This month Scot turns his sights to a couch he got in college for only five dollars. Why was this so huge and how can we get from pleasant memories about a couch to a quest to make music?
It’s since AI music has become much more common that Scot now needs to be a little more self-sufficient in his music sourcing needs. To be more sure of it all being sometimes significantly flawed human creation.
Join Scot on a fraught-filled path that brings him in contact with a whip salesman, and two music podcasters from New York, Nick and Jon, who lend a hand with the quest this time.
How does a story about a Five Dollar Couch lead to a foolish musical quest and an 8 foot long leather whip? Listen in to find out.
Part one of two.
————
Pearshall Couch Link
- https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/seating/sectional-sofas/1960s-spanish-revival-modular-sectional-sofa/id-f_41439752/
- https://www.instagram.com/p/C_RmCFWvH_i
- https://www.pinterest.com/pin/448741550388744571/
Nick and Jon Make a Song
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nick-and-jon-make-a-song/id1805865811
David Hilowitz Bontemi Chord Organ Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAxjF-viqAI
Music from this episode by:
Shawn Korkie – https://www.fiverr.com/shawnkorkie
Isehgal – https://www.fiverr.com/isehgal
Yashchaware
Raghav – https://www.fiverr.com/trappy808_
Dony Larsan – https://www.fiverr.com/dony_larsan
Aandy Valentine – https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine
DISCLAIMER HERE AT THE TOP:
–While I was writing this episode I often wondered about the difference between a sofa and a couch. When to use what word, and what the difference is. What I discovered is that there is a real difference, and also that I did not really care much about it. In this episode I will say sofa and couch for the same thing, interchangeably, without any consistency past which word I thought would sound better at that moment, so if you are a strict couch-sofa-ologist, I apologize. — also you’re a what?— anyway, here’s the episode:
TPS021 FIVE DOLLAR COUCH – PART ONE
Hi, and welcome to The Perfect Show. I’m your host, Scot Maupin. I’m what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered ‘perfect.’ Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I’m presenting as a little nugget of perfection.
One day during the summer when I was 19, I found myself suddenly needing to buy some furniture. And I guess this would be the first furniture that I would officially own. Well, that’s a question. From age 0-18 I had lived in rooms with dressers and tables and chairs and beds, of course, but do you really own that furniture? Are you the owner of your childhood bed?
When I was 18 I lived in a dorm for my first year at the University of Kansas. The room came pre-stocked with beds and desks and not a ton of room for much else. I wedged in a small table and comfy chair from home, but that was it.
I went back to my parent’s house and stayed in my room that summer. A summer in which I also got an answer to who owned my childhood bed afterall.
My dad had gotten offered a new job at a University in Missouri, and with both of their kids past high school now, my mom and dad decided to sell our house and move to Missouri so that he could take it.
The plan was going to be for them to move down so that my dad could start the job, and my mom could start teaching down there at the beginning of the new school year. With this all being so sudden, the idea was that I would stay behind and continue living in the house while they were trying to sell it. I would stay in the place by myself, and just keep it clean and tidy so it could be shown to people whenever they have someone interested, and in exchange I would basically have a free place to stay for the whole year that was close to my job and only a 30 minute drive to my classes at the college.
I was thrilled at the potential independence and unearned square footage, of course. The drive didn’t bug me because when I was living in Lawrence, I had to make the reverse drive to my job, so it was about the same to me. It would be a shame to not be around all those cool college parties and bars and stuff, but let’s be real – that’s not a thing I was really exploring much of no matter how close I was.
With the plan in hand, I turned in my enrollment stuff and ticked a box that meant I didn’t want them to save any dorm rooms for me, and that was that.
Until it wasn’t that, of course.
A family the same size as ours that knew my parents from church asked my parents if they could check the house out and they came over to look at it one day while I was at my summer job. By the time I came home that evening there was now a very different plan in place.
Either my dad had set a really really fair price, or that family had been really agreeable. Probably both, honestly. But I found out it had happened because when I got home from work my parents were both sitting there and said, ‘Yeahhh, we’re gonna need to figure something else out for where you stay’
So the house was out, the dorm was out. But no big deal. People have to rent apartments all the time, right? Right. [beat] Well maybe not in a college town right before classes start up and everyone’s already rented everything, but, you play the cards that you’re dealt.
I ended up finding a really really small studio that wasn’t a great deal for how tiny it was, but it was close enough to campus that I could walk and save on a parking pass or a bus pass so that offset the rent a little bit.
Now the next problem was the space.
It was small, but at least it was also awkward, meaning if I put ‘my bed’ in there, it would really be the only thing I could fit in there, and even then, it would be hard not to block the weird, narrow pathway to the bathroom at the back of the space.
And while I was mulling over this problem, here’s where I found out it wasn’t even mine to worry about. My parents were like – oh, we were going to move all the furniture from your room to the new house so that we can put it in your room there.
I got to claim a few old tables and a shelf, but my bed went away to live in a house I would never live in, and I had to come up with a new makeshift plan for my new makeshift plan.
One thing that is true about me still today, and was only more so when I was 19, is that I am a talented sleeper. I can usually sleep comfortably in even nonideal situations. I’ve had my share of good bed sleeps, of course, but I’ve also had great sleeps on hard wooden benches, futons bare tatami mats, minimally carpeted floors, and even the seating area of a Japanese ferry while the boat was rocking so hard that pretty much all the other passengers were busy puking over the side while I slept peacefully.
The guy that sits down on a plane and without reclining my seat just conks out and goes to sleep? That’s me.
So my plan was to get a couch, and then just use it as a bed at night, but have it be there in case I wanted to have people over and watch movies on my small tv. This never happened, by the way, but for some reason I was really fixated on the idea of how to best set up my small studio apartment for entertaining guests, plural. Ah well.
I don’t think I’d give up my bed now, but at age 19 it seemed like just as reasonable an adventure as any, so I borrowed my dad’s truck and went off to visit some thrift stores.
But yeah, for this I knew I wanted to go to the Salvation Army on the other side of Olathe, Kansas, the city I lived in, because that one had a bigger store floor, and that meant more space for couches.
Once inside I look over toward the furniture and my vintage eye is caught by the beautiful mustard yellow color of upholstery from before I was born. There were normal sofas there, boring ones. There must have been, I mean, but who would know. I headed straight over to the yellow one to check it out.
It wasn’t just the color, either. This thing was weird. I looked it up for this episode and I found it, too. If you know your couches by name, then it’s a Pearshall Spanish Style couch, and if you are a normal person who doesn’t know what that means let me describe it. There will be pics on the webpage of course, good reason to hit up perfectshowpodcast.com, but in the meantime
it’s a couch in two halves, each one is 5 feet long, and each one has one arm, so that when it’s put together, longways, you get one ten foot long couch. There is one cushion on each half sitting on the springy frame, and the back is plain fabric, but you’re supposed to add cushions or things for that part.
Individually, each piece looked like an upholstered version of like a lounge from ancient rome, where someone would maybe recline and be fed grapes by servants or something.
The couch as a straight ten foot line was only one possible configuration. My tetris brain looked at the L shaped and even fully square shaped possibilities for this sofa.
Test sits and lays yielded surprisingly comfortable results, and it was in really good shape for a thrift store couch.
Now my second bit of good luck:
I had come on a sale day where they were trying to move furniture specifically, because they had too much stock and wanted to free up space. So on this particular day, all the couches and like kitchen tables and recliners and things were all $5 each, one day only.
That was enough of a sign for me. I mean both it being the sale day that I stopped in and also the actual sign that was there telling me that it was $5 furniture day.
I remember a slight back and forth when I was paying about whether it should count as one thing or two, which might double the price to $10, but I made the devastating trio of points that it was clearly meant to be one couch with two pieces, it was all donated at the same time, and each piece only had one arm, and I ended up with the whole thing for only five bucks.
I loaded it into the truck by myself. That was the other great thing about this couch. Almost every other decent couch I can think of you would need two people to slowly maneuver it into whatever space you’re putting it in, but this one, with the two frame pieces and two cushion pieces, I could move each of the four pieces on my own, meaning I could move the couch solo by just taking more trips. And with none of the pieces being actual ‘couch size,’ the task of fitting them up stairs, around corners, and through doors was not bad at all.
Once in my small space, I actually decided the best configuration to start with was the unconventional ‘boat’ shape, where I pushed both halves together face to face, putting the sofa arms on the same side, and making sort of a 5 or 5 and a half foot square of sofa, but basically now in a mattress shape that I could stretch sheets and blankets over. The end was open, so I could dangle my feet off if I wanted to, and it was big enough to fit my whole height diagonally.
So I kept it like that, and slept there that entire year. A year with a lot of things going wrong, but the $5 couch always came through for solid sleeps and lovely lounges.
After that year I ditched the studio apartment, but kept the couch. I relocated to a larger spot, with an actual bedroom, but farther from campus. I realized that the tradeoff of a larger living space was well well well worth finding the places I could park and just walk a little farther to get on campus for class.
This new bedroom development, and me working at a furniture store, helped guide me back into the world of bed owning, and the couch became just a couch again, sometimes in its long form, sometimes in L shape, but never back in the boat.
Including that first year, I’d say the couch was really useful for about 5 years. One as a bed, and four as a couch. Though it switched back to bed again whenever someone wanted to crash late at night, or a traveling friend needed a place to lay their head.
And they were always impressed. I would set someone up on the couch, blankets and pillows – I’m a good host – and not feel bad at all, because I’d slept on it for a year in every position and I knew it slept great.
And it wasn’t that there were no other options. In a college town it becomes cheap-or-free-couch-season once or twice every year. I just never had a need to swap out, and I never found another couch that could be its rival.
I kept it until I literally moved across an ocean to Japan and I couldn’t justify taking it with me. I mean, I got one suitcase, I couldn’t take a couch. No.
So that was it with this couch. I took it back to a thrift store, and my story with it ended there. I hope it had a good life after that, and someone else found and appreciated it like I had, and it treated them well in return.
Happy ever after for a couch. It’s a nice thing to imagine.
———
So then fast forward to today. What can I do with this? I don’t need a couch. I have a couch. It’s not as good as that one back in college, but it’s fine and it’s not like a successful ending for this episode looks like me in a room with two sofas anyway.
I figure the real essence of this experience wasn’t just that it was the perfect couch, it was that I had found something I needed, something incredibly useful, for only $5. Right thing, right time, right price.
So to recreate that I don’t just need to go out and look for cheap couches, I have a bed and a couch, like I already said. Instead I should look to get something that would be similarly useful to me today. And since I’m doing this for my audio-only podcast, it should be something that makes sound at the very least. And it should be something for $5.
So then how do I seek out a $5 item of some sort that makes useful noises for a podcast? Where do I shop for that?
eBay? Nope, shipping costs. Flea markets? Good. Thrift stores? Of course. Dollar stores? Sure.
Craigslist.org?
Yeah, there it is.
At Craigslist I could filter for local items, name a specific price, and comb through $5 item search results looking for ones that could make useful sounds.
So after browsing through the roughly five thousand $5 items near me, I circled back to two that seemed like they could be interesting. One was a little plug-in piano-organ type thing, and the other was an 8 foot long leather bullwhip. They were both $5 each.
I will have the screenshots of these items up on this episodes page on perfectshowpodcast.com if you’d like to take a look.
I don’t play the piano, but I could potentially learn to play simple tunes or do some podcast scoring with it, so the piano would make sense. On the other hand, an 8 foot leather whip only makes one sound, a whip-cracking sound, that happens when the tip travels faster than the speed of sound actually creating a small sonic boom. A thing which would simultaneously be both not very melodic and quite tricky to record. I’ve also never whipped much, so that’s a factor too.
But…counterpoint, It’s an 8 foot long leather bullwhip for $5. So while the piano feels more useful, the whip has that same vibe of ‘oh this is too good to pass up’ that the $5 couch did. I couldn’t choose between them….so I didn’t. Instead I looked up that $5 in 1999 when I bought my couch would be $9.60 today, first of all – yikes, but that’s about $10, and $10 is enough to snag both of these treasures, so I decided to avoid the tough decision like I like to do, and just go with both. Thanks, inflation.
So the short version of my plan looked like this: Step 1. Go get the items, step 2. Question marks, step 3. Have a bunch of useful audio. Bing bang boom, no problem.
[TAPE – CAR SOUNDS PULLING UP AND GETTING OUT UNDER THE PREVIOUS NARRATION, THEN CONTINUING AFTER. – RING DOORBELL – I’M RECORDING MYSELF – – 36 seconds
We headed back to a standalone garage, and inside it was filled with tons of tables and things covering every table. These were the belongings of an older relative who had moved out of their house and in with their kids, but that left almost a house-worth of things to move along to new owners.
TAPE – HAVE A LOT OF STUFF FOR SALE – WANNA PLUG IT IN AND HEAR? – PLAYING – FANTASTIC. AWESOME, COOL. – 46 seconds
I pulled out my first $5 bill, gave it to Jennifer, and packed up the old organ.
TAPE – Pleasure – THANK YOU SO MUCH – 7 seconds
The organ worked completely but the metal front plate had come unglued and was missing. On the bottom of the instrument was a paper tag labeling it a Bontempi Hit Organ model HO258.
Searching the internet produced various bontempi fan organs, they are apparently from the 70s, but there was only one like mine, model HO258, and it was listed for $175 on ebay, so I feel like I definitely got a good deal.
This little organ only worked when it was plugged into a power source, and that power just ran a fan inside that blows air through the various tubes and reeds. That’s why it sounds like an accordion, or a really large harmonica, because it’s using the same method to make sound, but instead of your mouth pushing the air like a harmonica or your hands pushing the air like an accordion, for the chord organ it’s the electric fan, so you also hear a low hum whenever it’s powered on.
Okay. Well, next up: the whip.
[TAPE- DRIVING TO GET WHIP – BEVVY OF WHIP SOUND NEEDS – 1:12
I showed up and met Glen, my whip salesman for the afternoon, but then almost immediately we ran into a problem.
TAPE – OH NO – ITS MISSING – CANT BE TOO FAR – 10 sec
Turns out the kind of person who has and sells a whip on Craigslist is the kind of person who has and sells a LOT of things on Craigslist, and finding my whip may be more like finding a needle in a haystack…
TAPE – GOTTA BE CLOSE, YUP – HERE CAN YOU TAKE THIS OUT? – 26 sec
We weren’t just looking for A whip, but a box of whips, and it was stashed on a shelf somewhere amongst all of Glen’s treasures.
TAPE – I HAVE REAL PROBLEMS THROWING THINGS AWAY – SHOW YOU HOW TO MAKE IT POP – INDIANA JONES LESSONS – THIS IS 8 FOOT – YOU CLEARLY KNOW WAY MORE ABOUT WHIPS THAN I DO. – HOWD YOU BECOME SUCH A WHIP EXPERT? TRYING TO SELL THOSE. 1:55
If you didn’t catch that, Glen said, ‘Trying to sell those’ meaning the box full of whips I was picking from. After I selected one, Glen stepped in to give me some pointers with it, after I was backed up enough in the crowded garage to hopefully be clear.
TAPE – WHIP NOISES – YOU GET THE IDEA – THAT”S THE ONLY MOVE I KNOW. IT RIED THAT – CAME UP ON A BOX OF THEM IN AN AUCTION – STUCK WITH THEM A LONG TIME – STUCK WITH ONE NO LONGER – THANK YOU. – 1:04
Glen closed his garage door back down, and even though he had found what he was looking for, I would bet that he spent a lot longer milling around in that garage, inspecting and adjusting his various treasures.
TAPE – ALRIGHT – I GOT MY ITEMS, THIS STEP IS COMPLETED. ON TO THE NEXT STEP – COOL. – 14 sec
I had the little chord organ and the whip now, l. And what would I do with them now that I had them? Well, I would, and did, procrastinate – that’s what.
For the two years I wasn’t making the show of course, and then through this whole season as I moved it later and later down the schedule.
There is one issue at play that I haven’t really brought up yet, but it seems relevant at this stage of my plan. I said earlier that I don’t know how to play piano, but the bigger truth is that I’m not a particularly musical adult. I’ve been dragged to karaoke with friends but I don’t play instruments. As a child I played the bagpipes for 4 years, from ages 7-11, and trombone from 9-17, but I would say for both of those, it was mostly me practicing an instrument as a begrudging kid and my parents not knowing whether to let me quit or make me keep playing even though I was miserable.
I think of myself as so not musical that each episode of this I make, one of the parts I look forward to the most is finding people on Fiverr to commission music from for the episode. I try to get some new custom stuff for each episode, like last episode for the Superman music, and of course I also bring back some of my favorites over and over again.
I admittedly search Fiverr for artists who are charging less. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s about 50-50 and I’d say I have a collection just about as big of songs I commissioned that I don’t care for or they just weren’t right for the show. Also that’s not really surprising to me. When you shop at the more inexpensive end of fiverr musicians you get either low level people producing mediocre work, or people who are actually quite good but are just starting out so they are trying to get some gigs and strong reviews before raising their prices. That’s the group I try to get most of the time, but I ended up with a pretty equal distribution of both groups, I’d have to say.
At least those used to be the two main kinds of artists I’d find there, but the last couple of episodes I’ve been finding a third kind of music vendor on fiverr, ESPECIALLY at the price points I used to think of as my home.
Where I used to just have to determine if I was dealing with good musicians who were working for cheap or cheap musicians who were pricing themselves accurately, now there was starting to be an influx of prompt jockeys, tech enthusiasts who use AI to generate music for the people who hire them.
I was beginning to worry more and more that AI music would seep into my music for the show. I like that mellow lofi stuff and I think they’ve been sliding ai music into those streaming channels for a while now.
I even talked with an artist I have gotten songs from, asking how he could compose and rearrange so quickly (a thing I was genuinely curious about because when I asked for changes they got made shockingly fast) and if it was because of AI. He said he had been using AI at times in different songs, and it was just such a bummer. I paid for the tracks, but I won’t use them and I can’t really listen to them either. Like as soon as I knew AI was involved it just evaporated my feelings about the tracks to just nothing.
I guess here’s where I out myself as very not-neutral on this topic. I don’t like AI. I really don’t like generative AI or that people are using it to make pictures, make video, write things, or make songs. I think it’s a dangerous cultural shift. Also I’ve been fooled, sure, but as soon as I know something is crafted by or with AI, I feel myself lose interest in it, hard. It may be that the stuff I see is truly uninteresting past the surface, but I engage with art, almost always, by thinking on the process the artist used to make it. What were they were thinking? What did they want people to get from interacting with the work? And what I am getting out of it myself, which may or may not line up with what I feel the artist was going for?
It’s the way I enjoy art. When I’m watching or listening to or looking at art, I want to connect my humanity to the humanity or humanities that chose to make it. That humanity simply doesn’t exist with AI slop generated by an LLM.
There is a little dance that always goes on between artist and audience. The artist creates, and the audience consumes, but AI shifts the focus of that dance from creation to consumption. Whereas before, when the focus was on creation, consumption became a byproduct of that act. It was one of the main downstream effects, sure, but it was still downstream from the origin. Fruit to be picked from a tree.
When you shift that focus from the creation to the consumption, you end up seeing things a little differently. Now the need is to consume, to gorge on as many new things as you can. Now the artist is not the creator, now the artist is that pesky bottleneck keeping you from eating as fast as you want. The artist becomes the problem.
And AI offers to solve the problem. Why wait for creation when you could opt for generation. So what if it’s not as good? So what if the more we use it the more it harms others. The important thing is that we don’t have to stop eating. Who cares if it’s good as long as it’s here. We have embraced quantity over quality. We have become mouths instead of minds.
I try not to use AI in any aspect of making this show, which includes the music, but that’s a bit harder for me to police than the rest because I always farm the music creation out to others.
So, back to my task at hand, if the premise is I do something useful with the $5 objects, like how the couch was clutch for me, and given that 1. I don’t want to have AI music on the show, but it’s getting more and more prevalent where I usually find music, and 2. since the two objects I got were noise making objects,
then they will be most useful for the show either by making background music myself to use throughout the episode or like a big finale song to end it on. And here’s where I realized that if that was my plan it had a major major flaw.
I lack both the musical skill and the technical know-how to pull that off on my own. — So basically both sides of the musical coin — I can record whip sounds, I can record the organ, but I can’t just turn that into music.
So I started where I feel like everyone should start these days, and looked up youtube stuff on piano for beginners and whatnot, simple tricks to master the piano fast. Stuff I’m sure is really legit and not at all scammy. No real magical help for me here. Most of it was aimed at people more advanced than me.
But I also wanted to play around and let my bottled up musical genius come out if it needed to, so here is my actual first attempt at practicing this little chord organ.
[TAPE – CHORD ORGAN PLAYING – 1 – scales and simple, layer it under the next 3 chunks-] – 1:06
I gave myself the challenge to record a little bit of noodling around on the chord organ every couple of days to try and get better at playing it as well as understanding it’s strengths and weaknesses.
This went well for the most part as long as you’re okay knowing the main strength is it’s super-easy for anything to sound like it’s sad accordion funeral music, which I’d also list probably as the main weakness too.
Practicing the organ I could tell was going to be a bit of a process, and may even need a different approach… But like the whip feels like its own separate thing. How hard can it be to learn a whip?
[END TAPE]
First I looked up whip groups in my area. My good ol’ local whip groups, yes those are a real thing. There are groups where people get together and practice whipping these long bullwhips and doing trick stuff with them and doing stuff with whips in both hands and all sorts of wild whip things, but I figured my big issue was just space.
Because in order to use the whip sounds I have to record the whip sounds and in order to record the whip sounds I need to be able to freely make the whip sounds. Now my place isn’t tiny, but it’s also not ‘I can whip a whip in here’ big either. I would need to head out to a third location, so one weekend I took my weird task out to a place in Oakland where I regularly see other weird people doing their own weird tasks from time to time – Lake Merritt.
This is a lake here in Downtown Oakland California with a very walkable perimeter, and there are always interesting things like food vendors and drum circles and all sorts of stuff happening at different points along the route. My plan was to set up somewhere along the lake and just become another piece of that while I recorded my whip.
TAPE – NOT WHIP A WHIP, THROW A WHIP, LETS SEE IF WE CAN GET ANY GOOD WHIP NOISES. – 18 seconds
TAPE – THROW THIS AT THE MICROPHONE – LAUGH – THAT DIDN’T WORK AT ALL – 8 sec
It took me a little while to get down the placement as well as the snap part…
TAPE – YOU CAN HEAR IT GO PAST BUT IT”S NOT GOT THE –[SNAP] OH HO HO – SNAP. SNAP x 6 – THAT DOES WORK I NEED TO GET IT A LITTLE BIT – 22 sec
The first time I got it to snap was extremely satisfying, I must say. Sort of like the crack of hitting a park golf ball, but I was getting the whip-crack more on accident than anything. I was inconsistent at best, recording for about an hour just to get a couple of minutes of tape..
TAPE – WHIFF NOISES – LOTS OF WHIP NOISES BUT WHIFS – I DONT KNOW WHAST IM DOING. – 17 sec
TAPE – MAYBE IF IM – OH OH OH OK. MAYBE IT”S THE DISTANCE – THIS DISTANCE – OKAY, YHATS GETTING BETTER IF I BRING IT UP SLOWLY – 16 SEC
TAPE – OOH I HIT THE MIC – THAT HIT IT RIGHT ON – GOOD SNAP – 12 SEC
TAPE – WHIPPING NOISES (X2) OKAY I FEEL LIKE I HAVE A FEW – 11 SEC
TAPE – WHIPPING NOISES SOLID – 31 SECONDS
TAPE – SECOND SET OF WHIPPING NOIES – 16 SEC
[OVER THE TAPE YELLOW AND BLUE ABOVE] And I got better with practice, of course, but I wasn’t achieving any sort of rhythm or percussion section for a song. These were just the raw whip sounds and the miss sounds…although I did start to notice sort of a sand slipping through the hourglass situation beginning to develop…
TAPE – PIECES OF THIS WHIP ARE BREAKING OFF IN LARGE QUANTITIES, DONT KNOW IF IT HAS MUCH WHIP LEFT IN IT – 13 SEC
TAPE – I DISTURBED THESE PEOPLE IN THE PARK LONG ENOUGH – LETS CLOSE IT OUT – 5 SEC
And that was it, that was my super awkward public recording session for the whip noises.
With my random whip sounds and little organ practices not resulting in anything awesome, it’s probably time to enlist some help on this quest. Preferably someone musical, I think. That seems like the smart thing to do.
Conveniently, though, I have recently found a new podcast that I started listening to of a musician named Jon and mastering engineer named Nick who each week take a song Jon makes, and go through the mastering process that Nick did.
It’s half lighthearted life chitchat, and half super-technical audio talk, and that’s a weird mix but I dig it. There’s also a choppy frankenstein intro each ep that is really amusing and weird and funny. It’s a good show. I started listening and even was beginning to learn things from the song mixing parts.
Then I was like – oh, duh, I should ask these guys for songmaking advice, and what I could possibly do with something like this, and they responded, by talking about it on their pod, and really coming up with some new ways that I hadn’t even thought of to use the whip.
So here they are on their weekly podcast, Nick and Jon Make a Song, where they actually address me, personally…
TAPE – THIS IS NICK AND THIS IS JON (MAKE A SONG) INTRO – 46 sec
Now bear with the clip for a few minutes, because it does get a little technical, but I really like how deep they go.
TAPE – JON RECOUNTS MY QUEST – READING MY EMAIL – SOUND DESIGN CORNER JINGLE – ASK HIS PERMISSION FIRST – PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT A GRAIN IS TO OUR AUDIENT – EXPLAINING PITCHES AND GRAINS TECH TALK – BE WHATEVER PITCH YOU WANT DEPENDING ON HOW FAST YOU REPEAT IT- AND THERES OTHER COOL STUFF IN THERE DEPENDING ON HOW FAST YOU REPEAT IT – EXPLAINING A GRAIN – AND THERES OTHER COOL THINGS THAT GRANULAR SYNTHESIS CAN DO LIKE – SCANNING AROUND IN THAT SAMPLE – PICTURE A SQUIGGLY LINE THAT MOVES TAKE ONE SEGMENT AND MAKE A SOUND OUT OF IT – 2:21
So I was thinking that they would take the whip crack and use it as a drum, but what they’re talking about here, is using an even tinier part and just repeating it faster and faster until it’s just a hum or a tone or essentially a note.
TAPE – I WONDER IF I CAN USE REAPERS BUILT IN SAMPLER TO DO GRANULAR SYNTHESIS ON THIS SAMPLE – YOU MEAN ON HIS WHIP?? YEAH. UM, GRAIN IT UP. SO HE CAN USE A LITTLE BIT OF THAT. – 16 SEC
TAPE – HERE WE GO – CAN YOU PLEASE DESCRIBE WHAT YOU’RE DOING? – THIS IS REAPERS BUILT IN SAMPLER. ITS CALLED RESAMPLEMATIC 5000. I PUT IN THE WHIP SAMPLE AND AM LOOKING FOR A WAY TO MAKE IT VERY SHORT – DETAILED THINGS FOR SAMPLE – OBEY NOTE OFFS SO IT DOESNT PLAY THE WHOLE THING EVERY TIME I PRESS A KEY BECAUSE THIS IS A LONG SAMPLE – 30 SEC
TAPE – SO I SEE WAYS TO MAKE MY ATTACK AND RELEASE TIME – SO HERES WHAT I THINK IM LOOKING FOR – GRANULAR PITCH SOUND STUFF – WHOAH – IN COMBINATION WITH THIS ENVELOPE – COCOS STUFF – SO THERES YOUR WHIP SOUND GRANULAR SYNTH – OH WAIT BUT – THAT WAS FUN – 1:11 [1:58 TOTAL BLOCK]
See what I mean? These guys are crazy audio wizards with music stuff.
And t hey also went through how to turn the whip into percussion track.
TAPE – (COULD BE DIRECTLY FOLLOWING ABOVE TAPE – DEPENDING ON THE EDIT) ACTUALLY I THINK IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO GET THIS KICK DRUM THING – HEAR THAT? I THINK IF WE CAN REVERSE THAT IT WOULD MAKE A SICK KICK DRUM – OKAY WE REALLY HAVE TO RELEASE THIS LIKE NEXT WEEK – NO WE DONT, OH FOR IT TO BE RELEVANT FOR HIS POD? – 44 SEC
Yeah, turns out no, you didn’t. It was more like 7 months, but I appreciate the thought.
THATS THE ONE RIGHT THAT ONE REVERSE IT AND ISOLATE IT ON IT’S OWN TAPE – THEN THATS GETTING IF YOU PLAY THAT AN OCTIVE DOWN – DUDE TOTALLY – HEY HEY HEY HEY MY NAME IS MY NAME IS RANCH FRITOS – RANCE PREBONES – 58 SEC
Okay first, these guys are maniacs and I love them, but I also have also listened to that clip so many time’s and I have no idea what name Nick is saying his name is. Ranch Fritos? Rance Prebones? Genuinely no idea.
But yeah, they gave me some good ideas, I followed along with a lot of it, I think, and then they ended the conversation with this:
TAPE – I THINK IT WOULD BE COOL IF WE INVITE MR SCOT – ON TO SEE IF WHEN HE’S DONE WITH HIS THING TO LET US DO WHAT WE DO AND TAKE A CRACK AT HIS THING – SO YOURE INVITED SCOT – SCOT WELCOME – NICK AND JON BUMP OF LISTENERS – 28 SEC
Nick and Jon clearly know their stuff, and are lightyears ahead of me on the technical side, so it sounds like I need to think about granular synthesis for the whip, because I like what they were able to do there in just a few minutes with it.
They even said I should reach back out when I have a song and they can sort of do their normal thing, but to my song instead.
So now I just gotta make a song, right? You know, that one tiny task. And so I got back to practicing:
TAPE – CLICK ON – SLOW PARISIAN EDITED – CLICK OFF – 1:15
And even the stuff I was sort of the happiest with – still sounded like a clown slowly dying in Paris.
Clearly I was lacking skill in the whole musical area. I could improvise slow, but what would actual music that’s useful to me be? What would it sound like?
Something more upbeat and fun, definitely.
TAPE – JAUNTY CHORD MELODY SNIPPET FROM MY PHONE – CLICK OFF 21 SEC
Or on the other end of things I could go for something more lowkey and thoughtful. Those are the two main vibes of the music I normally reach for when I’m scoring the show each episode, and probably what would be the most helpful to have more options for.
TAPE – MORE SOMBER AND THOUGHTFUL PIECE – WITH HARMONY CHORDS – CLICK OFF – 1:24
Another challenge I’m up against here is that I don’t really want to keep getting better at music, per se. After I’m done with this project I’ll probably run in the opposite direction for a while again. I’m not trying to be a musician, and I don’t see this quest turning me into one.
But now I can’t hide from it anymore and I’m either gonna have to figure out how to make some useful music with these items or I’m gonna have to start all over again with a brand new idea.
[INTRO MUSIC]
Hi, and welcome to The Perfect Show. I’m your host, Scot Maupin. I’m what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for – –
Okay no, no. I’m not going to do that to you. I’ll stick with this song thing…Although, I mean, one possibility…imagine if I could find some really cool thing on Craigslist now that wasn’t up 2 years ago…hold on, lemme check
No, no. I did actually just look and there wasn’t anything better. Dang.
Okay, so I put off doing the thing by pulling out my musical instruments and putting them on one table sorta in the middle of my place so that I’d be ready when the mood struck, vowing not to put them away until I finished. – wanna guess how well that worked? It’s been several months now and…they’re still on that table.
I put off doing the thing by writing it on my todo list and just not quite getting to it day after day after day…and it is still on the todo list currently.
I put off doing the thing by taking an online class on how to make music for non-musicians. Which was interesting, but it was all about using AI to generate stuff and working from there, and I’m just never going to be able to do that without feeling like a huge hypocrite.
I put off doing the thing by writing the script for this episode.
I put off doing the thing by cutting hours of tape into the small clips I’ve played here.
And now I’m putting off doing the thing by just recording as much of this as I already planned, –
Usually if i’m talking into this microphone, at this point in the process, I know what the ending is and how we’re going to get there. This is not one of those times. This is a first for the show. I honestly do not know what comes next.
but I know I’m all out of things to do to put off the thing with. Things With which to do to put off the thing…with?
Are you about to hear someone who doesn’t make music try to make music and then make other people listen to it all because he had a couch he loved a weird amount in college?
Yeah, I think that’s exactly what’s about to happen.
Okay. Well let’s go figure..out…music.
——-
Hi hello. It’s post production Scot here.
I recorded that, originally thinking that it would fall more around the midpoint, and we’d just keep going, but then I was putting off doing the thing by putting together what I had and noticed how long it was getting, so that’s where we’re gonna pause for now.
It was a 2-part couch, and now this has become a 2-part episode.
In the next part we find that Scot has worked miracles with Nick and Jon of Nick and Jon Make a Song, triumphed against all odds, and succeeded in creating music. – I mean, I hope so. I’m still on the not-having-done-any-of-it-yet side of things.
So, I’ll forego most of the usual ending stuff, I mean, don’t NOT rate and review and subscribe just because I’m NOT reminding you,
I will tell you to visit the website perfectshowpodcast.com and look at the page for this episode to see a few pics of my couch, the link for the same style of couch I found, pics from the all the craigslist listings and of the items I got, and also my favorite youtube video on the bontempi chord organ, recorded by David Hilowitz. His is not the exact same model I have, but I like this video the best I think because he explains the instrument well, and then he takes the thing completely apart and you can see every piece and how it all works.
I’m easy to find on socials or email perfectshowshow@gmail.com if you need anything.
Oh, I’ll review a podcast again for the real ending next episode, but I am happy to announce that since I last published, Cover Lover, the podcast I reviewed on the previous episode, has started coming out again! I was super excited to see this, and encourage you all again to check it out.
I know this one took forever to come out but I’m not taking any time off between episodes and I’ll get the second part out much sooner. It shouldn’t take as long as this one did.
This episode was recorded and mixed at Milky Way Studios in Oakland, CA.
And remember, if you need a thing to double as a couch and a bed in a small studio college apartment, that’s what futons are for. The American version with the wooden frame that sits up or folds down, not the Japanese version that you fold up in the closet. It’s literally what everyone else used. But oh no, I was a pretentious art student and I just haaad to do things differently…
Anyway, until next time, I’m Scot Maupin, and thanks for listening to The Perfect Show.
[Outro music – 50 eggs]