Well, last May 17 I had some friends over to play some music in the room above my garage.   I had fixed the room up to look like a bar.   Suddenly, I remembered that I had an old Radio Shack boom box in one of my closets with some built in microphones that went straight to the cassette tape.   I looked around and tried to find a chromium tape, but since I couldn’t find one, I had to settle for the dolby noise reduction that was build into the tape deck.   Last week I had remembered the tape and used my old computer with a SoundBlaster card, so I had the idea of putting the analog audio on a computer.   The old computer uses a Celeron processor with about 125 mb of memory – it had linux on it so it would run at all.   I think it was something like RedHat 6.X or 7.X, but I’m not sure.   In searching thru the applications that might have something to do with sound, I found one called ‘Audacity’, which I could use to take the analog tape outputs and put them in the computer.   It pretty much filled up the hard drive.  I was really happy to see that it seemed to have worked, so I made an MP3 so I could put it on the web (plus, I needed the space back on my hard drive).   Since it was recorded above my garage, I decided to put it on garageband.com.

Here is the link:

http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSgZ1GxZ2E

(you may want to just download the MP3, because it seems like it skips a lot when I try to play it from GarageBand).

I’d be interested in hearing opinions from any of the people on this list about how you think it sounds.

-Mike Mazarick

PS – Do I remember correctly that Paul Hindemith was a bebop jazz player?   I can’t remember if he played sax or guitar….   I was surprised he stopped by and said “Hello”.   I thought he had died on the bandstand of a heart attack while on a gig a long time ago.