Re: Pre heat for roasting!

[btd@carina.cray.com (Bryan Dongray)]

Hi "J.A.Harkness",

I thought this amusing what you said in your statement:

> I posted the other day about how much I wish  'Coffee Homeground'
> would be rerecorded...
	...
> Awaiting a roasting
	     ^^^^^^^^
Obviously, you like coffee!

> I declined to name the song for fear of being lynched but having had
> a number of requests to reveal the mystery song and feeling somewhat
> brave......or foolhardy.......I would reveal what not only do I
> consider to be Kates worst song but one of the worst songs ever
> written  to be.........Babooshka......emphasis on the 'Boo'.

I'm not going to flame you, everyone can have favourites, and
everyone can have un-favourites too. Personally I'd put Babooska
up high on MY list, I like songs that conjure up a scene (or scenes).

You really could have a video of this, not just KB with a double bass
dressed in a black leotard, switching to a "Conan" style warrior for
the chorus, but an actor and an actress sending/reading letters, going
to (say) a cafe to meet, with flashbacks of them being younger eg
getting married, and finishing with her revealing she IS his wife, with
a good final scene of smashing crockery in (say) a kitchen, or maybe at
that cafe.

I've even transcribed that one into MIDI format, along with a few
other KB tunes. The hard part with KB music is getting the extra
sounds like the smashing sound at the end of this song, I finally used
a car crashing and the first 0.1s of a gun ricochet. Another hard sound
example is in Army Dreamers, the rifle clicks, I used a footstep and a
wood stick (I think). You see, General Midi does not have the ability to
have sound samples, *just* those instruments defined in the standard.
They can be played on any note and some parameters can be varied, such
as sustain, volume, pan (stereo position), etc. You also need a good
wavetable chip to get a good sound too, but I suppose you get what you
pay for. Hmmm, Fairlight please! I have to agree with KB that a
computerized drum kit is very mechanical, unless you go in and vary
the timings just a little - a lot to do by hand, for a judgemental gain.

Nice things about MIDI is the size. Whereas a 3 minute, 11kHz stereo WAV
file would be about 4Mb (if 8kHz mono au - only 1.4Mb) a good MIDI file
would usually be about 40k, since it only defines instruments and notes
turning off and on. Here's those I've done, and their sizes:
	armydrea.mid	23651	(only 2834 when zipped)
	babushka.mid	31099	(only 5003 when zipped)
	cldbstng.mid	59650	(only 3044 when zipped)
Does anyone want me to send this somewhere to be put onto (say) a WWW
page for those (who can play MIDI) to download?
They are already on a MIDI ftp site:
	ftp.cs.ruu.nl:/pub/MIDI/SONGS/POP
with the filenames as above (there is also a .DOC file with my comments)
so "whoever" could get them from there and set up their pages reference.

I'll be happy to email to those who want to listen, but do not have a
way of ftp'ing them. Make sure you have a way of decoding and playing
these and (say) if you don't have pkunzip, then tell me (maybe you
have UNIX compress). The above uuencoded messages are "only":
	LINES	BYTES	FILE
	 66	3935	armydrea.zip uuencoded
	115	6925	babushka.zip uuencoded
	 71	4225	cldbstng.zip uuencoded
each line is 61 characters wide.
I will be doing some more, it just takes a while to do each (well).

			Bryan Dongray

PS I thought "babushka" was quite an excellent filename (for a PC and
to do with this song and the artist, but I guess someone else has
already thought of this before me though).