SteveCastellano.com

Now selling gear. Synths, mixers, other stuff. Dig in. Follow the link on the right under “Pages”.

People who say “you have to pick your battles” never do. Discuss.

The great Artie Roth is pictured mid-solo during Meh’s debut performance at C’est What in the spring of 1998.

Photo courtesy Gord Fynes

Two more ringtones, not BBC World themed but with more of a laid-back vibe. They’re the same piece of music really, one with a lead and one just backing tracks. One purposeful, one pensive. And neither so obtrusive that you couldn’t use them on those rare occasions when you absolutely had to have your phone nearby while you were otherwise, oh, I dunno, gettin busy.

Lazy 1
Lazy 2

What’s next? Free animated emoticons? Punch-the-monkey banner ads?

Well it’s true. Mostly. “Free ringtone” is more like it though, considering how long “create more ringtones for the V710” has been on my to do list and how many I’ve created so far (2). And why aren’t you getting both, I hear you greedy monkeys asking? Because the first one is my primary incoming call ringtone, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to even flinch for a call that’s not for me, meaning that there’s one ringtone created with arcane tube synth technology that won’t get programmed into any phone but mine.

This ringtone is the one I use for incoming text messages. It’s called BBCWorld1 as a tip of the electronic music hat to Bill Bailey who drew my attention to the BBC World News theme in one of his stand-up DVDs. It doesn’t really sound anything like the BBC news theme, but the germ of the idea was that periodic sine tone (or “pip” as I believe it’s called in the Queen’s English) that sails over top of the whole mess and gives you that “incoming message” vibe. If I offer up more ringtones, I expect there to be an ongoing BBC World News theme… uh… theme.

So here it is in MP3 format, how you get it into your phone is up to you.

And if there are any synth geeks out there, yes that is a stock MS2000 patch underpinning the whole thing. Killing an afternoon programming my own multi-layered synth patch to use in a ringtone just isn’t something I could look back on and be proud of.

Edit: For those of you who have already pulled that down, I’ve uploaded a slightly revised version with a better fade and slightly smaller file size – a 160kbps bitrate MP3 is perhaps overkill on even the best phones.

Every time I see the Eiffel Tower I think of de Maupassant.

When I was in high school I had a sketch pad with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the cover, and I wrote beside it, “just as de Maupassant ran when he saw the Eiffel Tower, because he feared it would poison his mind.” I don’t remember where I read that quote, though I think it might have been Huxley. I was a precocious youth, you see, though not intellectually curious enough to try and learn more about de Maupassant himself. And 20 years later, I still haven’t read any of his work.

And if Guy were alive today I’m sure that would piss him off mightily. Not because I think he was of such a delicate and insecure nature that my ignorance of his volume of work would offend him. But more likely because the only reason I ever think of him is the Eiffel Tower, which he loathed quite eloquently. He was one of its most vocal detractors, having once said something to the effect that one can get the best view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower, for the simple reason that it is the only vantage point in Paris from which the tower itself is not visible. Le snappe.

So today’s criticism entry is not a criticism, but a warning to critics. Be careful what you criticize. Or perhaps don’t criticize anything too well. Or if you must criticize stuff, remember to do other things that people will remember you for. Ideally in English.

Photo courtesy Francis Mariani.