This month's offering - most likely the shortest one we'll ever post - contains a couple of the better musical answering machine greetings I (EJ) have concocted over the years. The first one was written and recorded shortly after the Jerlins' wedding. The second, based loosely on the Tower Of Power song, "Credit", was recorded in 1989, shortly after I moved out on my own for the first time.

So what can one say about these?
Surprisingly, plenty...

After purchasing my first answering machine (a PhoneMate dual tape-based model), I quickly discovered I had two parameters I had to adhere to if I was to successfully make a musical answering machine greeting work:

• I had 24 seconds to work with; I intended to use every second available to me.
  
  
• The piece had to contain periodic momentary bits of total silence, or else the machine -- which was tailored to record a human voice rather than music -- would perceive that the recording was over prematurely due to the relative volume levels not changing enough. This way, a normal person could record a plain generic voice-only greeting from 5 to 24 seconds in duration and the machine would know when the end was, rather than the caller potentially waiting for 10 or more seconds of silence for the prompt ("BEEP") to leave a message.
  
  

Thus, a very sparse accompaniment with "percussive" starts and stops and little silent moments are contained throughout both of these. If you had called the Jerlin household between 1988 and 2003 or so, you'd have experienced one these greetings.

Alas, all good things inevitably come to an end.

In 2003, our trusty PhoneMate bit the dust after 16 years of faithful service. By then, the only answering machines available for sale were these new-fangled digital models with all the bells and whistles one could ever hope for... except the ability to record music.

Any/all attempts to record music on any of three increasingly upscale digital models resulted in nothing but static no matter how loud or soft the music was recorded, or how much I narrowed the frequency range, undoubtedly due to the poor allowable bandwidth tailored only for human voice, so as to use the lowest sampling rate and the least amount of memory possible. (Yes, I returned to the store twice and bought another more expensive model each time hoping the more expensive one would actually allow music to be recorded -- to no avail. I even tried a cheap Radio Shack model just to see if that would work. Though it worked better than the expensive models, the sound was still dreadful.) This is progress? This is the digital age? I WANT MY OLD ANSWERING MACHINE BACK!!!

So I scoured eBay for a used cassette-based PhoneMate and got one at a nice price. And for another month or so, the old musical answering machine greeting was restored to its former glory... until that PhoneMate bit the dust. sigh. At which point, my wife Kirsten "encouraged" me to let my daughter record a simple greeting, which has remained to the present day.

So now that it's taken you longer to read this than to listen to the music... heh heh...

Many of you have only previously experienced these recordings over a noisy low-fi phone line. Now you can enjoy and appreciate these newly remastered recordings presented in hi-fi stereo for the very first time!

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