Savage Scribe

I’m reminded often – but not often enough – to take time to stop and appreciate the beauty and wonder of life: my children, an evening with friends, a fall day. More often I find myself complaining about the frenetic pace of my days, and then amnesiacally falling right back into the mælstrom euphemistically called “life.” I think we all need constant reminding to, as the Buddhists put it, “be present.”

It’s too easy to get caught up in schedules, meetings, bills, events, television, tasks, and obligations. Not that these are inherently evil, but too frequently we find ourselves slave to these masters. I believe it’s critical that we constantly work on being open and receptive to what’s going on around us, and always strive to be in the moment.

I was just made aware of a wonderful (?) example of this today. The Washington Post conducted a unique sociological experiment on January 12, 2007. They asked world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell if he would try something: pose as a street musician in a Washington DC subway stop. One of the world’s foremost musicians, playing some of the most beautiful music ever written, on a Stradivarius violin heralded as one of the finest musical instruments ever made, and what happened? Nothing. Almost 1,100 people walked by, with only a handful even stopping to listen for even a moment.

Writer Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful story about this experiment and his reflections on it. I found it moving – especially the feedback from the two people interviewed that truly appreciated the music.

In the immortal words of the bard Ferris Bueller:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

YouTube of Joshua Bell at L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in DC

Fascinating story of Joshua Bell’s Gibson Stradivarius (halfway down page)

Here is a link to this article on Kiva (page B6) I wrote for the Minnesota Conference of the United Church of Christ.

Our church is filled with extremely generous givers who rally to the cause of people in need. This is a tremendous blessing, but can be a problem for our Board of Missions which channels that giving spirit. We’ve found that varying our mission focus tends to keep people invigorated and involved. It’s a constant challenge, however, to present interesting and meaningful opportunities for mission. That’s why we were excited when we recently learned of and became involved in a new avenue for helping those in need: micro-lending.

Micro-lending — also called micro-finance or micro-credit — is the process of lending small amounts of money — as little as $25 — to people and businesses that wouldn’t ordinarily qualify for a traditional bank loan. This is most often found in developing nations where what we think of as traditional banking may not even exist, or might be reserved for only the wealthiest strata of the population.

Kiva is a non-profit organization that started within the last couple of years to facilitate micro-lending to those in need around the world. It works by establishing a link between lenders and borrowers through Kiva’s technology platform and on-site lending partners.

A lending partner is the actual field force that has a presence in or near the borrower’s location. Lending partners are most often other established non-profits. The Kiva website allows a lender to transfer funds to Kiva. Kiva then sends the money electronically to the lending partner nearest the borrower and the lending partner disburses the funds to the borrower. The lending partner also collects the repayments and channels those back to Kiva, and then back to the lender.

Kiva has an online database of borrowers where you can view the histories, stories, and photos. Since, as with any loan, there is always a risk of non-repayment, the Kiva site keeps track of the borrowing and repayment history of each borrower and lending partner. In this way you can make some judgment as to the relative security of your funds when lent to a specific place. You can also monitor the funds you have available to disburse and the borrowers to whom you’ve lent. You can also easily view the repayment history and see update information about the borrowers.

Setting up an account on Kiva is very easy. We created a primary account for our church to be the “master” account. Individual members can then create accounts of their own to view loans and their progress.

Our Board of Missions initially made three loans to small entrepreneurs in Peru and Nigeria, and have already received two repayments on our first loan! Micro-lending through Kiva is an exciting idea that eliminates about as much of the “middle man” as is possible to do, and gets money to people that need it in a very direct way. It’s very fulfilling to be able to see and read about the actual person(s) to whom you’re lending funds, and many borrowers even give updates on their situations. If you’re a church seeking to expand your outreach, Kiva may be your answer!

Everyone wants to sell you ringtones these days. Your cellular provider, your favorite band, the web site you just visited, your neighbor’s kid, everyone. But why should you pay 99¢, or even $2-$3, for a ringtone? Especially when it’s from music you already own! I’m going to show you an easy way to make ringtones for free!

Of course, you’ll have to do a little work to make it happen. But that’s the trade-off for being free, right? And here’s an additional benefit to making your own ringtones: you’ll learn how to do basic audio-editing at the same time! Free ringtones and education! Sweet. Let’s get started.

Software

The first thing you need is some audio-editing software. What, you don’t have $75 to buy it? No problem. Wavepad is a free audio-editing platform from NCH Software that you can download here. NCH distributes a free version of their software in the hopes that you’ll upgrade to the paid version once you’ve come to love the program. The installation process is very simple and will only take you a couple of minutes.

Once you’ve installed Wavepad, start the program. You’ll end up on a window like this:

Setup

Now it’s time to choose a song from which you’d like to create a ringtone. Remember that this should be music that you own! Most phones will only use a maximum of 30 seconds for a ringtone; this means that you should choose a song – or portion thereof – that has a good, recognizable “hook” within that time period. Ballads and long intros don’t generally make good ringtones! Wavepad will recognize most audio file types, so you can use MP3, WAV, M4A, or other common audio formats with ease. Choose File – Open File… (or use the Open File icon) to select your song. I’ve decided here to create a Van Halen ringtone to use on my next vacation to Mexico.

The file is now loaded and ready to edit. The first thing you should do is save it with a new name; this will keep you from accidentally overwriting your real song file. I’ll save my example as beautifulgirls.mp3. To do this, choose File – Save File As… from the menu at the top.

You’ll be brought to the “Save Audio File As” window. Type in your file name, select “MPEG Layer-3 (*.mp3)” from the drop-down menu as shown here, and press “Save.”

You’ll now see a screen that has some settings on it for the quality of the MP3 file you’re saving. I’d recommend leaving the default settings – shown here – of 128 kbps and “Joint” as the Channel Encoding Mode unless you have good reason to do otherwise. Just hit “OK” to proceed. You’ll then need to wait a minute for the file to be saved under the new name. *Now* is when the fun begins!

The Good Stuff

The first order of business is to understand what you’re looking at. The squiggly lines in the center of your screen are the waveform of your song, displayed visually. You should also see the player controls at the bottom of the window. These are pretty standard, really, with Play/Stop/Fast Forward/Rewind and so forth. You can also control playback with the keyboard; here are some of the standard controls:

How Ya Do It

The object here is to isolate a 15-30 second piece of the song. I used the “Play” control to play through my Van Halen classic until I found the place where I wanted my ringtone to start. I hit the <Esc> key to stop right about where I want the beginning, and then used the ← and → keys to fine-tune the position. You’ll have to play around for awhile to get the hang of positioning within the song.

You can see from the display that my position is at about 56.5 seconds into the song. Since I want my ringtone to start here, I don’t care about the part of the song that came before this. To get rid of the beginning of the song, I’m going to use the Trim Start function. Choose Edit – Trim Start from the top menu, and the first 56.5 seconds of my song are removed. Now if I hit <Home> and then <F9> (Play) the song will begin where David Lee sings, “(That’s why I said) Here I am, ain’t no man of the world, no. All I need is a beautiful girl!” Perfect.

Now we need to pick an ending spot. It sounds best if you find a natural break in the song; that way your ringtone doesn’t “cut out” in the middle of a word or riff. For this ringtone, there’s a good stopping point about 17 seconds after my new beginning.

Again, I used the “Play” control and the ← and → keys to find the exact spot where I wanted my cut to end. Once I’ve found this spot, I now want to get rid of everything after that. The function to do that is Trim End. Again, this is under the top Edit menu. Once I’ve done this, all that remains is the 17 seconds (or so) that will be my ringtone.

Final Things

Play your ringtone through to make sure it sounds like you want it to. Just as with most applications, Wavepad lets you “back up” if you’ve made a mistake; just use the “Undo” button up top to go back as many steps as you need to fix your error. If everything sounds good, click on “Save” to finalize your masterpiece.

I won’t go into uploading the ringtone to your phone, as that depends on your phone model and service provider. There are multiple methods for doing this, but the most common are:

1. Plug your phone into your computer via a USB connection and upload the ringtone directly.
2. Email ringtone to your phone as a text message.
3. Remove memory card from phone, load the ringtone onto the memory card, then plug the memory card back in.

I hope you have fun with this process! The most important thing to do first is save the file with a different name. That way you don’t destroy your original sound file. Other than that, don’t be afraid to experiment. You can always “Undo” any mistakes, or start again from scratch. The way you learn is by trying. And be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions!

P.S.

There are many, many other things you can do to “spice up” your ringtones. You can add echoes, change speed, cut-and-paste different parts of a song together, repeat sections…the possibilities are virtually limitless. I’m going to show you two small effects that can make your ringtones sound classier: Fade-In and Fade-Out.

Perhaps the portion of the song you’ve chosen doesn’t have a “perfect” entry or exit point for the ringtone, or maybe the start or end sounds abrupt or harsh. To fix this we can use the same process that radio DJs have used forever to smooth transitions: the fade. Let’s use the same segment that we worked on above.

I want to find a very specific point in the song, the point where Roth starts to say, “Here I am, ain’t…” This comes right about 1.1 seconds into my ringtone. I used a little different technique to isolate this point. The <Spacebar> key activates the “Scrub” function. “Scrubbing” constantly plays the tone of the current location in the audio file; that is to say, even when you’re stopped at a certain point, the sound keeps playing. You can then use the ← and → arrow keys to “scrub” through the song to find the exact point where a certain sound – in this case, the word, “Here” – begins. It takes a little getting used to, but experiment with it.

When I find the appropriate point in the song, I now want to “Fade In” to that point. “Fade In” starts the volume of the selected area at zero, and then brings it up to normal volume at the end of the selection – just like you were turning up the volume on your stereo. You can make a selection in several ways: using your mouse, using the keyboard (utilizing the <Shift> key and arrows), or via menu options. In this case, I decided to use the menu option Edit – Select to Start. This highlights the first 1.1 seconds of the song like so:

In order to fade this selection in to full volume, I choose Effects – Fade In from the top menu. This now alters the appearance of the selection. See how the sound wave in the selected area ramps up from zero?

The same technique is used to fade out the end of the ringtone. Here I’ve decided to fade out from 16 seconds to the end of the track. This time I use the Edit top menu again and choose Select to End to arrive here:

Now we’re going to fade out the end of the song, just like gradually turning the volume down to zero. Choose Effects – Fade Out from the top menu to arrive here. Note now how the sound wave gradually decreases to zero.

And that’s it! Make sure to choose “Save” again to keep your hard work, and you’re ready to load it onto your phone. Happy rings!

Hockey games are raucous events, full of speed, action, and excitement. One thing that adds to that atmosphere is well-chosen music. If you’ve been to a game or watched an NHL game on television recently, you know what I mean. Music fills the “dead” spaces between face-offs, penalty calls, periods, and time-outs. It can energize the crowd and make a great experience even better.

If you’re like me, you have kids playing youth hockey. As a youth hockey parent, you probably end up volunteering to help out with scoring, managing, or even providing music for the games. I’m going to show you an inexpensive and easy way to use your MP3 player to make your hockey games even more fun and memorable. The good thing is, you already have the most expensive component: the MP3 player itself!

Almost all hockey arenas these days have sound systems hooked up to overhead speakers. Virtually all of these systems use a standard 1/4” TRS stereo jack for input. So all you have to do is to:

• figure out how to connect your MP3 player to the arena speaker system, and
• make sure you have enough power output so we can hear the darn thing!

The Materials

Since you already have the MP3 player (you do have one, don’t you? If not, steal your child’s), there are only two other components you need:

1/4” TRS plug to 1/8” TRS plug adapter cable – here at Radio Shack

Boostaroo amplifier

The cable allows you to connect your MP3 player to the input jack used by the arena’s sound system. The Boostaroo was originally designed to amplify the output signal of an MP3 player to allow multiple headphones to be driven by one player, but it works perfectly to “pump up the noise” to a level suitable for input to the arena. I’ve tested multiple arenas without using the Boostaroo, and the output from the MP3 player alone is not enough to provide sufficient volume.

Pump It Up!

Plug the Boostaroo into your MP3 player. Then plug the 1/8” cable end into one of the three Boosteroo outputs (it doesn’t matter which), and the 1/4” cable end into your arena’s sound system input jack. Turn on the Boostaroo, then your MP3 player, and fire up a song! You might also need to adjust the output volume of the arena’s amplifier. Make sure to start out at less-than-full volume so you don’t startle the Zamboni driver!

This should have you rockin’ the house in no time. Let me know how it works for you!

In the words of Gandalf, “So it begins.”

Welcome to a site devoted to the writings of Michael Stoos, Freelance Commercial Writer (FLCW), raconteur, and author. I’m Michael, your host and tour guide, so buckle up for the ride!