Mike Hallenbeck 5/25/25 Mike Hallenbeck 5/25/25

BARELY BROTHERS JUNE 28TH!

Mark your calendar. Saturday June 28th, !0 Items or Fewer returns to St Paul’s Barely Brothers Records with Gated Community and Joe Fahey & the K-Tels! It’s a tsunami of salubrious songwriting sagacity, even if I don’t know how to pronounce “sagacity” without looking it up, which I’m too lazy to do right now. Please join us!

Showtimes:

12:30 PM – Joe Fahey and the K-Tels

1:30 PM – 10 Items or Fewer

2:30 PM – Gated Community

Barely Brothers is at 783 Raymond Ave, St Paul, MN 55114

10 Items photo: Kevin McLaughlin

Mike Hallenbeck 10/1/20 Mike Hallenbeck 10/1/20

MINIDISC REDUX

Recently I’ve been resuscitating a “sinner-songwriter” recording project I started almost 20 years ago. Engaging every lateral move I could think of between CPUs, CDRs, operating systems, DAWs, and dongles, I finally managed to unlock all the sessions and revamp them as projects in my current Nuendo system.

There was only one file I couldn’t find, which was a piano performance I tracked in my friend Ben’s living room, back when we were housemates. I wrote it off and redid the performance using a virtual piano, which was fine, but it still bugged me because it just wasn’t the same.

Finally I remembered that what I was sifting through were WAV files, but that the many of the source tracks-- including the piano-- had originally been recorded to minidisc. Minidisc, folks! And do I still have all those minidiscs from the early 2000s? You better believe it!

So I unearthed the boxes of MDs, and lo and behold, found the piano performance after about an hour of rifling through them. The disc was labeled and everything. I found one of my minidisc players-- my first one, not even the newer Sony that does actual digital transfer of files-- and was happy to discover that it still worked.

I input the audio into Nuendo-- complete with creaks of the piano bench and that annoying whir the MD recorder made every once in a while-- and I was happy to hear that I’d done a couple of mouth clicks to sync with the countoff I’d done on muted guitar strings previously. The session’s legacy tracks are now complete, waiting for edit and mix!