Instrumental Invasion, 1/13/21 January 14, 2021

The January 13, 2021, Instrumental Invasion on WCWP was recorded one hour per day on December 11 and 12, 2020.

The playlist was created and annotated on December 10 and was the first playlist with 18:40 segments in mind. Hours earlier, after only a few hours of sleep, I edited all but three segments for the previous four shows from 18:45 to 18:40. I hoped that would prevent automation from cutting off the end of the last segment, which happened the night before. And so far, it has. December 9 was the last show to date with that problem.

This was also the first show where I scripted out my talk breaks in Microsoft Word prior to recording, and therefore the first time I saved a script. I tweaked each portion as recording progressed.

For the second week in a row, I swapped out the 1984 and earlier segment for a third 2017 to present segment.

Recording the Lisa Hilton liner (after I annotated the playlist) required a Rube Goldberg machine. There was no way for her to record on her own in a home studio or on an iPhone app, so we had to do it over the phone. I connected a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter to my iPhone 11, attached a male-to-male 3.5mm cable to the adapter, connected the cable to my TASCAM DR-03, plugged in headphones so I could hear Lisa, and hit record. Only Lisa’s side was audible, but that was all I needed. We spoke for nearly ten minutes with a minute or two dedicated to the liner. Afterward, I extracted the raw WAV file from the DR-03 and edited it in Adobe Audition. Once I compiled the best of each take, I hard limited, denoised, and normalized the audio.

With that long explanation out of the way, here’s the final cut:

Recording from my phone is presumably much easier on the Zoom LiveTrak L-8 mixer that I got for Christmas. I presume because I haven’t tried yet.

I like all the show’s running gags: musicians from Illinois, synth instruments on the same song as actual instruments, and the parent-child element. I’m sure Game Dave would appreciate the Ghostbusters reference in the last talk break.

Click here to download the aircheck MP3 or listen below: