The beginnings of a podcast…

So I guess I decided to start a podcast. But before I have recorded even one episode, I have started this website/blog. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in case you haven’t already figured that out from the first two sentences. Its not like I set out to have a podcast. Its not like I went out in search of specific pieces of equipment I needed in order to do this. What happened was sort of by accident. Let me explain…

I play guitar a little bit. I say a little bit because I mostly sit around strumming by myself. I’m not in a band, never have been, nor do I expect to be invited into one anytime soon. I do this in the “music room”of my house. In any other suburban single family home like mine the room would be called a bedroom. One of the four this house has to offer. But, I don’t have any kids and I only need one bedroom for sleeping, so this bedroom became the music room. I keep my guitars in here and a couple amps. I added a desk so it doubles as sort of an office with my laptop and a printer. Over the years, with playing guitar, I have acquired gear that gave me the best bang for my buck. I’m not exactly cheap. I actually love spending money. Just ask my wife. But I really love getting a great value for the money I spend. One way I accomplished that about 10 years ago was I bought a little stomp box/effects pedal/amp modeling doohickey that I could plug the guitar into and get thousands of different tones and effects. Hours upon hours of fun! If I went out and bought individual pedals and amps and speaker cabinets I would have spent thousands and thousands of dollars for what the doohickey approximates fairly well in my estimation (at least for my purposes/skill level). And if that wasn’t enough bang for my buck, with this doohickey came a CD, and on that CD is some free recording software. Its not Pro Tools, but its perhaps not too unlike Pro Tools. OK some of you will be yelling at me about how its nothing like Pro Tools and you’re probably right. But when you open the program you can see all of the little sliding fader things and about a million buttons that I don’t know what the hell any of them do. Its like a recording studio on your computer. Neat! So, I set that aside…..besides how do you plug a guitar into a computer? My laptop doesn’t have a 1/4’’ jack….I think the doohickey plugs in with a USB but is that how you get the music into the recording thing? Who knows right? Certainly not I. So for the last 10 years I would play guitar for a little while, then put it down for a few months, then pick it back up. Clearly, its just a hobby. Playing guitar, when I’m inspired, is sort of meditative for me. I can escape the world for a while and maybe create something cool that didn’t exist before. But I never messed with the recording software for the last decade I’ve owned it.

Today, by the way, is Christmas Eve 2019. 364 days ago (that’s Christmas 2018) I got a really cool present from my dad: a microphone. Cool! I never had a microphone before and this one seemed quite nice. You could just tell it was a quality thing and not a cheap piece of crap. Thanks, Dad! My dad always gives great gifts for Christmas. His theory is to get people what they would never go get for themselves. That is genius. I’m always thinking about what people would want or need, not what they would never think of. I need to change that because the way my Dad thinks can stimulate inspiration where nobody saw it coming. But wait, what do I do with this microphone? I have an old reel-to-reel tape recorder (also given to me by Dad; he bought it new in the 70s) so I guess I could plug straight into that thing and record myself on some 10-inch tapes. Or I could plug the mic into my guitar amp and just sing horribly through the house, when my wife was at work, of course. So that’s what I did. I may have also pretended to be a stand-up comedian a few times but that is a whole other story. Then, last week I was getting ramen at this great little place near where we used to live a couple years ago. Right next door to the ramen place is a pawn shop which is a regular stop after I fill myself with more pork belly than should ever be allowed. I had bought stuff there before, including one of my acoustic guitars. Well this time I noticed they had some sort of a box in the case with all the guitar pedals and it clicked! This box is exactly what I need to plug a microphone or an instrument into a computer. An ‘‘interface!’’ It has 1/4’’ inputs and a USB output…..I suppose it takes the analog audio signals from a microphone or a guitar and converts them to little digital 1’s and 0’s, and sends those through a USB to the computer? That must be it. Eureka! It worked! For $40 I got this little box, connected the mic to it and connected it to the computer and started up that old ProTools like software. After a few hours of fucking around and pressing buttons I figured out how to record and even play it back. No way!

As it turns out, like many of you, I have been listening to podcasts a lot for the past 5 or so years, ever since I got a paid subscription to a music streaming service. Since then I have found podcasts to be a very interesting medium. You can say whatever the fuck you want. You don’t have commercial breaks. You decide what to talk about. You decide when you want to do one and when you want it to end. Being the control freak (my wife calls it that, I prefer Freedom Lover) that I am, I was intrigued. I also have a lot of opinions. So when I accidentally discovered that I had acquired all, or most, of the necessary gear to have a podcast, I pressed record….

A Fist From Your Face……What kind of name is that? Well to me its sort of a double entendre. First, on the surface, it kind of sounds like someone might be about to be punched in the face. We’ve all wanted to do that at one time or another. Or maybe someone has a metaphorical fist coming out of their face. Like maybe their words hit you like a left hook. That’s a powerful image. The second part of the double entendre is a bit more literal and technical. You see, in other parts of my life, I have made friends with a number of people in the field of broadcasting. Both radio and TV. And I have been in a proper radio station studio, in front of a mic, on more than one occasion. And this is what they tell you: try to keep the microphone about ‘‘a fist from your face’’ so your mouth is not too close nor too far away. For whatever reason that stuck in my head and it was the first thing I could think of when I was deciding on a name for this podcast. Instead of listing 10,000 other shitty names and being indecisive like a teenager trying to think up the perfect band name, I just went with the first thing. Welcome to A Fist From Your Face.