OK, folks, here are the photos my wife took during our Voltaire recording. The above is, from left to right, Seth, Dylan, Mark and Wes.
We were parked in my cluttered basement where I do my recording, with me on my usual setup:
...And the other guys lined up on a short table sitting to my right.
I had been looking forward to this episode from a technical standpoint, as at least I would have full control over all the mics, but it was actually more difficult to make sense of after the fact, because all of us (including me) exhibited really terrible mic technique, as you can tell by how far Dylan and Wes are here from the mics. This meant that, e.g. Dylan was nearly as loud as Wes on Wes's mic, which made it tricky to mix. Also, all the track volumes were very low, so I had to digitally turn them up. In the case of Wes's mic, which had a nasty ground hum on it (i.e. a buzzing noise) from about 5 to 30 min into the recording, I had to apply my noise reduction plugin enough that he sounded fully as bad for that part of the show as if he'd been at home during one of our earlier episodes using a low-quality headset mic.
This was of course made up for by the spirit of the room. Here's the infamous "slap" noted in the audio, after which all the rest of these pictures were taken.
One bonus to us all being in the same room is that Seth was able to give us verbal cues that he wanted to talk, whereas normally he waits for silences that don't come.
However, the thing went maybe shorter than we'd planned (we had maybe 2 hrs of footage before editing, whereas we normally have three or more) because earlier in the evening we opened a group bank account, which ended up taking hours, and then went to dinner, which also took a while. All this was on a day where Wes and Seth had been traveling, Dylan would be leaving to drive many hours to Michigan early the next day, and Wes and Mark were both in a long business meeting for our day jobs (which was the reason for him traveling to Madison in the first place, which sparked this whole effort), meaning we'd been connected and conversing more or less continuously for 8 hours or so prior to the recording. So, we started pretty late, and couldn't really go deep into the night, and were mostly on the tired side. Despite that, it was a heap of fun, and we'll surely do it again some time.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Good to see the brilliance behind the faces 🙂
You guys look great, but you don’t look anything like the philosophy dudes who live inside my head. Is there anything that can be done about that on your end? Thanks! Looking forward to listening to this one.
What, no coat and tie? Where are the beards? The pipes? The wood panneling? How can one do philosophy without some tweed at least?
Actually, I think they look exactly like what I expected, at least based on the cartoon picture:
http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/wp-content/uploads/4HostCaricatures_740px.jpg
I can’t wait to see how Lucy Lawless reacts to these photos.
A note on the audio engineering, Mark: the noise gates you are using on the tracks could use another 50-100ms of release time, so that the track doesn’t unnaturally dip into silence when a speaker takes a brief pause between words.
Scratch that, reverse it- I meant to say attack time.
Seth needs his own Jeopardy-style buzzer he can push when he wants to talk. Also, the rest of you need to stop interrupting him when he is talking! It doesn’t happen very often, but I have still noticed it in recent episodes.
It does my heart good to see you guys together and clearly having a great time. May this moment never leave you.
I’m quite surprised at Seth, he looks like a nice, fun guy who sometimes kills people when they make him angry. You should definitely give him a Jeopardy-style buzzer, just in case.
You guys look like you had a ton of fun together. I look forward to the next “live” episode, because I could definitely hear the energy, despite your tired state.
You all look exactly as you sound.
Mark looks EXACTLY like I imagined!
Damn that Seth is a handsome fellow!