SKYPE-ING...

There’s a songwriter over in England I’d really like to talk to, and it was suggested I check out Skype, a program for making long-distance calls for free with the computer. Yes, “Alice” the ‘puter has the brains to handle Skype (though it would help to have those extra RAM chips installed), and our local version of high-speed Internet should work, even though it’s pretty slow compared to what most people in other areas have. Skype says I need a microphone and a webcam, and I have both, but they were cheap ($1 and $15, respectively) and not very good (and that could always be related to the price).

I used the ‘puter mike briefly, back when I was subscribed to Whitby Shores, the Website started by Canadian deejay Len Amsterdam, but I always had an annoying echo that neither I nor anyone else could figure out how to eliminate. My webcam is one of my worser wastes of money; it works, but the picture quality is horrible. (If I’d gone with the ‘Hello Kitty’ model—just a few dollars more—I could have at least had something decorative.) And I shouldn’t forget that the soundcard itself is an antique—it’s an old Creative Labs SoundBlaster I acquired for free from a computer repair guy after Alice’s onboard sound gave up the ghost about four years ago. “Alice” was never built for music—she was built for graphic design work. (She now has really good speakers, though.)

As I begin dinking (finally) with the computers out in the studio, assembling my three-for-five-bucks units into one good music-and-video computer, I might consider making the new computer I build the “Skype unit.” Odds are the onboard sound on those ex-college computers is way better than Alice’s ancient soundcard, and I have an adapter that will let me use my vocal mike instead of that $1 computer thing. I hadn’t planned on making the new unit an Internettable computer, but I could—“Alice” has the only working network card, but I have a wireless card that may still work, left over from when I was living out of a motel room when I first moved to Phoenix. I still need a decent webcam (Santa? You listening?).

What’s been tentatively titled “A Man for Christmas” now has two verses and a chorus; it needs one more verse, and maybe a bridge. I’m happy with the first verse and the chorus, but am still not sure about the second verse. The song is intended as a gift for fellow writers Polly Hager and Glynda Duncan, both of whom have been making “What’s it take to get a man around here?” noises lately. Having told them both there was a song in it, I now need to demonstrate what I meant.

It is rock ‘n’ roll, of course (folk-rock, actually), because that was in the parameters I set for myself—but I do seem to have defaulted to the same rhythm I used in “The Dog’s Song,” and I don’t want the two being that close. The chord progression in the verses is at least different, and if I record “A Man for Christmas” in a different key (forcing me to play it differently on the guitar), it might sound different enough to be okay.

ELSEWHERE: Three weeks until the Christmas concert—notice has gone out to the “joelist” and to Facebook, but I still need to do the press releases for the newspapers and for Oregon Music News (as an experiment—we’ll see if OMN really are only interested in events in Portland), and there are still more posters to distribute (I’ve been taking some with me everywhere I go). Band practice is scheduled for next Saturday, and our first radio spot (of two) is Friday morning. And it’s time to make copies of the Joe Songbook on CD. There are jobs to apply for, too—several of them, in fact. I just wish I felt more hopeful about the results.

Joe