GBU Christmas Special ’16

Ho, ho, ho! It’s the second annual last-minute Christmas Miracle GBU Christmas special!

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Quick correction: I accidentally claimed Fred Astaire plays Kris Kringle in Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town; of course, Astaire played the mailman narrator S.D. Kugler. Whoops!

This time we’ve got special guests Jon and Gabriella back, as well as producer Sarah nearby. We look at the 1951 and 1970 versions of Scrooge, as well as Rankin/Bass classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, The Little Drummer Boy, Frosty the Snowman, and The Year Without a Santa Claus as well as many, many other Christmas specials and movies.

For anyone curious, I haven’t given up my Annual Exploratory Christmas Endeavor, but I have gotten very, very far behind on writing about any of them. Sorry!

This was a hell of a thing to put together. As you can tell by listening to the handful of episodes we did since putting together the supposed return of the show, we’ve had this awful digital noise interrupting our attempts at recording. Well, three days ago I fixed it! Turns out we were missing some software that besides controlling the interface, would also update said interface’s firmware. One of those two things was causing the problem (it seems) and it’s now fixed. But that wasn’t all I fixed in the crunch time between the 22nd and release.

I also figured out how to fix our historically quiet volume! After increasing the gain on the hardware, each of our tracks in Logic, then each track again with the Focusrite Red2 plugin, THEN the master track, all to no avail, I realized something was artificially capping the volume (and that all the gain I’d applied was surely brutalizing the audio quality within this cap). And now, I know what Normalization does. So once I turned off Normalization and got a huge blast of sound coming out of my Bounce from all that gain increasing, I stayed up until nearly 4am turning all that gain back down and fine-tuning the levels with the goal of hitting or only barely passing the 0db mark, which was huge for me since the goal of “how high should volume go?” has always seemed elusive and amorphous to me.

So now we’ve got an episode with an appropriate volume level (according to my headphones, I haven’t run a car test yet but will be releasing with confidence anyway).

This is hugely exciting for me because it means future episodes will have a consistent volume level.

And here’s the photo Adam took of me checking my notes from the iPad (huge and cumbersome).

Don’t forget to let your film-loving friends know about the show. You can follow us on Twitter @GBUpodcast and you can e-mail me at Brian@candidpodcast.com. The other thing we’d really love is for you to rate the podcast on iTunes or your podcast app of choice.