Spin it again.

It never fails. Every time I make a microwave breakfast burrito, the radio station signal goes out. Now everybody in the Central New York DMA knows when I have my morning nosh! Christ on a bike - whatever happened to privacy?


Cousin SmithDid I say piracy or privacy? Strange how similar those two words are. Anyhow, things are heating up here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, home of Big Green. We're furiously hacking away at the strange, strange project that is Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick - a collection of original material attributed to "cousin" Rick Perry, governor of Texas, much as the psalms are attributed to Solomon and "Greensleeves" is attributed to Henry XIII. (It is our way of paying tribute to our cousin ... who is actually only our cousin in the sense that Henry Jones was Dr. Smith's cousin on Lost in Space.) We're busily mixing away, twisting knobs, pushing sliders, kicking antiquated processors in the side. Usual production thing.

You may ask, why don't we automate our mixes? Let a computer handle some of the grunt work? You have a live-in mad scientist, do you not? Why not let him build you an automated mixer? Damn, you're full of questions today. The fact is, we have tried this, using existing technology. Some folks use their iPads or even their phones to do mixes. We have neither, so in the past we have resorted to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a somewhat rusty Core Duo processor and about 8 gigs of RAM. I think his logic board is a little faulty, but that's not usually a problem in music production.

Anyway, the first time we asked Marvin to do a mix for us, we had to hand him back to Mitch Macaphee, his creator, so that he could program some of the nuances into Marvin's tarnished coffee-can of a skull. He really didn't get the idea entirely. In fact, it's a good thing I interrupted him part way through. When I came into the studio, he had stuffed the master tapes of International House into our blender and was about to press the frappe button. Interesting processor treatment.

Well, we can't let THAT happen again. Marvin is banished from mixing. He's got marketing this time around. What could go wrong?

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