Bob Hutko - Extras...
11/16/06
Almost a year later…
I have to say that I’m
excited about the amount of activity my site is seeing… I think maybe the “busted” page got listed in
some people’s blogs or something, because for a
few months there I was getting hundreds of hits on it every month… And even more exciting, more and more people
are downloading “Dear God”,
which I still maintain is the best song I’ve ever made.
Anyway, I got married, started
fixing computers (http://www.ithacacomputerrepair.com) etc, etc… not
a whole lot going on musically.
Well, there are a few things in
the making, but they’re moving slowly.
One that should be done soon is an extension of the ever-popular “busted”
song mentioned above (so all you google searchers for
“Japanese Pornography” have something to look forward to) with a
terrifyingly brilliant guitar solo from Pedro Arroyo.
There’s also the sticky
sweet “Two Miracles” song and “Theoretically I’m in
Love”. The former has a great
chorus and the later has a great first verse, but, well, we’ll see ehre they go…
I notice that Theoretically I’m in Love
was in my last post as well. Maybe I’ll
write one verse in the first hour of every year…
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1/1/06
Happy New Year!! A few things:
#1) An addition to the soundtrack
portfolio. Not a song so much as mood
music…
Bob Hutko – SSkeys[96].mp3 (96k –
1M)
Bob Hutko – SSkeys[160].mp3 (160k – 1.7M)
#2) I’m beginning a new song. I’m thinking about
putting samples up as it progresses, but only if people express interest in
seeing the evolution of a song… It’s called “Theoretically I’m
in Love” and a lot of people are gonna love it…
#3) Believe it or not, I have a discussion
board page almost all ready to go. My
hope is that it could be a forum for feedback so I can make things better… Look for it soon…
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12/30/05
An old, old song… Every once
in in a while I’ll give someone a mix cd of my songs and they’ll come back saying “That
one is so great - I listen to it over and over again!” To
which I respond “The 17 year old song? Let’s Get High? Little Girl? No, no, no… that
other one… How in the World Did it Happen…
Really? I put that one on there? No way… I mean, it’s a good song and all, but I have
such a crappy recording of it it’s not even worth listening to…
Well no more!! (I do hope…)
Bob
Hutko – How in the World 12-30-05[192k].mp3
(6.2M)
Bob
Hutko – How in the World 12-30-05[96k].mp3
(3.1M)
I highly recommend the former, but
you probably already know that. Happy 2006… Get
yourself a good internet connection already!
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12/26/05
Hooray for the holiday
season!! Here is a special present for you: A new version of
Trapdoors of Goodness. I was listening to the Sort of…
album, and I decided that the song isn't done justice.
Someday I'll get Helen to record her awesome harmonies for it...
Bob
Hutko - Trapdoors of Goodness 12-23-05[160k].mp3
(160 k/s ... about 5.8 M)
Bob
Hutko - Trapdoors of Goodness 12-23-05[112k].mp3
(112 k/s ... about 4.0 M)
And the lyrics
Some commentary on it: The old version had what I consider a few fatal flaws in it… the most blatant is the thrown “P” right at the beginning on the word “poets”. I did the original recording in August of 2000 on the John Lennon Songwriting Contest tour bus, where they have a complete recording studio, and I settled for this take after many many tries, one of which included the engineer’s girlfriend showing up with lunch in the middle of the song… The quality is okay, but I feel like in general it sounds a little muffled and I was trying a little too hard with the vocals - a little loungey if you will…
The new one is a lot more
relaxed. I think it shows that I’m working a
lot more with the mic rather than fighting with it…
The very very beginning shows a little something I
will keep working on with the guitar, something a little cleaner and more
rhythmic. I’m going to try to develop it more, but I haven’t worked out the transitions yet.
Little things to notice: I think
I added a lot more power to the bridge (“It’s always been… Then we… Will we…”) both with the vocal timbre
and with the subtle change going lower on the last “will we…”. Also, I
was toying with the chorus. The original is ”Until
we fall… And then we wake up…”, replaced with “When will we fall…
when will we wake up…”. I really really
like the rhythm of “When will we”, especially before “wake up”.
That will definitely stay. Of course you may notice I didn’t
stay consistent with it at all… It’s hard
to think real quickly sometimes while singing and playing and knowing this is
all being recorded, you know?
And the overall sound quality is a
bit of a miracle. The original recording was really muffled, and I
managed to brighten it up a lot. Is this interesting?
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12/19/05
Alright! = I finally got down to work and fixed
the really obvious mistake in the electronic song song
jp2. I was scared for a minute because some of my audio files got lost and I
thought I would never be able to fix the song, but I managed to find them...
whew... ... Sooo, download
the new version here or on the soundtrack
page: Bob Hutko - jp2.mp3
On a somewhat related note, you may notice that
the audio files you download are rather large... you see, most people think
128k/s sounds fine for mp3 audio, but I just don't. I know it would be nice if
download sizes were smaller, but it kills me to hear the flaws in those files
with higher compression, so I set my absolute minimum standards at 192k/s... so
let me know if you think it's important that I put some low quality files up...
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12/14/05
So, are you ready? The first special internet
extra... It's an old song called "In the Meantime" from the album
"What You Really Want". Back in 1997-ish, I went a little crazy for a
few days and during that time I really liked the phrase "in the
meantime", I guess because it implies that there's something really
important going on that we're taking a break from or somehow outside of or that
we were doing and will get back to, and it always applies because it's always
the meantime for something.... This song is kind of a bow to that moment in my
past when I somehow thought it significant to sit for periods of time saying
"in the meantime" over and over again.
"In the meantime, I fuck myself up every
night - all us little people as we live our little
lives - we learn our lines, we play our parts, we play our games with each
other's minds and break each other's little hearts. Wonder if we're good
enough, try to keep on running fast enough just to keep up with all the changes
as we change our minds."
................Bob Hutko - In the Meantime.mp3
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12/13/05
Okay, I finally fixed the soundtrack page so that
it should work with internet explorer as well as with Firefox.
I think the branding is important here, don't you... I like listening to the
electronic stuff much more if I'm trying to imagine what kinds of scenes the
music could go with in a movie or cartoon...
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12/10/05
A Japanese final exam later...
Guess whose website is now searchable on Google?
As of last night they picked up my site. Funnily enough, though, the cached
files that they have for their search engine are those of my OLD site!! So I
guess they're just slow...
I finally ironed out all of the major kinks of the
sight, I think...
-All of the music links now work, including the
ones to the new songs!!
-The pages with pictures should all work in both
Explorer and Firefox now.
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12/09/05
I've been aware for a little while now of some aggregious mixing errors with the song jp2...Could you tell
that the second "distorted horn thingy" is way too loud for the mix?
It's a real shame, because I think it's a really neat little song. Pedro's
guitar solo is perfect, and I ripped up the keyboard solo, if I do say so
myself... but in general, it's a song that I've been meaning to tweak for some
time now, so hopefully I'll get to it soon...
Everyone should also be aware, for the record,
that the song Magnet was a collaboration between
myself and the musical genious known as Andrew
Finkelstein. Credit has frequently not been given where it is due simply
because it didn't look right on the label...
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12/07/05
Okay, I don't have any good extras to throw atcha yet, so instead some words of explanation... For the
record, I do have some ideas of some good songs that I don't put out there so
much, so don't lose hope. In the meantime, feel free to check out the extras
page on the old site *HERE*
Speaking of the site... In an effort to appease
the great gate-keepers of the internet who live in the mysterious land of google, I have changed the way I designed my site
significantly. You see, I really hate HTML. It's very messy and awkward and it
never looks quite like you told it to... maybe I just don't know how to use it.
So instead of using it, I have in the past simply made each page one big
picture with a map of links pasted over it. It works great and always looks
right, but there's not actually any *text* on any of the pages, so the search
engines won't pick it up. Therefore, I put some hidden text on the page which
fooled MSN and Yahoo, but not Google. So now, I'm trying to fool Google into
displaying my page when somebody types "Bob Hutko"
instead of asking "did you really mean Bob DUDKO?" Maybe they're just
picking on me...
The point that I'm trying to get at is that
sometimes the site does funny things. It's google's
fault. That said, know that my site, and the rest of
the internet really, is best viewed with FIREFOX
instead of internet explorer, which you should have gotten rid of long ago
anyway...
Is this better than the "page can not be
displayed" page?
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12/06/05
Today one of my ESL learners said that she had a
word for me to explain to her. I waited while she punched some things into her
Thai-English electronic translator thingy and after a minute she turned the
screen to me...
"ejaculation"
After some discussion, we were able to determine
that a better word for what she meant was "exclamation"