I don’t always want to look at my cell phone and check the caller ID to see who’s calling me. So with people I normally correspond with via cell phone (my wife, my daughter in Seattle, my writing clients), I try to custom-build distinctive cell phone ring tones. I try to use songs that I would recognize instantly, but would not be mistaken for a popular song heard on a current radio station. For example, if my phone suddenly plays the Shaft-influenced introduction to the DDR track “I Believe in Miracles” by Hi-Rise, I know my buddy Dennis is calling.
This is not unusual by any means. Last November, when I was in Ohio as part of a writing / photography project with the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, I was having a conversation with Peggy Santanglia when her cell phone went off, with the dulcet sounds of the Angels’ “My Boyfriend’s Back” playing through the cell phone’s tiny speakers. Santanglia, the lead singer of the Angels (and the voice on “My Boyfriend’s Back”), politely excused herself and took the call.
My cell phone of choice is a two-year-old BlackBerry 7803e. It doesn’t have a touch screen, it doesn’t even have that teeny-weeny trackball in the center. It does, however, have the ability to make calls, and I can text people with an exposed full QWERTY keyboard. And it is fully capable of playing ring tones, whether they originated in the phone or were purchased on the secondary markets.
Unfortunately, my phone’s carrier is extremely restrictive when it comes to adding anything customizable to a cell phone – unless that “something” is purchased directly through the carrier’s online store. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think a man in his 40’s should have a customized cell phone that blasts the latest Katy Perry or Panic! at the Disco track for all to hear. Maybe it’s just the cynic in me, but I don’t need a customized ring tone so that Kanye West’s latest Auto-Tune track can be heard in the middle of a boardroom conference.
So when it came to adding a new ringtone so that I would know if my buddy Adam from the Premier Basketball League was calling, I chose the track “Well Come 2” by the Japanese funk band Kome Kome Club… a live version of which sounds like this:
Well, I knew very well my cell phone carrier would never have a track like this in their arsenal. Are you kidding me? One of the best-selling J-Pop groups of all time and my carrier doesn’t have this track as a selectable choice? I could get “Poker Face” from this cell phone carrier (unfortunately, not the Weezer version that they played at SPAC last Monday), but just TRY to get “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” – they’ll laugh you and the white stuff on your nose out of the store!
So I needed to figure out an end-around maneuver, a way to surruptitiously add my choice of music to my phone. And at that moment, just like in every episode of The Wonder Years, at that moment, I realized – there was a way.
It’s simple, really. After legally purchasing a copy of ‘Well Come 2″ on an import CD, I transferred the file to my computer. I edited the track down to about 10 seconds (about 16 bars of the intro’s horn sections) and trimmed it in such a way that the track would loop in case I couldn’t get to my phone immediately. I saved the edited file down to a low-resolution (96 kbps) monaural mp3, and then uploaded it via FTP transfer to my personal chuckthewriter.com homepage.
After that, I fired up the BlackBerry and used its built-in web-browser to find my homepage, and then to get the link (the .mp3 file) and save it to the phone. Now the .mp3 is in the phone, and I can designate that file to play whenever Adam calls me. And I didn’t have to pay my carrier one extra cent to add this track to my cell phone – and I don’t have to feel embarrassed with a sub-par selection of pre-loaded ringtones. Nyah nyah nyah!
Now I don’t know if this will work with every cell phone out there – whether you’re using a BlackBerry or an iPhone or Palm Pre or a Star-Trac or two tin cans with lots of fishing line. So, loyal Times Union blog readers, I’ve come up with a way you can test my “add a ring tone” plan to your own cell phone.
Rather than incur the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America for putting any sort of edited track onto a blog where people can download it for free, I found a different type of ring tone for you. In this blog, I’ve added the sound of a vintage 1970’s Western Electric ringing telephone as a downloadable sound file. This is actually recorded from my own house phone, here at my home writing office, and is royalty-free. You can click here, save the ringing tone to your cell phone, and designate that ring as one of your selectable choices.
Test it out and let me know if it works for you – if so, you too can create your own personalized ring tones and not be a slave to the cascading MIDI tones built into your cell phone.
Or … if you really want your phone to play something like “I Do Not Hook Up” when you’re in the middle of a corporate meeting… that’s your choice. But at least you have a choice.
Chuck The Writer 