Just For Fun #2

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

From all of us at Metal XOR Studio

Project Spotlight #10: What is Muffin Loaf?

What is Muffin Loaf? It was a snack in the vending machine where Jason works.

It is also the name of the band that played one show where Jason works.

The year was 2003. As a training exercise Jason's department was to design and set up a small performance area that included a sound system, video cameras, and a lighting rig to simulate a show site. They decided that if they were going through all the trouble of setting such an elaborate show they may as well make use of it. So a few of them got together and created a band.

The players were (from left to right in the picture above) Ken on guitar, Harry on drums, Brad on vocals, and Jason on bass guitar. They were looking for a name for themselves and someone noticed a "muffin loaf" in the vending machine. The name had been found!

They had one rehearsal in Harry's basement on Saturday, March 15, 2003. It was video taped and recorded on cassette and digital recorder. From the digital recording Harry made a bootleg practice CD called Tasty Jam in the Cellar. Jason pulled some of the songs from the camcorder and created another bootleg CD called Sounds from Underground. The play lists on both CD's were slightly different.

The night of the show was Tuesday, March 18, 2003. They had co-workers stick around after work to listen. It was recorded to 3/4" video tape and SVHS. The tapes had a bad audio mix, so the planned "live album" was never made from those tapes. Almost all of the songs they played were covers, but they did have a couple of originals thrown in.

In 2004 Jason produced a Muffin Loaf video using pictures from the rehearsal and show and set it to the band's rehearsal version of "Crazy Train."

Update - In 2009, Jason produced the second Muffin Loaf video using the band's rehearsal version of "Rock and Roll" set to a time-lapse recording of them building the set. Click here to watch the video at YouTube.

Muffin Loaf has not played together since. There are plans to have a reunion jam some day. Maybe another bootleg will come out of it...

Next week: Who are the Traveling Deengelburys?

Article: Services Used

What makes it possible to share Metal XOR Studio content with the rest of the world? What services are used to turn the blog from an idea into reality? Let us take a look at the services used.

Blogger
This is the website you are on now. It allows a user to create a blog, post new entries, archive old posts, etc. There are many blog sites available. The reason Blogger was chosen was because it is owned by Google and the Studio already had a Google account using various other services.

Verizon Online
Verizon is the Internet provider the Studio uses , so through them there was already web space available for a Metal XOR website. The Metal XOR Studio Information Source was created to be a place for the Musik Catalog, songs to listen to, documents to read, etc. Since the blog site offers no storage for files, the content needed to be stored somewhere else. So the Information Source site seemed to be the appropriate place.

Mediamax
The storage at the Metal XOR website was very small. In fact, last night the Studio hit 87% of its storage capacity. And there aren't that many songs and publications posted yet. There is a LOT more content planned to become available. So this morning an account was created with Mediamax to store all the music and publication files the Studio wants to provide to the public. The Information Source will still be the website the public will use to access the files, but the files themselves will now be stored away from Verizon.


And those are the three sites used in this blog. Plans for upcoming downloadable content include electronic versions of all Metal XOR Studio books and booklets that have been published, new e-books, entire album downloads, video, and more.

So keep checking this site for announcements regarding new available content.

Update: Since this article was written there are two other services used by this blog.

Scribd
Scribd is a site that hosts documents. So all of the interviews and lyric booklets are now stored there. They offer an option to embed documents on your website, so that's what the blog uses to allow the reader to view the documents in a small reader within the post.

Flickr
This is a site that hosts pictures. The Studio has two accounts. The first is for the album covers, and that is linked to the album cover slide show in the sidebar on the right of the blog. The second account is for the rest of the miscellaneous pictures that have been shown on the site. There are over a hundred pictures now on the site and that number increases every week.

This Day in Studio History

It was October 29, 1996, when the book "Olympus: Mountain or Molehill?" was released.

This was the definitive guide to Mune Mud's 1991 Olympus. It told how each song was recorded, the inspiration behind each song, what was recorded on each track of the 4-track master, hidden meanings, etc. No Mune Mud library should be without it.

Album of the Week #10: Electric Field Donut

Project name: Isthmus
Album name: Electric Field Donut
Release date: July 9, 1996
Release format: cassette
Studio name: Metal XOR Studio

Tracks:
1. Safety in Numbers
2. Free
3. Simple G
4. Rain Fusion
5. Farmer's Anguish
6. No Soul
7. Mama Got Caught
8. Jay's Mambo
9. The Long and Winding Road
10. I Saw Her Standing There
11. Nowhere Man
12. Yesterday
13. Help
14. Hey Jude
15. Let It Be
16. Rocky Mountain Way
17. Wicked Game
18. Flipcharts

This album came from a jam session that Harry and Jason had on February 5, 1995 in Jason's basement. The Metal XOR Studio was still under construction so the jam was done among the construction materials. They filled three 45-minute 4-track master cassettes and from those tapes this album was created.

It was a few months after the jam that Jason went back to the master tapes and started adding drums (most of the songs were recorded without drums since it was just the two of them), additional keyboards, and guitars. Once the songs were complete they were compiled for an album. Then it was time to name the album and the project. After a LOT of suggestions for a project name, they settled on Isthmus. And Harry came up with the album name. He saw a picture of lightning striking a baseball stadium and he said "Electric Field Donut!"

Most of the jam was them creating their own music and lyrics as they went, it was all ad-libbed. After their creative steam ran out they got out Jason's book of Beatles songs and started recording Beatles songs. Side A of the tape is their originals and side B is their Beatles covers.

This album also started an Isthmus tradition. The song "Wicked Game" has appeared on every Isthmus album in one form or another. And this was the first album to feature it.

For most of the album Jason played the guitar and Harry was on keyboard. They took turns singing. And this jam session was recorded with a video camera. There have been talks of releasing a video tape from the session but that has not yet materialized.

Below is the schematic for how the equipment was hooked up for this session.



Next week's Album of the Week: Lambskin Temple by Isthmus from 1996.

Collector's Corner #16

Below is an inside look into the record-keeping of the Studio. This page actually dates back to 1991 when the 4-track recorder was bought for the Studio. After recording a few songs it became evident that some sort of log was needed to keep track of what songs were on what tapes. So a Master Log book was created. This is the first page created for the Studio log.

Let's take a tour of the page, shall we?

• The title of the page came from the time frame these songs were recorded. The "Olympus era" (c1991, named for the album that came out of these songs) took 2 pages in the log book. Following the "Olympus era" was the "Underwater Problem Factory era" (c1991-1992) that titled pages 3 and 4 as "UPF 1" and "UPF 2."
• The title is "Olympus 2" even though this was the first page in the logbook. The pages were titled before the recording dates were added to the page. So when it came time to title the first few pages they were mixed up and page 1 became "Olympus 2" and page 2 became "Olympus 1" and the error was never corrected.
• The date of 8/6/95 in the upper right corner indicates when the page was titled.
• On the upper left side of the page is the word "counter." This was to be the column where the counter numbers of the recorder were written down for each song so a song could easily be found on the tape. But this was soon abandoned as it took too much time.
• The letters on the far left of the page indicate which project the song belongs too. At the time, Mune Mud was the only project so most of the these songs belong to MM, or Mune Mud.
• The yellow highlight next to some songs indicate that an MP3 exists of that song. The highlighting is out-of-date as most of those songs are now in the computer.
• In the center of the page are the song titles. Some songs don't have titles but a short descriptor of what the song was.
• As previously stated, the recording dates were added later. And those dates were not written down for most of the earlier recordings so the indicated time frames are the best guess as to when these songs were recorded.
• The next column has "T=" for each song. This became the tempo column. A T=60 means the tempo was 60 bpm (beats per minutes).
• The far right column shows the running time of each song.

To date there are 28 pages in the Master Log book.

And this first page is not in the Metal XOR Studio Museum. It is in the Master Log book that is still being used in the Studio today!

Listen Online!

The fourth installment of Listen Online presents three new tracks! These come from the 2001 album The Vintage Years Volume 1 by Harry and Jason. These tracks are from 1986 and are some of the very first songs Harry and Jason recorded together.

Click on the name of the song to listen to it.
"The Beautiful Corns"
"The Redenbacher Song"
"Hair"