Crushing Krisis

Monthly Archives: January 2010

Apocalyptic Love Song – Arcati Crisis, Live @ Rehearsal

Friday, January 1, 2010

It’s a new year!

Ten years ago at this moment I was a freshman in college with a totally new group of friends at my first adult dress-up party, about to experience my first kiss. And maybe die in the throes of Y2K.

Tonight I am home alone with my wife, and I shaved off my mustache., so I could give her a unscruffy New Year’s kiss.

There have only been two constants in my life that ten years. Music. And Gina.

“Apocalyptic Love Song” is about loving someone to the end of the world and beyond. I think it’s the best song anyone currently living in Philadelphia has written. Possibly the Eastern Seaboard. And I will not rest until Gina wins a Grammy for it. Sometimes I am brought to tears while we’re playing it, moved by the power of Gina’s lyrics and performance.

Encompassing the two constants in my life, and addressing the unknown the always lies ahead, it seemed fitting to end our concert with it tonight.

The future makes me laugh, the future makes me cry
I can see it all in the reflective square of light shining in my eye
I see ripples. I see waves. I hear cries of despair.
And all I can think to do is go on breathing all this air
But I know that for a while the sun will continue to shine
Just as long as at some point you were standing here by my side

(watch in HD on YouTube)

You can download a revelatory version of “Apocalyptic Love Song” from our most recent Live @ Rehearsal CD.

You can watch our entire web concert in sequence via our YouTube playlist.

Filed in arcati crisis, elise, gina, under my skin, video | | Comments (0)

2010, pass or fail

Saturday, January 2, 2010

In perusing the new year’s resolutions of my bloggy and tweety friends, I’ve noticed a lot of hate on 2009.

I suppose a lot of terrible things happened to a lot of people last year, which makes me almost embarrassed to admit it was pretty awesome for me. I don’t have to explain why, because you’re reading my blog, AKA Peter’s Awesomeness Tracker (e.g., wedding, Paris, music festival, skydiving, #bdc, etc).

I also accomplished a lot of personal goals. Not resolutions, mind you – intangible, mutable agreements with yourself that you might choose to honor on any given day. No, real goals – like, “Keep a balanced budget,” “Record X songs,” and “Convert home office to recording studio.” And each goal came with an associated amount of points, altogether adding up to 100 – which meant I could grade myself on my year.

(I know, right? Only I would take delight in making new year’s resolutions into an academic endeavor with a grade.)

I didn’t get a 100% on 2009, or even a C. It was more of a pass/fail thing, and I certainly didn’t fail – in grade or in the obscene amount of important things I accomplished.

The goals were good for something else, too – they let me know what wasn’t important. If I cannot bring myself to tag the last 800 posts from CK’s first three months even with my grade hanging on the line, it’s just not gonna happen.

I kept that in mind as I designed my 2010 goals. I focused less on esoteric personal requirements and more on things I could accomplish and view a product of.

It’s hardly a secret that many of my goals are related to my music – over a third! Last year one of my big goals was to get out regularly to open mics, which I did! For 2010 one of the biggest goals, with the most associated points, is playing shows where I am featured on the bill.

What a coincidence, then, that I am playing my first solo gig at the Tin Angel this Friday.

201001tinangel

I have some more to say about that (CLEARLY!!!!!), but it will keep until the week begins.

Filed in betterment, performance | | Comments (0)

What I Tweeted, 2010-01-03 Edition

Sunday, January 3, 2010

My best and most-interesting tweets of the last week.

Quotes of the week:

I'd like to see one Best Albums of 09 list topped with an actual solid, listenable, loveable album, and not just alterna-flavors of the year #

While getting my music out into the world takes a fair amount of practice and effort, I can keep my blog going by sheer force of will. #

Awesome tool for volunteer PR RT @JDEbberly RT @sylviahubbard1: Publicity Planner for 2010. Authors yr gonna love this! http://bit.ly/79PJnF #

@SarahPsyDeal When it comes to Pizza Hut, I lose all semblance of self-preservation instincts. Only the pizza matters. in reply to SarahPsyDeal #

Dear Universe: Please lend me about $750 so I can buy all of the amazing 2009 albums I so blithely missed upon date of release. Best – Peter #

My wife, the (dessert) pyro. http://twitpic.com/vtcw0 #

If I was on a label the job of the design intern in the doghouse would be to lasso out my hair. Since I'm indie, that's my job. #

South Philly Fowl http://twitpic.com/w30ws #

@NotGiamatti Clue is the best movie ever made. I almost themed my wedding after it, but we couldn't decide which parent would be Mr. Boddy. in reply to NotGiamatti #

Reminder: Candy Canes are not medicinal in nature. i.e., No, Peter, it is not the same as taking an antacid. #

Happy New Year! I shaved my mustache for our New Year's Kiss because THAT IS HOW GREAT A HUSBAND I AM. #

@SarahPsyDeal Every year I would swear I'll get ripped for the music fest & play a set with my shirt off. Please achieve that dream for me. in reply to SarahPsyDeal #

Possibly the best part of recording video while I record audio is capturing all of the awesome moments where I scream obscenities at myself. #

If I ever forget why it is that I want to be playing music I can usually re-kindle it in the span of three live tracks from Ani DiFranco. #

You should follow me on Twitter so you can read my tweet action as it happens.

Filed in Twitter | | Comments (0)

Daily Demo: Icy Cold

Monday, January 4, 2010

Here’s a brand new HD video of “Icy Cold” with beautiful hi-fi multi-track soundboard audio. It comes with a story.

(watch in HD on YouTube and download the mp3.)

Okay, story-time.

Ten years ago (less 24 days) I was a freshman in college, and I wrote a song called “Icy Cold.”

It was an odd one – very oblique lyrics in one of my more unusual alternate tunings (at the time) made it a challenge to sing and play. I left it off my 2000 demo CD Other Plans and, curiously, also did not consider it for my 2001 studio disc Relief. It remained bound to my apartment, where it factored in to a few of my favorite Trio recordings.

Around the same time I wrote “Icy Cold” – 86th in a rapidly-expanding list of songs – I decided that it was time for me to start playing shows.

Being rather ignorant as to what that entailed, I assumed that I would just phone up a local, mostly-acoustic venue where people I liked frequently played and explain that I wrote tons of awesome songs, and then they would invite me to play. (Later, after my initial flush of success, I could upgrade to playing the TLA or the Electric Factory).

The Tin Angel being the only local mostly-acoustic venue that I knew of at the time, I sussed out their booking information and rang them up.

That was the extent of my year-2000 booking experience at the Tin Angel. No follow-up. No booking. No flush of success.

To be fair, I would have been an utter disaster. I know some people so wonderful that their first ever show was at the Tin, but I was not that kind of wonderful in 2000. Sure, I had the awesome songs, but I could just barely sing, and I was playing a guitar that didn’t even especially stay in tune!

Over the course of the past ten years I’ve done a lot to rectify my singing and guitar-playing issues, and I’ve played in a lot of amazing Philly venues – including the Tin Angel, as part of a showcase with Arcati Crisis. Yet, I’ve never fulfilled that original goal of ten years ago – being featured solo on the bill at the Tin.

Well, that’s going to happen on Friday at 10:30 p.m., so when it came to choosing the first song to post in 2010 in this glorious new HD audio/video combo format it seemed natural to choose “Icy Cold” – especially given the slights it experienced in 2000 and 2001.

Plus, it’s really freaking cold out.

That’s my story.

PS: I owe the hugest possible shout-out to Tim Jahn for explaining Adobe Premiere Pro compression codecs to me via Twitter at the eleventh hour (literally) to make this beautiful video possible. Tim writes a blog of occasional, thought-provoking bulletins that I have been enjoying for months. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Filed in betterment, cold, college, demos, memories, performance, self-critique, songwriting, stories, video | | Comments (1)

Unsynced

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I’m supposed to have another video posted for you in an hour or two.

In fact, I do have a video. It’s awesome – more HD, more brand new digital audio, and a song overdue for re-recording.

Except, the sync is off.

Not the whole time, mind you – just starting from about 1:50. I seem to be moving progressively slower than I’m making noise, until at the end of the video I seem to be lip-synching in delayed reaction to a performing Peter positioned somewhere off-screen.

However, that’s not really the case. At least, not in Adobe Premiere when I’m editing the video. There it is crystal clear and perfectly aligned.

Digital video editing is new to me, and I approached it like any other technical skill I’ve acquired in my life – I started doing it blindly and learned more with every mistake. Codecs, lots of mistakes there. Frame rates and aspect ratios, more mistakes. Exporting, metric tons of mistakes.

I’m pretty sure the syncing is not my mistake, as determined by an unreal number of hours of scientific trial and error. Even the almighty Google doesn’t have a lot of light to shed on the situation.

That leaves me on day two of my new project with no product. Honestly, it would have been less frustrating if this happened on day one.

Also, my iPod forgot all of my ratings from yesterday, I think my wallet was stolen on the bus, and I had a dream that Karen O. was following me around the house singing the first verse of “Man” over and over…

…and if that sounds entertaining to you then you clearly are not having the day I am having.

Filed in thoughts | | Comments (1)

Flip Video Hell

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Good news: wallet found!

Bad news: still in video encoding hell.

Since I’m sure someone else on the face of the internet is experiencing this issue, allow me to expand:

My project: Shoot video with my Flipcam while I record audio in my home studio. After mixing the audio, sync it to the video in Adobe Premiere for a studio-quality music video to post to YouTube.

Sounds straight-forward, yes?

The Flip is certainly straight-forward – about the size of a pack of cigarettes and operates with a single button. Its 1280×720 isn’t the crispest, but it does well in all sorts of lighting conditions, and can absorb loud sound at concerts without clipping.

That said, the sound is still through a relatively tinny single mic, so adding stereo multi-track audio from my studio marks a vast improvement.

The problem comes when I import the MP4 into Adobe Premiere. It looks beautiful! However, its timing is every so slightly off – compared to the audio track the video falls increasingly behind. The difference is less than a second, but enough to ruin the visual sync of the audio to the video.

Not only is it visible against the video, but you can hear it via an increasing echo if you turn up the audio from the Flip. And after encoding the problem seems even more pronounced.

I’ve been trouble-shooting this for 72 hours, and I can’t discern the source of the problem. So far, I have:

Installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled all of my various video codecs

Tried encoding the end project in a number of formats

Tried editing with multi-threading on my system turned on and off

Tried converting the Flip video to other formats prior to editing

At the moment I am truly and completely stumped. On one hand, it could be that I’m simply not unpacking the MP4 file correctly into a format that I can edit with.

However, my growing suspicion is that the Flip is dropping and/or inserting some frames, and it would only take one or two “skips” to throw the video off several milliseconds against my audio recording.

I lucked out on Monday with “Icy Cold,” which lags just a hair, but since then I’ve been completely frustrated.

Unless some video superhero comes through with an explanation and a fix it looks like I’ll be hawking my Flip to step up to a more pro-sumer model for my upcoming projects.

Updated: Comments from my personal video superhero, Colin, of SeptaWatch.

MPEG is a compressed format, meaning it uses a combination of dropped frames + keyframes to make up for the lack of real data. When you “decompress” the MPEG, those frames are gone forever, so they have to be recreated. This is an imprecise science. Since the Flip is recording compressed video, you’re not recording with any sort of frame-by-frame accuracy.

The songwriter’s job is never done, eh?

PS: Could it be the audio that’s off? It’s possible, but not probable – I’ve been using Cubase for over two years, and my DAW is customized for it. It’s certainly not a logical explanation

Filed in gear, thoughts | | Comments (0)

Hot off the presses!

Thursday, January 7, 2010

This week has been one of the more technically challenging ones I’ve ever spent as a songwriter, but right now that doesn’t bother me because look what I’m holding in my hands…

Brown Bag Demos discs, hot off the press.

Yes, that’s right, my first physical mass-produced CD release since 2001, and it’s totally DIY by Elise and I:

I decided to put together a CD six days ago

I wrote 11 of the 12 songs from 1999 to 2009

I performed all of the songs solo in my studio from 2007 to 2010

I engineered and mixed the recordings

E shot the photo; we both retouched it

E designed the cover art; I laid out the disc art

E and I worked together to launch the accompanying new website

E originally conceived of the Brown Bag Demos name and execution

More news tomorrow, as I make my solo debut (and sudden guerrilla CD release party) at the Tin Angel – 10:30 pm, $8.

More news on buying/downloading the CD on Monday.

Filed in songwriting | | Comments (1)

Backstage at the Tin Angel

Friday, January 8, 2010

Backstage at the Tin Angel

In the bathroom at the Tin Angel, about to go on. There seem to be a lot of people here. Oh my.

Filed in thoughts | | Comments (0)

Under My Skin

Saturday, January 9, 2010

It’s that time again.

Decades help us mark the time, draw arbitrary lines around styles and changes in our world. Sometimes my memories of “The 80s” are actually from 1992. Sometimes that great 30s pop art I love is from the 20s.

We claim 10 years as something tangible, but can we really understand it? At age 20 it’s half of our lives! At age 30 it’s just the upwardly mobile portion. So when do we understand? 40? 50? Do ten years ever make sense as a discreet, disposable unit the way one, or two, or five do?

I don’t know, and I’ll have to decide in August when this endeavor hits its own decade mark.

By then I’ll have celebrated dozens of other tiny deca-birthdays, as my early songs are all reaching that milestone. I’ve let most of them slip by unnoticed, or unmarked, or just by playing the song once or twice.

“Crashing” marked the beginning of my “modern” era of songwriting, so I marked that one with a recording.

Today marks something else. “Under My Skin.” God, I cannot even believe I am typing this, but I wrote it ten years ago. And, I never stop playing “Under My Skin.” For the first time, this is a song I’ve been living with – regularly, non-stop – for a decade.

So, there’s my measure. This tune took me from 18 having my first kiss to 28 and about to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. 18 and unsure of what life held in store to 28 surer than ever of what I want from it. 18 and barely able to carry a tune to 28 and confidently holding the stage on my own in two gigs in a single weekend.

But, I can tell you all about that this summer. The blog covers that. What does the song cover? Continue reading ›

Filed in under my skin | | Comments (0)

Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1

Monday, January 11, 2010

I could write a post about how – even after a weekend primarily comprised of sleep – I am still a veritable vegetable after a week of near-all-nighters capped by two gigs.

I could write about how perfect a storm my Tin Angel gig was, but how already I know it wasn’t enough to fulfill this year.

I could write about a slew of interesting links I’ve flagged over the past two weeks.

Instead, I am writing to let you know that my first proper album in nine years is released to the internet at large today – for free, for the moment.* I am exceedingly happy with it, and still on my walk home could find previously unheard nuances in each of my performances. 11/12 of it appeared originally on the blog, although 8/11 of that has been significantly remixed or remastered since its original appearance.

It is called Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1, as a nod to the lunch sacks E inspired me to distribute them in, and also in a nod to the fact that there will probably be more of these before the year is up. Hell, as Arcati Crisis we released three of them in 2008, so I have to match that before it’s even vaguely impressive.

* It costs $3 for a physical copy at the moment, and I think I have it a bit backwards, because the physical one doesn’t have bonus tracks. But, the physical one does have the hours of hard labor, the stunning disc faces, and the hand-assembled brown-bag slipcase, so if you’re the sort of person who likes to own physical CDs $3 seemed like a reasonable threshold.

Filed in thoughts | | Comments (0)

You can download my album for free!

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1

Do you like free music? Do you also like me? The intersection of those two interests is my first album since 2001, Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1.

Brown Bag Demos collects a dozen of my favorite acoustic demos into a single album – including many you’ve heard at Crushing Krisis, all newly remastered. The album is available for free streaming and download at BandCamp. You can DL in any format you’d like – from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis to FLAC.

[This "sticky" post will remain at the top of the page; new posts start below.]

Filed in my music | | Comments (0)

Trolls Under the Bridge

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

As I spend more time working on Social Media projects at work and at home, one of the most recurring topics is “Trolls.”

It’s a broad topic. Trolls can be anything from vociferous-but-reasonable dissenters to people with an agenda of annoyance and an axe to grind. Each species merits a different reaction.

The Air Force created a terrific Web Posting Response Assessment – effectively, a Troll Taxonomy Tool & Decision Tree – to aid in selecting a response. (Here is a PDF of a recent version, for your reference.)

It’s a great tool – it distinguishes between several layers of negative responses. There are true “Trolls” (negative purely for the sake of it), but also responders are who “Misguided” (negative based on incorrect info) and “Unhappy” (negative based on a corresponding negative experience).

This simple, one-page chart has been a sanity-saver on a few projects in 2009. It forced my teams to stop a cycle of second-guessing – evaluate, respond if-needed, and move on.

That’s why my thoughts went to the assessment last night, when I received a comment notification on one of my videos. The comment was to the effect of “this dude can’t hit a note.”

I tried to objectively place my responder in the tree. Clearly he had a negative experience listening to me. He’s also misguided, because I’m definitely hitting many notes quite well in the video, and his comment wasn’t subjective.

Ultimately, though, he’s just a garden-variety Troll – spreading negativity for some intangible reason it’s impossible to dispute. So, per the Air Force, I’ll monitor it, but won’t respond.

That’s the success of more than my crack Air Force training. Three or more years ago that sort of comment would cripple my confidence. I would probably apologize for his negative experience without ever assuming he was misguided. And I would stop playing the song, probably for months!

Yesterday, he just made me smile. These days I’m a lot bigger than one or ten trollish comments. I sound how I want to sound; if I didn’t, I would have never posted the video.

That’s the same confidence you must have in your brand to make good use of the Air Force tool. If you’re unsure of the product or service you’re offering, every dissent turns into a potentially reasonable complaint.

From there, it’s all apologies, and you’ll be overrun with Trolls.