The Smush Newsletter, September 12th, 2001 Contact: oskillator@hotmail.com Home: http://www.mindspring.com/~pfister_/smush/ "You're gonna die." --The Raisin Cajun TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Broken Monitors .......... Line 20 2. New Smush Music .......... Line 44 3. Classics ................. Line 80 4. The Wurlitzer of Wisdom .. Line 113 5. Bye Bye .................. Line 154 BROKEN MONITORS --------------- I remember one day some stranger came into the studio with a broken monitor. It had blown its fuse. "My monitor blew a fuse!" he said. Well, I looked at him in disgust, and asked him if he had it. He said that he still had the broken monitor and brought it in the next day. I looked inside and the fuse was gone! No wonder it wasn't working! I asked him for the fuse and he said he'd thrown it away. Then I looked in the blank spot and it said "5A 240V" and then it faded into darkness because I didn't have a flashlight. So I thought maybe it meant 5 ampoules and 240 volts. I looked into the fusebox and sold the guy a fuse that said "5A 240V" on it, turned the monitor on, and it worked. He went home happy, but I've been thinking... remember at the end of Unbreakable, when you found out that Samuel L. Jackson was really white? That was kind of like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arch when you found out that both sides of the headpiece of the Staff of Ra were important. What if the part after the "5A 240V" in the darkness it said "AND TAKE BACK 2A TO HONOR THE HEBREW GOD WHOSE MONITOR THIS IS". Not only would his monitor blow a fuse again, but the Hebrew god would smite the guy next time he was in Hebraia, for abusing His monitor! NEW SMUSH MUSIC --------------- Here are some of our latest releases. Please note that due to MP3.COM's laziness, new releases may not be immediately available. In fact, they might be unavailable for up to a week or more. NGO - Last Ta(NGO) Transmission. I wrote this Tango Waltz for the London Symphony Orchestra of San Bernadino to play. I took special advantage of the Pinto they have, though performances are expensive as the Pinto has to be replaced each time it is performed. The trumpet, bass, and violin aren't hurt much, though the last few measures are quite taxing on the performers themselves -- but as the man said, performers are free, but hardware costs money. BIG - This remake of Girl You Really Got Me Obvious was big in Japan, though since it was distributed by a company that makes pirate records out of dead babies... we traced it to a guy who tape-recorded a local radio performance of ours ... he made a killing, but unfortunately spent it all before Bailey, our Elder Wyrm, got to him. Rumble on Rock Beach - This is our first self-commissioned, self-written song that we've recorded for release on a Smush album -- apologies to all of our fans who were disappointed by the release of Bingo Was His Name-O, but we're growing as artists, and so our song titles are growing along with us -- we held back as long as we could, but the limit of only 17576 different three letter titles was starting to cramp our artistic style! Oh, you want to hear about the song! It's great. It's fantasic Russian-flavored 60s surf rock played with electric bass, electric guitar, electric hammond organ, and unelectric drums. The organ solo was played by our very own R.F.'s Corpse, and it raises the roof, hacks the planet, and all the party people are in the house. Or in this case, on the beach! ROCK beach! CLASSICS -------- These smush songs are old. They are also good. Except the ones by Rubbahead. AMB - Rubbahead was hanging a clock above the toilet when he slipped and hit his rubba head on the rim! When he woke up he had a revelation! A vision! A sound running through his head! The main melody of this song! HLP - Help! Rubbahead is holding an unlistenable song contest in my head, and he's written all the entries himself! ZZT - This song won the unlistenable song contest. Tim Sweeney would be proud. CAR - The first time R.F. died, it inspired this song. He had been run over by a Sweet Firebird Calimari F7 with whitewall tires. You don't see whitewall tires much any more. They're represented by the Electric Piano in this song, and the Synthesized Electric Piano represents blackwall tires, because they're just a pale (hah!) imitation of the real thing. We saved up a reserve of whitewall tires for the climax and resolution of the song to give you a warm fuzzy, rubbery whitewall tire feeling in your loins, just as if the Henry Winkler, A.K.A. The Fonz was sucking on your toes. Whilst you were both sitting in the whitewall tire swing you had as a child. Since Rubbahead and I haven't spoken lately, we have nothing to fill our newsletter with, so I bring you a document that I dredged up from the early years of musicianship, back when I thought everyone could be a musician. I now know better, but since we at Smush write music for musicians, I present you with: THE WURLITZER OF WISDOM ----------------------- "Now don't touch the Wurlitzer, girls" ---Danny, _Full_House_ I bet you can't name the 3 main instruments that the Wurlitzer company made. 1. THE ORGAN 2. THE PIANO 3. THE ONE-SONG JUKEBOX I gotta say, the best of them was a piano, even if their organ was mentioned on the show Full House. This is cause of how hard that Wurlitzer guy had to work to get it to work right. The electric piano is actually quite complex. Its kinda like this: /\ hammer /\ \ When you press the note, the hammer /= \/ drops onto a reed of a certain _______ _ / =spring reed thickness and length, then the |______|-oxo ==============|~~~~~ spring puts it back up again. Note ~\_____|~| oo | When you release the note, the damper ~ pickup hits it and stops the vibration. damper But this in itself wouldn't sound very good. Can we say, SINE WAVE? A decaying sine wave to be sure, but it would surely be pretty lame. Ok, here are the tricks he did to introduce the strange but true harmonics that a piano might have with its full three string setup: 1. The hammer strikes the note about 1/3 of the way down the reed instead of at the tip, introducing odd harmonics 2. The pickup is placed at a different angle from which the reeds vibrate, also introducing odd harmonics This was a supreme improvement over the older Clavichord, which was so fucked up. BYE BYE ------- You know what they say. If you want that bodiac, lay er down and smack em yack em.