GOSSIP SITES

There are plenty of choices out there when it comes to gossip sites. Sites like Eonline, Perez Hilton and TMZ all have great late breaking content as well as archived material. But if you’re looking for content that's a little less mainstream yet relevant, try these sites.

OMG - offers extensive gossip content and features a dedicated video section along with photos, written news and a blog. The video section highlights some of the most recent celeb stories including current and past American Idol contestants and the like. They have a great keyword map on the right that allows you to quickly click on videos OMG considers to be “Hot Topic”.

Pop Eater is similar to OMG in that they specialize in all the latest gossip from the biggest stars of today (people like Katy Perry, the cast of Twilight, Brad Pitt etc.). Popeater has an easy and visually comfortable site that mixes news stories, pictures and videos.

Star Pulse takes things a step further and breaks down their video category into music, television and movie sub-sections. Each sub-section contains a boatload of vids, all with deep and thorough coverage of their title subject. The music category for example will cover big stories and events like the latest Michael Jackson developments as well as small stories like Girls In Bikinis and the Human Synthesizer (what?). Anyway, it’s worth a visit if you want a big choice of quick and easy gossip news with videos.

The Smoking Gun does not offer any recent gossip news but if you’re looking for something with a vintage flair to spice up your imaging then this is the place to be. They feature archive footage from some of the biggest celebs and stories of the old days. The video section will show things that back in the day may have been scandalous, controversial, compelling or at least interesting. The audio has a that great old sound and the site is easy to navigate, making your audio foraging experience very easy.

VIRAL CANADIANS

This video is awesome. It was shot in one take by students at the University of Quebec at Montreal. We're linking to it because it makes you wanna pull an all-nighter and do something hugely creative.

viral canadian vid

UNREADABLE DEATH METAL BAND LOGOS

We humbly admit we didn't get any of these. Perhaps your ability to decipher the unreadable is better than ours. Czech it out.

METALSUCKS

MIC/PREAMP QUICK TIP

This doesn't get talked about much but, the input impedance of your preamp should be 10 times the output impedance of your mic. So, a mic with an output impedance of 50 ohms would go well with an input impedance of 500. A good match usually means the best performance but, of course, your mileage may vary.

Higher end preamps often include switchable input impedance to the get the best out of a variety of mics.

ZIP A MONTH

We're streamlining our website. You'll no longer see the archive/update category. We're replacing it with custom tools that let you grab any month's worth of audio from any publishing year. A video is worth a thousand words so, check out this tutorial. For the large version, in glorious HD go to youtube.

TAPESTOP EFFECT

Have you ever tried to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without peanut butter? We haven’t done any extensive studies, but we suspect it can’t be done.

Similarly, we believe it might be nearly impossible to create radio imaging that does not use the infamous sound of the “tape stop effect”. Slowing audio down to a complete stop, or it’s opposite, speeding up to normal from a complete stop.

Rather than spending huge amounts of time having to transfer audio to an old analog deck to create this effect, there are many audio plug-in options out there, some are expensive, and some are cheap. Thus we present our list for the “economical challenged” producer.



PRO TOOLS:

Vari-Fi, one of the plug-ins included in the free Di-Fi bundle that is included with Digidesign’s Pro Tools software. It is very basic, fast and sounds great.
http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=115&itemid=1009

WINDOWS:

PITCH BENDER, the super handy plug-in that comes with Adobe Audition, let’s you draw custom pitch curves on a time graph. This is should be standard in every DAW on every platform.

TAPESTOP, is a free and very simple, VST only effect that is recommended on many online forums.
http://www.kvraudio.com/get/826.html


GLITCH, on the other hand is a crazy sounding plug-in, with tape stopping as only one of it’s many audio mangling options.
http://illformed.org/plugins/glitch/




MAC:
TURNTABLIST, is one of several cool plugin’s from the minds over at Smartelectronix . You have to load samples into the Turntablist plugin and trigger the sounds from a keyboard or other midi controller, so it can be a bit clunky to learn at first. The results after learning this plugin can be very inspiring when you combine live playback at various pitches while spinning knobs on the interface.
http://destroyfx.smartelectronix.com/audiounits.html

EFFECTRIX, is not a free AU plugin, but since GLITCH is VST only on PC we have to mention this option. Tapestop is not it’s best feature though. Stuttering and mangling audio quickly is really what it does best.
http://www.sugar-bytes.de/content/products/Effectrix/index.php

SPEED FADES, is a new tool that is built into the FLEX TIME features in LOGIC 9. Suffice to say, a couple of Logic geeks we know are excited.
http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/whats-new/#flex-time

RETAIL RADIO HUNT

Since we're big radio fans at The Bag, we like to have radios almost everywhere in our daily lives. One of us recently discovered the need to have a portable radio to drag around the yard or garage for projects. The need was simple, a cheap, light, easy to carry AM/FM radio with no bells and whistles that takes minimal batteries. So it was off to the local major chain stores. Should take about five minutes right?

Not so simple. There are all kinds of mutations on the shelves, even a model or two still with cassette and/or cd but nothing plain and simple. That made us flash on a mental image of hand held transistor radios. These were the standard device that so many radio people grew up listening to under the pillow immediately after their parents called lights out. With only 9volts of power and one band (AM of course) you could listen to stations skipping off the atmosphere from hundreds of miles away. The web kinda does that for you now but, it's not quite the same in the garage. You don't want your laptop out there since you'll be flinging paint, oil and hot snowboard wax around. That seven dollar transistor radio, however, took a beating, went everywhere and seemed to last forever.

Those radios of old are literally still going as we discovered with a couple of cool websites. Check out http://www.transistor.org/ (Sarah's Transistor Radios) or http://www.8-track-shack.com/ . The vintage radios there are a total gas. When is someone going to make a laptop for 7 dollars that lasts forever?