 times the amount of hours I would have put in as an English teacher in China, not to mention that it also requires nearly 100 more work days per year as well.
If I were to work at the barbershop for one year, making 600 RMB per month and accounting for the first month going unpaid, my hourly rate would be 1.86 RMB per hour. That comes out to a walloping 24.47 cents per hour.
http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56

Song for my sweet, departed daughter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqZNMO3oIdc

Song I sang for my daughter, Amelia Laine Worth shortly after her death from Leukemia last year. Haven’t been able to listen to this song I sang it in memory of my daughter, Amelia Laine Worth shortly after her death from Leukemia last year.

Finally listened to it again yesterday. And today I went up on a hill, recorded another track of vocals. Wife held the camera, I edited the video. I like it a lot. Made me cry, and that made me feel better.

JESUS, I miss my daughter.
—-
Song: “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen.
Arrangement: Jeff Buckley.
Arrangement: Michael W. Dean.
Vocal: Michael W. Dean.
Drums, guitar, bass and organ: Cliff Truesdell.
Pedal steel guitar: Charlie Kramer.

For those of you in China, or who just want a better-looking encode than the YouTube, here’s the 85-meg file. (right click to save.)

I recorded this song ten years ago. The production quality is horrible (it was one of my first attempts at computer recording, and I also didn’t have a good mic or digital input for the computer), but it’s pretty nifty anyway.

I can’t remember if I played guitar or it was my buddy Mike. Mike?

MWD

HOW OUR NEW FRIDGE WILL PAY FOR ITSELF IN 18 MONTHS

With my new writing gig, we’ve decided to buy a new fridge this month. Nothing fancy, just something black and in the 500-dollar range that will last a long time and use less power.

Our current fridge is 24 years old and so loud we have to unplug it each time we record our podcast or do voiceover, even with our home studio door closed. It runs too cold or not cold enough, no matter how carefully we set the dial. It uses lots of power (and yes, we do vacuum the dust out of the coils). It also pees a bit. This could warp the wooden kitchen floor.

Also, our refrigerator’s compressor motor runs constantly, which is yet another reason to replace this frosty, peeing beast. New fridges have little microchips to switch the motor off when it’s not needed.

The old fridge has done well for itself (I hope the new one will last a quarter-century), but it’s time to buy my first major appliance.

Ahhh…adulthood.

So we were wondering “how long will it take the new one to pay for itself in saved power?” To do this, we had to figure out how much power the old one is currently using.

Ever look at your power meter? It’s that thing somewhere outside your house that has little dials on it. It’s an analog steam punk-looking device that probably hasn’t changed in design in 80 years. They certainly haven’t changed since I was a kid, 40 years ago. They do make digital ones, but most of the meters in use are still the type with the moving dials.

The little vertical clock dials at the top tell you how much power (in kWh or Kilowatt hours, i.e. thousand watts per hour) it’s using over a period of time. The big horizontal silver dial below that measures power being used right NOW.

Every few months, a guy comes by your house, gets bit by your dog, and reads the meter. I wanted to do this on our domicile myself (except for the dog part).

I had to search the term “how to read a power meter” to crack the code. Most of the few results only tell you how to read the top dials. But I found ONE that told me how to read the horizontal silver dial. This is the formula:

Look on the meter for something that says “Kh X.X”, where “X.X” is some number (often 7.2). Plug your numbers into the following formula:
3.6 x Kh factor
—————– = kW
number of seconds

First I went out and looked at the meter in normal operation and familiarized myself with its mysteries. I made a friend. “Hi Mr. Meter, do you mind if I poke at you with my eyes?” He didn’t answer, and I took that as him not minding.

I watched the silver dial happily rotating, wrote down the Kh=x.x number (ours is 7.2) and headed inside.

We unplugged everything in the house. Everything except the gas stove, but we couldn’t easily move it, and all it has on when it’s not cooking is a digital clock.

I went outside. The silver dial appeared dead. No perceptible movement.

I came back inside, plugged in the fridge, waited 20 seconds for the cacophonous motor to kick on, and went outside, cell phone in hand, set to “stopwatch”.

The silver dial has a black mark at one point, so you can tell when it’s gone all the way around. With only the fridge running, the dial took 75.5 seconds to rotate once. By applying the above formula, that works out to 343 watts per hour. Multiplied by 24 hours x 365 days a year, works out to 3004680 watts per year. That means our fridge uses 3004.68 KWH per year. That’s 3 million watt hours a year.

You could just measure with a normal-day level of appliances and lights on, then unplug the fridge and subtract. But we felt more scientific comparing nothing on to only the fridge on than we would have comparing everything on to everything minus fridge.

Just for kicks, we wanted to know what we use in a normal day hanging out in the nest. We left the fridge on, plugged everything back in, and turned on two laptops, a mixer, phantom power on the mixer, powered computer speakers, two digital clocks, the cordless phone, the DVD player (set on “off”, but still using a little power). Total usage: 762 watts.

That means our old fridge eats almost half of all the power we use in a normal late afternoon when a lot things are on. And the fridge is on ALL the time, which means it uses more than half of all the power we consume.

Just for further kicks, we left all the above on and also turned on the TV, which we rarely do while all the other stuff is on, but this put the total up to 836 watts per hour.

The new fridge we just put a down payment on (a brand name-unit, well rated on Consumer Reports, $550 new, $594 with tax and delivery, on sale from a major chain outlet, and it’s Energy Star rated) uses 432 kWh per year, less than one-tenth of our old one.

According to our power bill, we pay 16.6 cents per kWh. This price can change slightly, but it doesn’t change a lot.

So, the old fridge costs $498.77 per year to operate. The new one will cost $71.71 a year to operate. This means that the new fridge will cost $427.06 less per year to run than the old one.

The energy savings will pay for the new fridge in 1.39 years, or about 18 months. AND the new one won’t pee on the floor or rattle loudly in our quiet, lovely little nest.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/podcasters/message/33326

(The text at the top is Todd’s post, my reply is below.)

>>Get MP3 of episode 0054 of CLONE THE HOMELESS

Fri, 19 Oct 2007

WHEN A MICROPHONE IS BETTER THAN A ROLEX - part 2 of 2

Interview with DAVE BOCK and KIRSTEN BOCK OF BOCK AUDIO. Recorded on Bock microphones in the living room of Dave and Kirsten Bock.

Bock Microphones are becoming a name that people expect to see in the highest-end recording studios in the World.

Topics:
Dave Jerden, Bill Laswell, rock music click pads on bass drums, MDC, Alice in Chains sounds like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing over Black Sabbath, why David Bock and Michael Dean started playing guitar, 1973 Gibson Les Paul signature hollow body guitars, giving the gift of prog rock, Dave Bock’s awesome surround sound McIntosh tube-powered home stereo, Esoteric Audio, Dave Bock on the history of Bock microphones. Kirsten Bock and Dave Bock expound on how the first Bomb record got made at Hyde Street Studios. She talks about The Farm, The Chatterbox, Michael Urbano, Dave Immergluck, Dan Schwartz, John Hyatt, Bill Laswell, Michael Beinhorn, Liquid Jesus, the power of mixing in mono, how to play power pool. They talk about what’s on Dave’s iPod, George Massenburg, close micing jazz music, Barre Phillips, and the Hit Factory.

From the Clone The Homeless podcast

Get the $30 one-use video camera

then hack it to work more than once.

Voilà! You’re a filmmaker for 30 bucks!

Just got off a three-way Skype call with Howie Kafka and Skip Lunch. Still on the line with Skip. Howie’s in Germany and Skip’s in China, I’m near Los Angeles. We remembered something I’d forgotten: I introduced them, and I introduced Howie to the Internet. Howie said he had a computer but no modem and I sent him a SNAIL MAIL letter in 1996 and said “You’ve GOT to get a modem and check this shit out!” He did, then I introduced them to each other and they’ve been best friends forever, ever since.

mew. Awww…..I love it.

We had fun on the Skype three-way and were sharing links and music and all that stuff and had a realization: This is what we dreamed of as kids…..talking over the miles with our buddies, while living our lives in amazing places.

Rock the fuck on, man.