An honest-to-gosh Nessie in Santa Cruz?

This certainly won't be news to anyone with a serious interest in cryptozoology, but the average Californian (and particularly a friend of OCR) might be intrigued to learn that the Loch Ness Monster washed ashore in Santa Cruz in 1925, and its skull remains there to this day. Or more accurately, some denizen of the Monterey Submarine Canyon (the frigid depths of which rival Loch Ness in its unfathomable mystery) had the misfortune to surface and die near what is now Natural Bridges State Beach. The cause of death is circumstantially assumed to have been mauling by sea lions; the body was discovered by one Charles Moore. 85 years later the taxonomic identity of this creature has yet to be conclusively pronounced. The official story is that the beast in question was a Baird's beaked whale, despite possessing an elongated neck, no teeth, no visible blowhole, and an anomalously short spine and tail. After his initial analysis of the corpse in 1925, the prominent and quite credible naturalist E. L. Wallace concluded it to be some kind of herbivorous plesiosaur.





The bulbous forehead and rubbery skin suggest a cetacean to me, but I've never seen a plesiosaur; have you? Mammalness and reptility aside, the bigger question for us is the connection between this Nessie and our own, who as you know also resides in Santa Cruz where she performs with Nessie & Her Beard and Gay Genius. Given the global scarcity of Nessies, the presence of two in the same town seems far beyond the domain of random coincidence. The least interesting possibility is that our Nessie (or whoever named her) is well-versed in local folklore and selected the nickname in tribute to Moore's beach monster, but the link may run much deeper than that. How old is Nessie? When did she arrive in Santa Cruz? I wouldn't be the first to suggest that our friend Nessie is an immortal shapeshifter. Could she be the offspring of Moore's monster? Or perhaps its mate? Is it not possible that the corpse Moore found was merely some kind of exoskeleton cast off by a being that still walks among us? If you run into Nessie you should ask her.

Great Golfer

Yo,

This is your boy Scott from that goofy band Seabird Station. We spent a day in August shooting photos for Great Golfer, our upcoming release on Orchestral Colour Records. To celebrate, we've decided to post some rejects from that shoot. Enjoy!

Restoring an Old Mixer part 3

In addition to the Studiomaster 4 into 8, I've got some other dusty old 19" rack gear. So for the last part of this series, I built a cheap and simple rack to hold my now-fully-functioning mixer and other rack units. This was accomplished in no time at all thanks to the assistance of my dear friend Varun (aka Zebra, Benjamin Sisko & Space Trash). It's made out of wood (3 pieces) held together with L-brackets. For mounting the gear, we screwed threaded metal inserts into the wood corresponding to the holes on standard rack rails. It turned out good! Check the pictures. I've got a link here to download a little mp3 of my favorite drum machine (SCI Drumtraks) with EQ/pan/effects applied to individual drum sounds using the mixer. In case anybody is curious the other rack units from top to bottom are Ibanez DUE400, Zoom Studio 1204 and Kawai XD-5 (my secret weapon!).

-> Download the MP3!


Looks pro man!


Light it up!


Most of the cords are hidden.


Replaced missing slider knobs with red screw protectors.


The End.

Restoring an Old Mixer part 2

It's time to discuss the Studiomaster 8 into 4 once more! This project has evolved into something more spectacular (part 3 coming soon) but for now, let's talk about what it took to get this mixer working again! It shouldn't take too long because the fix was simple. I posted previously that the mixer's LED VU meters were malfunctioning. This symptom led us to discover the real problem. My brother Steve (who also gave me the mixer) deserves props for this one. He determined (via science) that the LED's circuit was not receiving enough voltage (neither was anything in the mixer). We later realized that the Studiomaster mixer, being British, was simply not set for American wall outlets. This turned out to be true, although it was not set for European outlets either (strange). There was an extremely difficult to locate method for switching the voltage to 120. It involved pulling out a square piece of plastic located on the back of the mixer (which contained a fuse) and rotating it to the proper setting. Beyond that, all I did was clean the noisy potentiometers (104 knobs and 12 faders). The pots were all a pain but the slider pots were really messed up. I took each of them apart, cleaned their parts, and removed bits of broken plastic. Stay tuned for part 3, the satisfying and flabbergasting conclusion to Restoring an Old Mixer.


See the tiny hole on each pot? That's where you squirt DeoxIT!


Look Ma -- No knobs!


The Faders were disassembled for cleaning.


Check out these guts.


Each channel has its own identical circuit.

Restoring an Old Mixer part 1

Some number of years ago my spectacular brother managed to acquire a free semi-operational mixer from a club in Minnesota known as The Cave. Needless to say, It's been collecting dust in my parents' garage for years. It's a 1980 Studiomaster 8 into 4. The name pretty much sums up how it works. It's got 8 input channels and 4 output channels. Each input can be sent to any output or combo of outputs. All 12 channels have a fantastic EQ section. Here's what Studiomaster's website says about it:

"Lots of features, good audio specification and the first departure for the company from VU meters to a more rugged LED bargraph 'ladders' for the metering. It could be used as a desk top mixer or rack mounted and with all the connectors at the rear many sound and Audio Visual companies made it their standard audio console."

Funny that it should mention the "rugged" LED meters because those are definitely broken on my unit. Props to Studiomaster for having a history page dedicated to their legacy products. This kind of information is invaluable to collectors of refuse like myself. This post is just an introduction to what is going to be a very exciting series on my latest project which is to restore this mixing console. It's exactly what I need to produce hot tracks for Orchestral Colour Records. More to come including better pictures!


LED "ladders" look cool but are BROKEN.


Check out my shag carpet.

Career Goals

This summer I've been job searching to find a future career. I've narrowed it down to a few options.

My dream is to write a song cool enough to become a children's game.

If I can't accomplish that, I would settle for coming up with an awesome instrumental with a dance to it. Like this one:

Those are my career goals.

-Tomi