putting the j in jjosh

So have you noticed the commenter named "oointgroov"?

Back in 1998 (I think) I was working at BBC America, painstakingly cutting out the swear words and nudity from British programming to make it palatable for American audiences. We would also cut up their programs and put in breaks for commercials. It was early days for BBCA and they didn’t really know how long it would take an editor to cut an hour of programming down, so they would give us tons of time for not much work. Which was great.

So I had all this time there. I would crank out my work for the week, and then parcel out delivering it, made sure I looked busy, and worked on all sorts of personal projects — mix CD’s, party flyers, personal films. I would hang out a bunch with one of my best pals, MR, who was working there at the time. We’d take these 2-hour lunch breaks and watch series that weren’t assigned, and just generally ahve a good rockin time.

The drummer for my band in college was working on a solo project called T Groove. He did this thing where he posted a bunch of solo split tracks for one his pieces, called "Robot Dance Party", and invited people to remix it. So MR and I spent some time remixing it on the AVID editing system I was using. This was kind of painstaking. I would put in the tracks from T Groove, and then download drum samples from the drum machine museum (site since taken down). Since we couldn’t control the speed of any of the audio, I would have to try each sample out individually, and then use the ones that just happened to be at the same tempo as the original track. Took a while, but damn fun.

Then we went to AT&T Labs’ text to speech demo and put in a bunch of lines for the speech synthesizer to rap over the track. This part was a blast. Something about the way "he" would read the lines, emphasize weird syllables, stretch sounds out in odd ways. Awesome. We made the chorus the refrain of "who put the ‘oo’ in T Groove". MR posts as commentator oointgroov. A while ago, I asked T Groove if he still had the remix but he said he didn’t.

Then out of the blue last week, he found it! I listened to it one morning, and it was the best part of my day/week. It gives me a good good feeling even now to listen to it.

"The beats T kicks are funkity fresh/ kicking the shit out of old John Tesh."

Robot Dance Party (Oo in T Groov MCTex2Speech remix) – T Groove