収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

I’m working on Fake Drumkit part for Song for a Free Court/Anarchy Now, and it needed more real drums, so I got out…

Oh, right, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about Fake Drumkit. So the musical shtick behind the band – as opposed to the political/theme idea – is, “what if a bunch of elves heard metal and thought WE HAVE TO DO THIS” and used what they had.

Since that includes a drumkit, I make what I call Fake Drumkit. It’s made of real drums like bodhran and djembe and bongo and wood block and metal and glass, and fake drums like big sampled bass taiko or at least things which sound kind of like taiko. Anarchy Now also has three tuned glass cymbals. It’s gonna be awesome. \n/

Anyway, I have a few drums recorded (and all those glass cymbals), but it needs more. And the bongos sound right so far. Not as bongos – I don’t play them as bongos, don’t expect that – but as midrange drums.

But I don’t have a stand, which makes them a pain to mic. So I drilled a hole in the little plastic bridge that holds the two bongo drums together, and epoxyed down one of those metal threaded rings that are on every mic stand ever and I don’t know why.

Anybody know what these are supposed to be for? They’re no good at anchoring mic clips, so that can’t be it.

I clamped it down with wax paper and tape, to keep the epoxy from sticking to the wrong things (like the clamp), and let it sit until this evening. Then I tried it tonight.

I’m holding the mic stand up, to be safe, but I didn’t need to.

Hey, it even looks kind of intentional:

Lots of room for underneath microphones

I’m a little worried about leverage on heavier strikes, but so far, so good.

Fake Drumkit is a lot of work, but I like it when it comes together. Wait’ll you hear the track for Something’s Coming. It’s not half as complex as this, but it’s totally bombastic – kind of 80s hair metal, really. BOOM BOOM BOOM awesome XD

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Clallam Bay Comicon! Otherwise known as a rather large party at Donna’s house The Lion’s Club. It’s a tiny event, but this year they had a venue and everything! But they’re still trying to figure out what they can do – the dream is to have a whole fleet of these things out in tiny Olympic Peninsula towns, maybe even on the same days, so you can have kind of a tour-the-peninsula-via-comic-conventions event.

Anyway, there were probably twice as many exhibitors as last year, plus we had panel programming. Next year, there’ll be more than one room, so the panels and exhibitor space won’t overlap. I did substantially better in sales than last year, to talk about business for a moment, but I think I’m the only one.

Donna Getting Ready for Opening Ceremonies on the Beach

Opening Ceremonies was more beachwalk than anything else. But it’s a gorgeous bay. Utterly lovely. I’ll throw more photos on the flickr stream later, but here are a couple:

Clallam Bay, East Side

Sunset, from behind the bridge

Then we went on a parade! We had a cosplay Scotsman playing flaming bagpipes on stilts. He won a ribbon.

I See You’ve Won First Prize!
(Niall actually did win first prize.)
(photo Angela Korra’ti)

The convention didn’t have a newsletter. I used to do the daily ‘zines at Norwescon for years, so I made one in the bar with a rubber stamp kit and some post-its.

Typesetting
(phone photo courtesy Donna Barr)

Electronic Edition, a.k.a. Typesetting is Difficult

The entire print run

There were, of course, panel presentations, and I did my concert. And if you’re looking for the PDF version of the Kitting Out Cheap – Building Gear on a Budget handout, click here; also, the series of articles I talked about on making your own podcasting or recording studio is here.

Introducing Cosplay to the Fishers

 

Supervillainy on a Microphone
(photo courtesy Angela Korra’ti)

I did a new thing called the Supervillain Origin Story set, just to see if they’d cope. And actually… they really did. I did much better in sales than last year, and I think that’s partly why. Also:

I HAVE A HEADSET MICROPHONE DO YOU SEE IT? OH MY GOD I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW MUCH I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS HEADSET MICROPHONE. HEADSET MICROPHONE WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?! I grabbed it on the way out of town from a Guitar Centre on sale for $210 including transmitter/receiver and … I should’ve bought one of these two years ago. I’ve got pretty good mic discipline at this point – and even use distance/proximity effect on purpose sometime – but I’m a highly kinetic player and always, always felt constricted and tied down and weird. I’ve always been much better without a mic and this is exactly like being without a microphone except I have a microphone.

FUCK YEAH HEADSET MICROPHONE!

Anyway.

After things closed down for the day but before we went out for dinner we stopped back at our hotel room. I have never wanted to open an appliance door more than when I saw this:

Do Not Open

OH MY GOD MUST OPEN. MUST. OPEN. Anna had to put a towel on my head and feed me ice cream.

Then we went and hung out on the beach for the illegal fireworks. It’s seriously Ten Finger Johnny time on the beach out here, particularly for the two hours before the official big fireworks display on the south side of the bay in Sekiu.

One Point Five Limbed Johnny on the 14th of July…

I don’t have any photos of the official fireworks, but Sekiu put son a great display for Fun Days; just like last year, there were cruise ships lined up out on the Salish to watch from a boring safe distance. They have some seriously exotic fireworks and they launch them really high, and it’s just great.

Today, cleaning, and mending, and patching a few fire holes in the old battlesuit – the usual drill after Escapades. How was your weekend?

ps: I put up a few dozen photos of Harrison Hot Springs over on my Flickr account, which I keep forgetting to use. I’ll add more Clallam Bay photos there later, but I don’t want these lost in too huge an update.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

I’ve always liked these little flowers. They look so fake, like they’re made of some sort of particularly sun-resistant plastic. I’M NOT SAYING IT WAS ALIENS BUT

…it was aliens.

Remember a couple of months ago the hell of upgrading Ubuntu so I could run a modern version of Jack, so I could run Ardour 2.6.14? Well, that was the latest version six months ago, the first time I tried to upgrade.

About five months ago, the long-awaited Ardour 3.0 finally came out. (They’re at 3.1.mutter now; and having the history with Microsoft, this sounds like a sweetspot for versions.) So now I’m fiddling around with that.

I’ve only been working with it for a few hours so far, but I’ve done a little test recording and editing, and tried to put it through some early paces. It works with the version of Jack included with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS; no Jack update needed. It still allows parallel installations, so you can use it without losing 2.6. There’s an installation script, but honestly, you don’t need it; you can run it straight out of its bin directory, which is what I’m doing.

First impressions are really good. Latency is lower. I’ve had a little list of features I’ve wished Ardour had, and suddenly it has them. There are a lot of UI changes, most of which I like, some of which I love, a couple of which… I’m not as happy about, but nothing I can’t get used to. It has updated project formats; I’m figuring out how much that matters, it seems to maintain double root files now, one for Ardour 2.x use, one for Ardour 3.x use, but I haven’t tested that.

I love love love the new project view window.

It’s a lot smarter about use of screen space; I can fit all the tracks of, say, Voiceless usably into the editing window now, and even have a bit of room to spare. “Maximise editor space” is now actually worth using; it’s much smarter about use of screen real estate. Plug-in management in tracks is much better – that was one of those things I’ve been wanting. Click track now lets you set files for both emphasis note and basic notes, and it has an exposed level control. (You could do that before; it was just difficult.)

One way in the past to crash Ardour has been to get freaky with editor zoom controls while the transport is running on a complex project; 2.6.8 would crash pretty easily that way; I’ve only seen 2.6.14 do it once. 3.1 hasn’t yet, despite trying – but the night is still young.

Anyway, those are all just some first impressions. I’ve already made a scratch project for the soundtrack album in 3.1; if things continue to go well, I’ll do the whole album in it, and post new impressions as I have them.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Criminal Studios’ workstation desk has had a usability problem.

Ardour, my digital audio workstation (DAW) software, has an editor view and a mixer view. Both are really useful for different things, and Ardour will happily display both at once. But both want lots of screen space, making you toggle between them, which is a pain in the ass. Avoiding that requires huge tracts of land, and those big monitors are spendy.

Last week, I realised I could cheat. First, Linux, Windows, and OS X all support multimonitor/multicard displays. Second, for the last year or so, everybody’s been dumping 4:3-ratio LCDs, even newish ones in good shape; nobody wants them. Pretty good ones go for $20ish; I spent $16. Third, old-school 4:3 ATI Rage cards are $15, new in box.

Combine these facts, and $31 buys you:

Huge Tracts of Land

The blue field on the left display is part of the background graphic, made by modifying a standard Ubuntu Studio desktop. There’s no actual special functionality; it’s organisational notation. “Files left here need sorted.”

2560×1024, aw yeah

(Click on either to enlarge.)

By themselves, neither display is good, by any modern definition. I mean, lol 17″ 4:3 LCDs. Would you want to play games on this? Hell to the no. FPS would be wretched, you have this screen divisor bar where the monitors meet…

…but that’s totally irrelevant.

All you need for a DAW is to match screen resolutions and have enough oomph to draw sound level metres moving. That’s about the same graphics power as you need for something like, oh, Word. Getting that functionality cost, I repeat, thirty-one dollars.

It’d've been $16 if the old graphics card sitting in the parts box hadn’t been the wrong slot type. Do you have an old PCI graphics card sitting around? Thought so.

After all of two days in this configuration, the usability difference is tremendous and obvious. Being able to have all this extra data in view at the same time is really useful when recording other people, and there’s actually a lot less mousing even as I do more things, because I’m not having to change views and move windows around to get to tools.

It’s so useful, I’ve decided to shell out another $44 for a cheap dual-monitor bracket. But you don’t need that; you can just sit the monitors on boxes to get them to the right height. But I need screen mobility.

See, the studio desk is double-sided. I set things up on the outer side when I’m recording myself or rehearsing. It’s for best access to the DAW controls from the recording floor:

Note location of chair and keyboard; recording floor is to the right.

When recording others, I set up on the opposite, further side, so I’m out of the way, and can see everything they’re doing:

Flipped about

Needing to move the monitors every couple of days? That’s worth a pair of monitor arms. If you don’t have that, don’t bother.

This situation won’t be last forever, because all the good old 4:3 monitors will go away, or get old, or become rare enough to be more expensive. But for the time being, it’s pretty cool. And dirt cheap, so you can spend your money on things that matter.

Like microphones.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!