In The Movies . . .
If you saw me roaming around downtown Indianapolis or leaning over the railings near the White River with a portable audio recorder late last year, there was a very good reason for me to be doing so. I was recording background and foley sounds for Catherine Crouch's new short film A Pirate in Alphabet City. She was also gracious enough to use some incidental music I composed. Cast and crew got to see the final product last Sunday, and I couldn't be happier with the way it turned out. What surprised me was how much easier it is to put music in video than when I first started researching the subject years ago. No more messing with SMPTE code - just play along to the video (I did all of my work in Reason) and nudge the clips as necessary.
The movie should be hitting the festival circuit soon, and hopefully I'll get to do more work like this in the future.
PERMISSIONS!
The stuttering audio problems returned late last night, even despite the UC-33 being off and unplugged. Heck, they continued even after I removed ALL of the MIDI gear. So that's a problem. - until I noticed some nasty red flags on my user folders when I tried to save a track within Reason. Out of curiosity, I rebooted from the Lion Recovery disk and reset the user permissions of my recording account. The results? Not only did the audio NOT continue stuttering, but I was able to get my devices working. Via USB. Even the "officially" legacy Roland GI-20. Just a quick device creation in the Audio MIDI Setup utility, and it's performing as expected. The problem traces back to when I was messing about and moving my user profile as part of an attempt to Boot Camp Windows 8 on my new dual-drive Mac Mini (again, don't try it - doesn't work all that well in theory and not at all for me). So I'm up and running at full strength again and . . . recording a track my wife says sounds like Katy Perry. Perhaps I should not have been so effective in my troubleshooting efforts.
New Music Computer Unsure About My Old Devices
Another fun part of upgrading is seeing what devices still work with your new system. So far, my GI-20's USB capabilities are gone (it's officially not supported in Lion), and my UC-33 is stalling audio on my machine right now for some reason (tonight's troubleshooting includes testing USB cords, USB hubs, and working with the Mac's audio and MIDI settings to try and correct the situation). The device itself is class-compliant (i.e., the Mac should just accept it and move on), and I'm hoping to run the MIDI out on the GI-20 to the UC-33 MIDI in for usage that way. Did I think I'd have to ever daisy-chain MIDI devices together again? Nothing like new technology taking me back to the 90s! The M-Audio Duo seems to be working splendidly, though, so no need to work there. Thank goodness for small favors.
New Music Computer Doesn’t Like Windows
If anything, just let this be a warning to never try and install Windows 8 on a dual-drive Mac Mini system. It doesn't work. Trust me - I have many days of effort to attest to it. I encountered several warnings that it was difficult, but I tried every possible configuration short of voiding the warranty and disconnecting one of the drives. Just doesn't work - gets through two reboots and hangs on a black screen. And throws up occasional errors, just to taunt you.
On a lark, I tried the 32-bit version on my 6-year-old laptop - took about half-an-hour to a full boot. Amazing.
That said, the dual-drive Mac Mini makes a great machine for Reason and the RAID array means the data is always backed up. Which is nice. But it definitely doesn't like Windows. At all. Even when given its own drive and no Boot Camp. What a prima donna.
So now I'm going to revisit Ableton Live Lite (free, courtesy of Soundcloud) and see how it plays with Reason. And we'll never talk about Windows again.
Our First House Show
So our first house show didn't start out as OUR house show, but the original location of the house show fell through and we gave this wandering orphan event shelter for the evening. The original host handled all the invites (although we also welcomed some neighborhood friends in for the fun of it). Even the food came pre-acquired, so we literally just had to open the doors and move some furniture.
Luckily, the band Faux Fix turned out to be both wonderful musicians and excellent people all around, and I was able to share some geeky moments over our common affection for the SoftStep. We witnessed a fantastic hour-plus show, they distributed some CDs and such (extremely important for a band on the road), and more folks got to hear their music (light but affecting electronic music with folky leanings - extremely likable).
So some quick tips from what we learned:
- Invite more than you think will show to ensure a full house
- Good food goes a long way
- Pleasant flexibility goes a long way
- Working with good people makes all task extremely easy
If anything, shows like this prove you don't have to restrict house shows to simple acoustic affairs or louder shows at larger places. Faux Fix knows how to travel light yet create a full, layered sound.
The Bass Geek’s Twitter
- Free official remix of Meshell Ndegeocello's Petit Mort, great way to start a holiday weekend - bit.ly/KovHLb 7 hours ago
- Last night's rehearsal proved it beyond a doubt - I need one of them there smaller amps . . . 8 hours ago
- Seriously - this Memorial Day weekend will be too hot to do anything. At all. I wanna be this guy. youtu.be/K5JSWZXaKQA 8 hours ago
- New blog post: Fountain Square Music This Weekend thebassgeek.net/2012/05/25/fou… 12 hours ago
- Lightning session at #stc12, then back home - thanks for everything, it was a great conference! 2 days ago
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