A pair of college students in Canada did a Prog podcast late last year. It had the unwieldly name of "The Prog Rock Blog ProgCast." At first, I was glad there was such a podcast. I soon discovered a couple problems. The first is a matter of taste. Let me put it this way, for a couple of young punks those two guys listen to some pretty old crap! Those listened mostly to stuff from the seventies or current stuff that's derivative of the seventies. And for the love of God! They collect LPs. The second problem was their discussions. Their opinions are so identical they ended up not discussing. One example, when they discussed the topic of lyrics, the first guy mentioned Glass Hammer as an example of a band writing bad lyrics. The second guy the uttered a couple of monosyllables expressing agreement. That was it. There was no explanation of why they thought Glass Hammer's lyrics were bad. I personally don't have a problem with their lyrics. This ProgCast's last episode is number 7 from November.

 

So there's a couple of lessons to be learned here. First, I don't need a couple of college students acting like old farts. There are plenty of old farts for that job. Second, there needs to be a variety of views represented in the cast of contributors. I would be the guy who is into Synth-heavy bands, one guy could be into Prog-Metal, another guy would be one of those old farts, etc. If the goal is to have five people per podcast, then we would probably need to have as many as maybe twenty people in the rotating cast. With everybody having other commitments such as jobs and family, not everybody will be available for each podcast.

 

So how are we going to do this? Following the TWiT model, what's required of every participant is a high-speed internet connection. The technology used is called VOIP. That's Voice Over Internet Protocol. Basically you're making telephone calls through the internet. The complicated part is that everybody is required to record the audio from their own computer. All the audio files then get sent to the guy who edits it all into a monophonic file. The advantage of this method is that it allows a geographically diverse cast. Using TWiT as an example, most of participants are in the San Francisco Bay Area, but they're spread out in the Bay Area during recording. Occasionally they'll have a participant in the East Coast, and one regular contributor lives in England. The disadvantages have to do with technical issues. If you listen to TWiT regularly, you would notice it's not unusual for someone's connection to drop during the podcast only to reconnect a few minutes later.

 

One problem for me is that I currently don't have a high-speed internet connection. It's not out of the question for me to switch to a high-speed connection, but that's the current situation. I have, thus, crafted an alternate scenario. The disadvantage is it requires all participants to be together in the same house. The first step will have the participant with the biggest house hosting a party. Ah yes! Can you just picture it? Kids screaming in the background. Food and drinks freely passed around. One participant getting interrupted because his kid needs a diaper change. It will be a blast. If these parties occur every month and they last about five hours, we could record four one-hour podcasts to be posted weekly.

 

Okay, what shall we name this podcast? Well when we assemble our cast, the name would be up for a vote. I, however, have a name in mind that's inspired by TWiT: This Week's Engagement Regarding Prog. TWERP get it?

 

Wow! I think we can make this happen.

 

© 2007 Ronnie “The Cruiser” Cruz