So how’d it go?

Artistically: pretty good. I’m difficult to please, but from behind the mic? I was happy with that. Despite the fact that I seem to have picked up a little bit of a head cold, I felt like I was in pretty good voice. I accidentally moved the bridge in Artefacts on the fly – I jumped to the chorus early and did kind of an improv mini-bridge instead. If you didn’t know the song, I don’t think you’d know. Also, live, I’m still playing my fast songs too fast.

I brought my minidisc recorder (anybody remember those? ^_^ ) to record off the speaker. What I got off that makes me feel pretty good about how I felt while playing; I was in pretty good voice – all up and down my range, really – and the instrument mix did sound good. So I can maybe trust my ears at this point.

Lesson of the day: Artefacts is a duet and I can’t ignore that. Having worked with it enough in the recording studio to really figure out how I should be playing it (and recording it that way for Sketchy Characters), trying to perform it solo just feels… odd. And wrong. Maybe I could do the second voice with some sort of microphone effects pedal. Would that be too weird?

Technical notes: The new-to-me sound equipment performed admirably. The basic sound balance coming out of the instrument preamps sounded really nice (thanks again, John!), so the venue sound guy and I left that output totally alone. He brought up the midrange on the vocal mic a little, then helped me make a couple of small graphic-EQ adjustments to deal with the cement floor and wooden roof of the gazebo (mostly a slight dip at 1khz, a hint of high-end trim, a little very-low-end punch down – picking up resonance, I think). I wish I’d written down his name! Thanks, sound guy with the one syllable first name I can’t remember but might have been Bill but probably isn’t! If you read this tell me your name and I’ll fix it!

My amp has separate monitor outs. I think they’re line level. I’m gonna see whether I can run that as a line in to a recorder of some sort and skip the microphone stage for live recordings.

Recording: Just as I was thinking, “wow, this sounds really good! Maybe I can release a couple of these as donation-or-free live downloads!” the player started belching up garbage. There are bad sectors all over the disc. I don’t have one intact song on the recording – not even enough to edit something together. I have enough to tell me what I sounded like, but the rest is useless.

Stupid minidisc. I’m so mad. I coulda had live tracks. p >_< q

Audience reaction: I heard very good things from the venue manager, which is important because she’s also the manager of the venue I’m playing in Renton, and the sound guy, and I spotted a couple of market vendors and several children bopping about, which is always a good sign. But I’m not the audience! And at least one of you were there! Possibly more, I don’t know! Only one person from here introduced themselves. What’d you think?

NEXT SHOW: June 1st, 2010: Renton, Washington! Renton Farmer’s Market at the Piazza. Opening day! Stage time 5:30pm. See you there!

• 

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil.

Drum toys

My friend Quen has released his formerly-shareware drum machine software, leafDrums 2.33, as an open-source project under the GPL. Sadly, it's Windows-only, at least right now. (This is part of why he's releasing it; he's no longer in a Windows environment.)

Anybody want to pick it up? It was a neat toy back in the day. Here's the source tree, on github.

look at all the pieces

Not feeling well, I think I have a head cold. :p

The secret second facility at Bagram in Afghanistan - source of a large number of torture and other prisoner abuse allegations - is confirmed by the Red Cross, tho' the US military continues to deny it exists.

Joe Lieberman and a bunch of thundering dickheads in the Senate want to strip away citizenship and the right of trial to American citizens upon accusation of any charge terrorism-related. No trial, no evidence, just a declaration by the administration, and voop! You're not a citizen and you have no rights a'tall. The Federal justice system is specifically banned from spending money on trials for you! It's neat. Here's John McCain's bill removing all rights from anyone accused of a variety of crimes. I'm not sure, but I think that one's abandoned, they're working on this even better one, which they just rolled out today.

Basically, they've already done away with trial and due process rights for anyone not a US citizen, and are looking for something new. (Really, with the assassination policy of Mr. Obama, they've done it for US citizens as well - why bother with indefinite detention or trials or rights when you can just order an execution?) So now they're working on extending it, and making it more formal - and specifically including US citizens on US soil.

And, sure, go ahead, assume it'll just be the "bad guys," even with the 80% innocent rate the US Army admits to at Bagram. They'd never go after, I dunno, a 14-year-old autistic kid in Atlanta attending a special needs school for a drawing, would they? Oh wait:

"They've pressed felony charges for terroristic threats," said [14-year old autistic student Shane Finn's] mother, Karen Finn. ... [School authorities] did confirm that Shane will face a tribunal and is being charged with making terroristic threats.

Emphasis added. That's a felony! Is it terrorism? Depends upon the specific law being used. Federally, right now, under Title 22? No. (See 2656f(d).) Under state law? Depends upon the state; some say yes, some say no. Fun dice to roll, isn't it? Because under the bills being discussed above, an accusation of terrorism is all that's needed and he's done, if someone high enough up wants him to be.

Yeah, sure, this particular kid? He'll get let off the charges - he's a white Southerner, after all. His family will be put through the wringer, but he'll get off. And yeah, even if he's not let off the charges, he's certain to get a trial - even under the McCain/Lieberman rules, I'm pretty sure he'd get a trial. And it'll get laughed out of court, one desperately hopes. To fall under the proposed new regime, after all, he'd have to get Federal attention. Not just local.

But it's not like these things ever stop there, is it? There's always authorisation creep and there's always enforcement creep. Maybe some later kid will get the attention of somebody who will have a grudge against the family, or want something they have. That kind of sword over an individual's or a population's head is a great way to get what you want.

That's how we got a lot of Gitmo's population, after all. Including this no-longer-14-year-old kid.