australia

so about a week ago we did a one-off fly date....to australia. ya, australia. 30 hours of travel each way for a 50 minute set? sure! sign me up! for those of you with the empathic ability to sense sarcasm in the written word, just relax, i'm kidding. i love australia. seriously. i love the accent, the weather and the fact that they had radio stations that play both christian music and regular music. and i don't mean like here in the US where a christian station will play a Fray song once a day to appeal to a larger audience.

how many of you are scared of flying? ok, well it's a 14 hour flight from LA to Sydney so if you ever find yourself on that flight maybe pull a B.A. Baracus and sedate yourself. i don't expect anybody under 23 to get that reference.

we had a day off in Sydney which was actually a lot of fun. we were about to go walk on the famous bridge at the harbor (i forgot what it was called), but then we found out it costs almost $200 a person to walk up onto a bridge. now i know us christian musicians make loads of money (sarcasm empaths, i'm looking at you), but that seemed a little steep for us. see what i did there? walking up a high bridge?....too steep?....ok i'm reaching now.

here's me taking a picture of @adamagee who's taking a picture of @briancalcara

well, the next morning we had to take a short flight to Melbourne on a ghetto little ariline called Tiger Airways. it was kind of a ghetto airline. think southwest airlines' backwoods trailer trash cousin. anyway, remember this. i'll come back to it.

so here's a picture of the picturesque land where the festival was held:

the whole time i couldn't help but think that this place looks like the sheep hex in The Settlers of Catan. for those of you who don't know what that is, do yourself a favor and buy the boardgame and join the sensation.

i didn't get a shot of the crowd but i did get one of us doing an interview:

shortly after the interview we all got to meet a longtime Stellar Kart fan @innieG who actually took a long flight from Perth to come see the show. she is pretty awesome.

so anyway, about 4 hours after we finished our show we had to get out of bed so start our journey home. well, remember our friends at Tiger Airlines? well, at the airport they decided to screw us over with about $850 in extra baggage fees that we didn't have to pay on the way there. now i wouldn't bore you with a story of something so mundane as an airline screwing over a passenger. what was interesting was that there was a documentary camera crew there who heard our conversation and started filming the whole thing. apparently they're doing a documentary specifically on this airline because they're known for screwing people over as well as canceling 30% of all their flights at any given time. and of course, i didn't want to pass up an opportunity to ham it up a bit for the camera. once i realized there was no way to talk them out of the fees i then directed my energy to thinking of catchy sound bites the film crew could use. however i don't think that one of them will make the cut. at one point i asked them if i should bend over, grab my ankles and make it official. this documentary will apparently be airing on national tv at some point. let's just hope we aren't painted as the ugly americans in the editing.

so anyway, australia was awesome. hopefully next time we can stay a little longer. the morale of this story - if you need to get to australia be ready for the long haul, buy settlers of catan, and if you're getting screwed over, figure out a way to make it fun.

i'm noticing a pattern

would you all like to know what i hate??????

THIS!!!!

for the uninitiated, i will enlighten you.

that, my friends, is Qdoba queso - and i must clarify that i LOVE Qdoba queso more than a fat kid loves, ummm, well, queso. wow i meant that to be a metaphor but it turned out to be depressingly literal and autobiographical. but enough about me getting old and fat. what really melts my cheese is that when i go to Qdoba and get their queso, they NEVER fill it up. seriously, even if i ask them to fill it up, they REFUSE. i mean, what am i paying for? seriously, it's $3.79. this isn't a side of guac. if you bought a can of coke and you opened it and it was only half full, you'd be pissed too, right?

attention corporate entity that owns Qdoba - please fill up the cup of queso or i will refuse to....well, i won't make idle threats that we all know i won't follow through with. but that doesn't change the fact that it makes me mad.

anyway, i had to get that off my chest. this weekend we spent some time in Washington, DC on a day off which happened to be my first time in the Capitol. i mean, i couldn't believe i was in the same city where our forefathers walked; great pillars of society like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Nicholas Cage. here's me on the Capitol steps:

wow, it's like i'm 8 years old visiting the Lincoln sites again back in Springfield. And here's the view looking down the national mall towards the Washington monument.

hmmm..is that a....well, nevermind.

and here's a nuclear missile on display at the air and space museum:

i'm noticing a pattern in these pictures. every picture has something in it shaped like a....yup, i think we can definitely say that washington is the most phallic city in the nation. but that's no big revelation. it's common knowledge that Washington is full of dicks.

ZING!!!

thanks. i'll be here all week. try the veal and tip your waitresses.

Mic Shootout - Results

ok ok i've got people on my facebook and in the blog comments wanting to know the answers in the mic shootout. according to google analytics the spike i get when i post a blog lasts about 3 days so i would be doing myself and my blog a disservice if i didn't wait...haha, well, that and i wanted to keep you all in suspense.

Mic A was the expensive mic, the u67 through a neve pre and a blue stripe 1176.

Mic B was the cheaper Rode NT2 through a vintech x81 and a distressor.

first of all, i gotta give props to two people who picked it exactly - my old buddy from college Stephen Hudson from www.TheBusyBoxStudio.com. he owns both mics and knows them well because he was able to tell them apart.

the other guy is @nathantbass who not only picked it, but felt confident enough to actually post his name and not post anonymously. he got it right. the high end gives it away. more about that later...

for those of you who picked incorrectly, don't feel bad. i actually agree with you that Mic B (the cheap one) actually sounds better. i would have picked the same thing. if the majority of people agree that it sounds better, isn't that what counts? i'm just amazed that the cheap mic even stands up to the expensive one. don't get me wrong - if i get rich i'll definitely have some for my mic collection, but unless you're buying old tube mics as an investment strategy, why pay more??

back to the mic differences - as nathan pointed out, the top end gives it away. newer mics seem to have more top end which usually translates to it sounding "clearer". although the u67 has a richer mid range without sounding nasally.

another thing to consider is that you gotta find the right tool for the right job. i have in my possession a borrowed Blue Baby Bottle mic. on most voices it doesn't sound great, but one week i recorded a rock band and did a quick test to see which sounded best. the guy has an interesting and different sound to his voice and the baby bottle actually sounded the best. so for me to say that one mic is absolutely superior to another is just not true. i've got another mic that i would consider too bright for most uses, except on things like acoustic guitar where i tend to add a little on the top end. it really depends on the application and how that mic compliments what you are recording.

but the lesson remains that more expensive doesn't necessarily mean something is better.

Mic Shootout - Expensive vs. Cheap

here's an interesting experiment for all the techie guys out there reading. and actually, even if you aren't technically minded you might find this interesting. below i've posted two links. both are short clips of my wife, @superchicktrish singing. One mic is an $8,000 vintage Neumann u67 ran through a vintage Neve 8068 console mic pre and then compressed with a blue stripe 1176 - the blue stripe is thought by many people to be the best vocal compressor there is. chris lord alge, the top mix guy in the US, says he uses it on almost all lead vocals.

and for those who have no idea what i'm talking about, here are some pictures:

Neumann u67

Neve 8068 Concole

UA 1176 Blue Stripe

the other mic is a $200 rode NT2 run through a Vintech x81 (a modern copy of the Neve 1081) and an Empirical Labs Distressor (which claims to emulate classic compressors). and here's the accompanying pictures:

Rode NT2

Vintech x81

Empirical Labs Distressor

i've mixed them up and labelled one Mic A and the other Mic B. listen to both and post a comment with what you think is the expensive mic and which one is the cheap mic. to vote, just leave a comment telling which one you think is which.

Mic A

Mic B