Mac Whacking

My pal Val had a great idea to help us keep singing while we is all other places than all the others is. Multitrack recording! It's, like, virtual ensemble work. I record a track, send it to you, you record a track to go with it, send it back to me.... I'd never contemplated doing that before with music.

I mean, I do that sort of thing regularly with text and other static works, but the idea of doing it with real-time music had simply never occurred to me. Now it's like, well, duh.

But I need the gear. Gotta be able to make those tracks in the first place. There's all sorts of digital-audio-studio-inna-box gadgets out there. But instead of getting a one-use gizmo I'm concentrating on getting a Mac iBook, which will do the audio thing fairly well (do a Google on GarageBand) and also do web browsing and play movies and make pretty pictures and be portable and make espresso with the optional USB-driven iCuppa attachment*.

I've always thought Macs were cool but never particularly wanted one until now. Back at Camp Singalot all the cool music nerds had 'em, and I could see they are much more handier for all-around music nerdiness than Windows machines are. And I want a laptop of my own that isn't 3 generations old anyhow. New Toy! Whee!

I'm still on a budget so I'll have to settle for an iBook of 1 or 2 generations ago. To that end my pal Nils here in Moscow has most generously availed me of two (count 'em, two!) sitting-on-the-shelf-gathering-dust iBooks he is no longer using on account of them being, like, not as new as the spiffy big fast ones he has now and they're also kind of broken. So maybe with some elbow grease and brain sweat I can fix one of these or even combine parts to make a working iBook and then I'll just need a decent microphone and a quiet room and then I'm going all Corsican and Shapenotey with Val and Megan and all. And I won't have to wait until the next Singalot. Whee! again.

They don't seem that hard to work with. Why, in a lull in the typing just now I took the keyboard off one of them just like this {pop oh shit oh shit there went the F12 key flying and I think it landed in the bin of the document shredder dang those things are small and it's the middle of the night and my glasses are upstairs where is it where is it aaaaagh! oh, found it whew}. Should be a fun project.

*Okay, not really. But you can get USB coffee-cup warmers.