Meta Bates

When I was 11 I made my very first recording. It was 1987 and the technology choices for recording were, how to put this, almost non-existant. So I did what any smart 11 year old would do, I improvised! Let me walk you through the history of my recording career. Don’t worry, I’ll make it brief.

The Boom Box.

I had a two cassette boom box, it was a beast of a machine. It was a ‘portable’ machine, meaning that it took 8 D batteries and a burly man named Attila to carry it. My recordings started simply on this machine. I would use the built in microphone to record my awful wailings and terribly out of tune acoustic guitar.

As my love of bands like the Beatles grew, so did my desire to capture my musical legacy the way I desired. It was around age 12 or so that the true experimentation began. I started playing around with using different input devices. I acquired a rather terrible Radio Shack microphone for the princely sum of $19.95. It sported, and I kind you not, a “built-in on/off switch”. That was actually a feature of this microphone. Actually it was the only feature of this microphone! My other trick for recording was to use a pair of headphones as a microphone. Did it sound good? Absolutely not! But it worked.

While the ‘quality’ of the recordings got marginally better with my new microphone and headphone combinations, I was lacking the studio trickery I so desired. I needed multitrack. If the Beatles had it, why didn’t I? Of course I couldn’t afford an actual multitrack recorder at this age, so again, improvisation proved key. I realized that if I recorded me singing and playing (at the same time), I could then pop that tape into the top player and record me playing and singing again while the first tape plays back into the second tape. How did it sound? How do you think it sounded??

The 4 Track!

At the tender age of 14 I managed to squeeze together enough allowance and saved up enough birthday/Christmas presents to get a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder. It was incredible! Here was what I had wanted all along. I could now discretely record all the wonderful parts (up to four) I could dream up!

I felt like the Beatles making Sgt. Pepper. Never before had anyone wielded such recording power (except for everyone else who had)! I was George Martin. I learned what every last knob on that machine did. I knew all of it’s tricks. I played with the varispeed knob. I recorded backwards parts. I was crazy.

Then I made a huge discovery! I could mix the 4 tracks down to stereo, pop that mix down back in the 4 track and then have another 2 tracks to play with! Brilliant!! The world was my musical oyster, and damn I was rocking it!

The 8 Track!!

When I was 18 years old I took a trip on the green line T to the Guitar Center on Comm Ave in Boston and purchased my musical destiny, a Tascam 488 8-track cassette recorder. Wow! I can still remember that day. Sitting on the T ride back to my house with that box on my lap. Giddy, excited, nervous, anxious, I can’t describe how I felt on that ride. I can say that it felt like it was going to take forever to get home!

I finally got home, rushed out to the little studio room my father and I had built in his garage and proceeded to hook it up. I had a 4 EQs per channel, inserts, sends, cues, all sorts of wonderful things! The sound was better, the quality higher, it even had DBX noise reduction! DBX! I still don’t know what it is, but I get very excited knowing it’s there!

That day I re-recorded a song I had recorded on my 4-track, that song was called, “I and You”. It was a dreadful song that I thought had to be the next big thing. And why wouldn’t it be? I recorded it on an 8-track!

The Computer Age.

In 1996 I moved to Liverpool, England to do my degree in Music. I moved all of my recording equipment across the pond with me. There was no way I was going to go to music college and not have a means to record all the amazing #1 hits I was going to write! The cosmos, on the hand, had slightly different plans for me. In the Spring of 1998 my house was broken into, and everything I owned was stolen, including my beloved 8-track recorder.

My world was shattered. I was a broken and lost man. How could this happen to me? Why Lord? Why?? Thankfully I managed to get a handsome of money from my parent’s insurance company to cover the claims, well, 75% of the total value anyway. Not great, but it was certainly better than nothing.

It was with this insurance money that I bought my own computer. My family had had computers since I was 8 or 9, but this one was mine, and I had plans for it. Since September of 1998 I have been recording music on my computer. Back then it was very difficult, now, it’s incredibly easy. I can record 8 tracks on my iPad should I wish.

So What?

Why am I talking about this now? I was recently doing some work around the house and stumbled across a rather large box full of cassette tapes. When I saw the box it all came flooding back to me. The countless hours spent recording. The incredible amount of songs I wrote, covered, or in most cases just butchered. They were all on these cassettes, and they were fading.

How long could these cassettes last? What would happen to those songs? What if I never heard them again?

Now, I’m under no illusions that these songs are well written, well recorded, or well performed. As a matter of fact, I know it’s the opposite of that. They were poorly written, recorded, and performed. But you know what? They’re mine, and I want to preserve them. That’s why I have undertaken an enormous project to catalog and digitally capture the music on those tapes.

It’s going to be an enormous project, that I know. I’ll do a cassette here, and a cassette there, and eventually I’ll have them all my computer and safely backed up. Will I remix them? Edit them? Release them? Chances are no to all those questions. That’s not really the point. I just want to know that those songs are safe. Maybe I’ll take a couple of them, polish them, and give them a new life with my band, but let’s see what happens, shall we?

I purchased a used Tascam 488 MKII on eBay, and tonight I transferred my first cassette. I’m excited about this project. Hearing these songs again brings up some great memories, and some awful ones. For example, tonight’s cassette contained six recordings. The first five I remember quite vividly. The sixth, however, is clear why I forgot. It was a ‘cover’ of “A Day In The Life” by the Beatles. But it consisted of a click track, a vocal, and 6, yes 6, tracks of drums!!! Oh, during the middle eight of the songs, two of the drum tracks switch to piano!! Why?? That’s a question I would like answered as well.

Anyway, expect a post every now and again about my on going battle with these cassettes. I’m sure there will be some funny, and occasionally horrific, stories to share about the experience.

PS. If anybody out there has some great earplugs they want to lend me, I’ll take them!!

Quite often I get asked why don’t I blog more? Why don’t I tweet more? Why don’t I _fill in the blank_ more. The answer is I’m a busy man. I’m the CTO for a pre-funding startup, www.shortbord.com, the father of two adorable little boys, the lead singer of a Boston-based band, www.myspace.com/colawarvets, and that’s just the big stuff! I have to prioritize what I can spend my time on, and unfortunately some of my open source projects are the first to get the ax.

Why do the open source projects always seem to get the ax? Well, let me start by saying that they don’t always get the ax, but they certainly jump to the top of the list. There are certain libraries I’ve written, cachetastic and configatron, are the two most prominent that I use day in and day out. They will always get the love the deserve. Then there are projects like APN on Rails. I wrote it because I had an iPhone app (no longer available) that I wanted notifications for, and there was nothing else available for Ruby to do the job. The plugin took off like crazy and I was overwhelmed with patches, questions, bugs, etc… That was great, and I was happy to help, for a time, but alas, I haven’t written an iPhone app for ages, and I just don’t have time to maintain a plugin that I wasn’t even using.

A while ago I realized that the best thing for APN on Rails, myself, and for the community was to find someone to take over the project so that it got the love it deserved. I put out the call and the good folks over at PRX (Public Radio Exchange) answered the call. The folks at PRX have written some great iPhone apps, including the very popular “This American Life” app.

So I’m happy to announce that the new official home for APN on Rails is now at: http://github.com/PRX/apn_on_rails. I ask that you continue to show the same support to PRX that you have shown to me over the life of this plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone, and thank you to Rebecca Nesson and the folks over at PRX for picking up the project and giving it renewed life.

I’ve always been a big proponent of Ruby 1.9, I make no bones about it. My question is why wouldn’t you be? It’s faster, more powerful, easier to use, and makes things a lot clearer and cleaner than 1.8. So why then are pretty much all of us still running our applications on 1.8.x? Great question, and as far as I can tell there is really only 1 answer.

That answer? Because no one else is. It’s stupid really, but it’s the truth. We’re all afraid to run our applications in 1.9 because we don’t know many other people that are. Because of that it makes it hard for you to make your application work with 1.9 because all those gems and libraries  you use aren’t 1.9 compatible, so you’re forced to keep running your app on 1.8. And so the cycle continues.

Enter Rails 3.0. Here is a major upgrade to the most prominent web framework in the Ruby community, and I would argue the reason that most of us got into Ruby in the first place. This upgrade will force us all to make some pretty severe changes to our applications to make them fully compatible.  The changes in ActiveRecord alone are so sweeping and massive that we, as a community, are going to have to put some serious time into upgrade our applications. Yet, despite this, we are all going to do it.

Why are we all going to upgrade to Rails 3.0? Because it  looks cool and sexy, and we want those great new features and all those performance enhancements to make our applications run faster. Which leads me back to Ruby 1.9.

In Rails 3.0 they are dropping support for Ruby 1.8.6 and below in favor of Ruby >1.8.7 and >1.9.1. I propose that Rails 3.0 becomes Ruby 1.9 compatible only. Think about it. What a perfect opportunity for us all. We are all going to have to upgrade the libraries and gems we maintain to support Rails 3.0 and we are going to be upgrading our applications to Rails 3.0, so why not go full steam into Ruby 1.9?

There is no better time than now to push forward into the future as a whole community. Let’s put Ruby 1.8 behind and reap the benefits of what Ruby 1.9 has to offer. What do you say? Can we do it? I think we can.

Hey there everyone, recently I have been getting a lot of requests for bug fixes and new features for the APN on Rails gem that I wrote. While I appreciate that the gem is getting a lot of use and helping a lot of people out, I, unfortunately, no longer have the time to maintain the gem.

Recent changes in my career have meant that I have moved away from doing a lot o iPhone development, and because of that I no longer have the time, nor the desire, to keep maintaining a gem I’m no longer using.

So, because of that, I would to find a new home for the APN on Rails gem so that it gets the love and attention it so desires. Are there any takers out there? Is someone willing to take on the ownership of this, apparently, very useful gem? If you are willing to take it on, please let me know and we can workout the details.

Thanks to everyone who has said good things about the gem, and I’m glad that it has helped people get to using push notifications quicker, hopefully, one of you can take this project and run with it. Thanks again.

About.com became the first, that I know about, to review my book, “Distributed Programming with Ruby”. What a great first review to have as well. They rated the book 5 out of 5 stars! The review can be found here.

“Anyone working with distributed programming in Ruby will want this book.”

The only downside they saw in the book, was that they wanted it to be longer! I have to save something for the 2nd edition, don’t I?

If you haven’t purchased yours yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s on sale at Amazon.com right now.

If you have reviewed the book, or know of a review of the book, please pass it along.