Yule Fair 2008: Winter Tales

On Sunday, we had about a dozen listeners for our presentation of Winter Tales at the Yule Fair in Montreal. It's always a pleasure to tell tales to such an appreciative audience and we heard lots of positive feedback about the show. This was the first show that Shayne and I performed together with Shayne on guitar and me talking lots.

It was also the first time I got to try my new microphone and laptop to record the show. I lowered the recording volume slightly so that the distortion wouldn't be such an issue, but I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. The show was an hour long and it took almost two hours to save it! I think the problem was that I saved it as an MP3 instead of a WAV file, which required the application to compress the audio to MP3 format before it could save it. More things to learn!

I felt pretty good about the performance and I'll be posting the best excerpts from it to the blog (hopefully) this week. If you like the stories, please give me some feedback and pass this blog along to your friends who can appreciate a good story.

Testing a Player

I think I may have found a player that allows me to embed the mp3 into the blog. I've tested it out and it works great.

I was getting some bad distortion at first, but then I saved it with a different encoding and the distortion went away.

So in case you're curious, I got the player from 1 Pixel Out, which has all the files you need and easy-to-follow instructions. Enjoy!

First Posting

This is my first post on this Story Blog. What I'm hoping to do is post one story a month for the next twelve months. Since December is only a week away, I will wait until the first week of December to make my first story post.

I will endeavor to select my stories in sync with the seasons. I may occasionally bend that rule at my discretion.

If you read this blog and listen to the stories, please leave me comments so I can know what you like and don't like.

I guess there are two factors that are really pushing me to do this:
1. I bought a USB condenser microphone which will allow me to record all my shows from now on.
2. I'm hoping this blog will raise my profile as a storyteller, getting me more gigs in the future.

I'm not adverse to occasionally featuring other tellers on this blog. If you're interested in that, send me an email (jdhobbes [at] gmail.com) or leave me a comment.

If you like what you hear here, please tell your friends!