Organized Gibberish

This past Saturday (9-19) I turned 25 years old. The weekend was fun. On Friday I hung out with some of my best friends, Saturday was spent with the family and on Sunday I rode my bike in the Minneapolis Bike Tour.

All in all it was a pretty great weekend!

Here’s a couple of photos. I had taken some really cool pictures with my good camera at the bike tour but my film case broke it wouldn’t spool, so I’ll post the only pictures I snagged with my cell phone.

These are my awesome parents. We went to Fat Lorenzo’s for dinner. It was delicious.

Cake time:

My bike post tour:

Beer Garden:

Have a good week,

-A

This past week was busy! I spent my holiday weekend flying to San Francisco with Ben to do audio on a technology pilot. We landed safely in SF around midnight on Monday and proceeded to crash a few hours later at the hotel. On Monday we took some time to drive into the city and check a few things out. I like to consider myself a nerd, especially when it goes to gadgets, but Ben tops them all (he’s quite proud of this too). Before we actually made it to the city we stopped at a Verizon store so he could pick up a MiFi. AT&T was giving us some trouble so he took the opportunity to try out some new tech. It’s actually really cool – he has a full write up here.

On our drive in I took advantage of my FlipMino and recorded us driving around the city and across the Golden Gate Bridge. We also stopped at the Fisherman’s Warf and the Bay Aquarium.

Check out my little video. I recorded the music in the video a few years ago. They were a couple of high schoolers at the time, but now they’re all grown up… the band is called, “Forest Green”

Here’s a few pictures:

Also this past week was the first week of school at my work. I ended up missing the first day, but I was able to experience the rest… it was a busy week. First home football game and first theatre department production of the year.

On Saturday night I got to see Patton Oswalt at the State. He’s great when he’s not doing old material off of his CDs. I love the stuff on his CD’s but he recited it all WORD FOR WORD live. He could’ve at least changed it up just a tiny bit. I’m no comedian but I think I could even do that. It was just annoying when the two idiots sitting in front of us would stand up and yell the next line in the bit. Oh well, it was still a lot of fun.

This next week is another busy one – it’s also my birthday this Saturday! Gonna hit the big 25 (tons of my co-workers, friends and family hate me when I say that)!

Have a good one,

-Adam

Last week my friends at Soup Bowl Records had a label show at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Minneapolis. My best buds, The New Monarchs ended the night with a great show! Check out some of the high lights from their set.

For those of you who don’t know the band I had the pleasure of recording their first album, “Blueprints” last summer. Check out their album and upcoming EP, “Electrocaching” on Amazon and iTunes.

-Adam

I got to go to American Idol Live last week and I took a little backstage video.

edit: I removed the video because people on youtube are crazy.

The show was the most well produced cover show you’ll ever see!

The last few months have flown by.  I’ve done a ton a cool stuff, met a bunch of awesome people, experienced happy times and some very sad times.  I’ll update this page soon with a couple of neat things.

At this very moment I’m having some hard times with my wrists and pinky fingers (nerve stress from riding my bike), so I might not be typing a lot but I show you some stuff.  Have a good night,

-Adam

Check this out:

crazyinternetbeatz:

Well, I was going to save this until later, but since Jim posted it, too, I’ll do the same.

We’re going to be podcasting from Gastro non Grata’s party at Art-a-Whirl for Flak Radio, along with Chooglin’ and Private Dancer, among other bands.  I’m honestly not sure how on Earth we got hooked up with this, but it’s straight f’ing awesome.  I mean, look at that poster!  And Chooglin’ is playing!?  Get the f out.

If you care at all about having fun, I look forward to partying with you at this.

I can’t wait for this one!  I posted it now so you guys can put it on your calanders.  That’s a whole month’s notice!  Come party with us!

-Adam

Oye, I wanted to post this sooner in the day, but it’s been a busy day and now I finally have time. Technically, it’s still Easter for another hour and a half or so. Anyway.

Happy Easter everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful day full of family fun, good food and some praise. Today I had to wake up at 4:30am to get to Church by 5:30. As a way of giving back to my Church I volunteer my time to do technical stuff during the big holidays and special events. This morning I was running the projection system with a big elaborate power point presentation full of images and a few videos that coincided with the service. I’d like to offer my apology now to the 6 and 7am services – you guys were my practice runs. Trust me, it’s not easy to follow long hand written notes and a mislabeled PP queue sheet.

By the fifth service I had pretty much memorized everything, which was fortunate because there were probably 1600 people in the Church (completely packed) at the time. After the 11am service got off without a hitch I took off to get to Mankato in time for family dinner at my Grandparents. It was nice to hang out with the extended family for the afternoon, and the food was top notch like always. The highlight of Easter at the Grandparents house is the Easter egg hunt. I have 27 cousins on my mother’s side. I’m lucky number seven in that mix so I have a bunch of younger cousins that still get to do the egg hunt.

This is Evan – he’s nearly two. He’s pretty flippin’ cool.

Around 4:00 I took off from Mankato to get back to Eden Prairie for Church again… This time I was playing bass guitar, and singing in our contemporary service called “Live Wire.” I really enjoy the band because it’s gives me a chance to play my bass with other musicians on a weekly basis without having to put any rehearsal time into it. The songs are also fun to play because I just get to make up everything. Tonight’s set list was a lot of fun. I’ve missed the last few weeks, so it was nice to get back into it again.

Now I need to get some sleep. G’night,

-Adam

I’m incredibly excited to go see one of my favorite musicians tonight – Andrew Bird.  If you didn’t already know Andrew Bird is a singer/songwriter/musican-extradonaire.  He can play pretty much any stringed instrument, his forte being the violin.  Not only does play a whole bunch of stringed instruments, and sings but he also is a professional whistler and will whistle over most of his musical interludes.   My favorite part of his performances is his live looping abilities.

Live looping is no easy task.  I’ve seen multiple people fail at it and it can really bring a song down.  What Andrew will do is start a song on violin, play 8 or 16 bars and then loop over it again.  He’ll do it multiple times to build up the piece and then start live playing guitar over it.  Later on he might add more to the loops to enhance the song through the bridge.  Watch this youtube clip from one of his live performances.  You should also note that the drummer he’s playing with is the very talented, Minneapolis native Martin Dosh.  Dosh also loops his drums live and will play keys to add more. How he does it without getting too much stage bleed is beyond me.
Live at Bonnaroo:

Have a good night everyone!

-Adam

One of my favorite parts of the week is to record and edit the podcast Flak Radio.  Flak is hosted by James Norton and Taylor Carik and our contributing writer is comedian Eric Nigg, writer of the popular segment, “Niggtistics.”

Here’s a brief clip from the about page:

Flak Radio began in November 2006. Al Franken Show producers James Norton and Joel Meyer, careening toward unemployment as the show expired, co-founded Flak Radio as an outlet for their surplus broadcast energy. Minneapolitan writer and man-about-town Taylor Carik was brought on board as a co-host, and the show clicked. More than 50 episodes later, it rolls onward.

Joel Meyer has since moved on to New York where he works for the public radio show Soundcheck.

Guests have included Onion editor Scott Dikkers, Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Jason DeRusha of WCCO, Aaron Landry of S4xton.com, Angie D of Overheard in Minneapolis, Electric Arc Radio, Rachel Hutton of City Pages, Tony Thomas of Minneapoliscast, and Internet musical sensation Tay Zonday.

Flak Radio reaches listeners via the magic of the Interblogs.

We should probably update that page because today marked the 109th episode.  I started working with the guys at episode 59 which means next week’s episode with be the 50th episode I’ve recorded.  I just checked my archive and if you’re wondering how much storage space a podcast takes I can tell you that 45 episodes of uncompressed audio at 44.1k 24 bit is about 200 gigs!

Nearly 200 gigs of uncompressed audio!

So yeah that’s a lot of audio!  Over the past year we’ve also recorded four live shows.  Two at the historic Ritz theatre in NE Minneapolis on 13th ave and the two at the Mid-Town Global Market.  This week’s show was one of those two Mid-town shows – check it out! You can subscribe to our show on itunes, or listen to it each week on the website.  If you’re looking for a little variety in your weekly listening habbits take a listen to the show!

-Adam

Now that I’m finally going to update this thing I felt I should take a minute to let you know a little more about me.

I grew up in North St. Paul and moved to the suburbs at the early age of nine.  Unlike the majority of my second grade classmates I started elementary school with a complicated learning disability and I was only reading at a Kindergarden level.  I didn’t have the ability to differentrate direct dialog and the random chatter around me.  Basically, I couldn’t tell if people were trying to talk to me if there were other noises around.  At first people assumed I had ADD, but after half a dozen tests they found I had no problems paying attention if I was isolated and could hear the directive.  To treat my disability I wore a special hearing aid receiver that had an accompanying microphone transmitter.  The mic was worn by my teacher or special ed assistant and it made it so I could hear them over all of the other noise that comes out of a 2nd grade classroom.

After two years of wearing these hearing aids and a lot of extra special help I had caught up to my classmates and I was testing at above average reading levels.  I am writing about all of this because one of the main focuses of this blog is going to be sound, sound design and general music/audio.  If you didn’t know this before you got here I’m now an audio professional… kind of funny that I wore hearing aids for a few years as a kid, eh?  I think the main reason I love sound design is because now I have the ability to hear all of those sounds at once and pick out the specific stuff I need to hear.  Who would’ve known that I was training to be a sound engineer at the young age of nine?

So the reason I made this blog… I’ve been a big fan of reading other people’s blogs for a few years now.  It started with the social networks, and live journals but then in the spring of 2007 I met one of the kings of blogging and that’s a man named Ed Kohler.  Ed knows more about blogging and the internet than any other person I’ve ever met.  I’ve read a few posts from him over the last few years about the importance of creating your own content.  At the start of 2009 Ed wrote a post about what he wants to see from his readers this year.  These lines really stuck with me:

What I’m asking for, in 2009, is more from you. It could be in the comments here, but better yet, it would be in the form of your own blog or some other form of creative content.

The thing that would excite me the most is seeing more of you become subject experts. What the heck do I mean by that? I mean, take a topic that you’re passionate about and write about it, take pictures of it, sing about it, dance about it, draw it, doodle it, cook it, drive it, eat it, or sleep with it.

After reading that I knew that I needed to get this thing going.  I’ve owned my domain for five years now and I’ve done nothing with it except use it as an ftp host… lame.  So now I want you, the reader, to stick with me for a while.  It may be a little rough at the start, but hopefully I’ll get the hang of it.  Please leave feedback, and constructive criticism is great!  Hopefully, I can make this blog be one of the first blogs that you’ll check in your RSS readers.

Goodnight,

-Adam