Man. If mixing boards could talk. "Hey mate, do you know you have the F-IN BEATLES in there?" ""This could be the best Rock And Roll I've ever mixed from a band made of LED" "OHMIGOSH Just spike me with 220, this Hendrix Guy...""Roll me another "J" for this song "Truckin"" "I'm GAGA over this LADY" "I'm really DOWN for this SYSTEM" Okay, I'll stop. This board is more like... "Why are you wearing that spaghetti pot on your head?" "Why would I want Breakfast at Uncle Louies?" "OH! You're EM1 and He's EM2 so you're BOTH OF 'EM...hahaha.." "Olson NWS, who? Lubin? Get out of my store!" "Awwww Ricochet, not another Radiolawn show..."

Gemini's finest. A basic "Disco Mixer", that was my main mixing board for years and years. Way back when I got an actual "band" called "Unedible Two", I started recording by having a tape recorder and plugging the outputs of musical devices directly into the recorder. Okay if you wanted to record it directly, bad if you then wanted to add vocals while you were recording said musical devices. The audible "click" as you plugged in the microphones to your dual input jacks just didn't make it a "good" recording. Enter this mixer. $100 from your local Olson NWS store next to Leathers Deli in the Fairview Park Shopping Center. See Walt for photos.

Who knows why these were carried. Gemini was at the time making "pro" stuff that ranged from okay to "check those speakers before they leave to make sure they work." I got this mixer and was off to the recording races. A Sanyo tape deck, Gemini condenser microphones, tons of adapters and connectors, and we were a band.  Plus, I recorded my solo stuff "Singin Inside A Bucket" was the aforementioned song where I used my mom's big spaghetti pot over my head as an unusual way to alter my voice. Want to hear it? Nahhhh. It's in the vault.  It was used as an alt-board when I had my real chance at obscurity "Spudlok", but my band mate had a better consumer board that had separate stereo selectors for two of his channels, which was high tech to me. 

Later this board became the workhorse to recording my "Radiolawn" show. At least 150 shows were banged out on this board. I do remember when Boomer and I tried to run a pirate station at a convention we were at how BAD this board was. Take a FM transmitter and run it through the cheese cloth that is this board and you have more HUMMMMMM than Pigpen's harmonica. (Okay Dead Heads, I'm sorry for that one.)

In bad need of some rewiring and maybe some shielding, I got a new board that had all the fancy bells and whistles and this was relegated to my turntable pre-amp. That was until I went alt-Windows and my studio went "HOOWEE". You see, the new computer didn't play too well with what I was used too, and that meant it became very tough to record in that state. Causing me to go old school and set up an old style "Alt Studio".

Gee, that was two computers ago. Look at the size of that BOX! A man BUILT THIS, it's Winners EXPEE.  It's a NON USB WHEEL MOUSE! GASP! Do you know how much that antique is WORTH? You mean that computer only has THREE USB Ports and they are ALL ON THE BACK OF THE MACHINE? Where is the rock you got this from under? Didn't they bury these in the desert like Atari E.T. Cartridges? Wait! Under that BOX! Hiding in PLAIN SIGHT! Is that a cheap scanner so obscure that ALT WINNERS never heard of a DRIVER? It hooks in with what? A Serial Port???? You talkin' CHEERIOS Here?  PS2 all the way on that keyboard and mouse. Way to score quality!

Well, the picture doesn't say all of that, but I had to go back a few generations of computer and set it up in the basement to make my "Alt Studio". Why? Because IT WORKED! I remember getting this computer from Boomer because it was faster and could show video like the early You Toobs. I watched the live internet only broadcasts from Hurricane Katrina on this computer. More important, when I turned it on, set up to record, I recorded and the show came out like I wanted. No "that's not what I wanted" or "why won't this work?" or "why is it doing that" or 'work...damn you..just WORK..."

Yes, while people floated on the boxes of "Spap Ooop" from the flooded A&P down Bourbon street, I watched it all unfold with this computer from the comfort of my Yuengling fuelled central nervous system using "Alt -" Samsung's finest 17" viewing device. It was only my second monitor, first being a Packard Bell 12" "orphan"  monitor. ("Orphan" because it was broken away from an entire system so it didn't have an official model number.  I found out later from an FCC registry site that it was made by our good friends at TATUNG.) Ahhh, the memories of how Yuengling used to come in 22oz "Bomber" bottles and how you could peel off the clear plastic labels and put them on other things. This one lasted the longest. "Samtron" brand was Samsung's attempt to make cheaper stuff to sell to suckers like me. Isn't that what Samsung was about anyway back when?  My monitor never blew up....

So there it was save for the portable CD player I hooked into the alt board to play the Radiolawn intro/outro and other junk like background music. Yes, I know, I was using a system capable of multi tracking but that takes TIME. I always try to do my shows as live as they possibly can be with a minimal amount of post production. What? Am I going to save that really good belch or me freaking out "work you piece of S*IT! WORK!" for future generations to realize I was a lazy ass buffoon with a microphone that smelled like a Yuengling? Yeah. Of course I used my beer boxes to help me set this mess up. I even recorded three episodes down here before Boomer game me a really small desktop computer with Winners XP on it. I was able to have an alt computer in my studio again so I didn't have to drag mikes and equipment down to my basement and endure seconds of extra processing time while the computer was "saving data".  Wahhhhhhhh! You could use the exercise.

Oh yeah, Christmas is coming... So good you didn't pack away those Christmas lights. You can just pick them up off the floor and hang them back where they were outside in just a few weeks. Dumb-ass. -Ric