Punctuating The Silence

Yeah, I know I wrote earlier that we only had 2 gigs this weekend. More on that in a minute. Last night was the first gig in Burlington, NJ. We were the inaugural act for a new coffeehouse starting at the Broad Street United Methodist Church. It wasn’t a huge crowd, but they were appreciative, and it was a fun night. The only major mishap was my main controller locking up right at the end of the penultimate song of the first set. It’s connected to my laptop via USB, and when a USB device goes away in Windows/Usine (yes, yes, I’m using Windoze - Usine is that good!), there’s no getting it back without rebooting. Fortunately, Dan has no problem filling in the spaces with his ability for extemporaneous speaking! I was able to reboot fairly quickly, and we closed the set.

Also, my friend Ben was there in the capacity of official band photographer. Thanks, Ben! Looking forward to seeing the results (even if it turned out to be more of test run - who knew what our backdrop would be?)!

And now the “.5 gig” explanation: Dan’s father is the senior pastor of our church, and he and his wife came to the gig last night. He heard one of the songs, and realized it would be perfect for the service the next morning, so he asked Dan if we would do it. This proved to be interesting, as we don’t have enough time to set up our entire rig Sunday mornings (although we do have some gear there: Dan and I play on the Worship Team for the first service), so we needed a “B” rig. For Dan, that meant one guitar (which happened to be the one he uses Sunday morning), using a clean sound (ie no pedal board), and his laptop and MIDI pedal board. For me, that meant my Korg Karma (which I usually use Sundays), my X-Station and my laptop. The laptop provides the environment, and any number of soft-synths, and the X-Station turned out to be the hub. Not only is it the audio interface for the laptop, but I ran the audio of my Karma through one of it’s inputs, and thus only needed to run one input (going mono here) to the sound board. I also needed to make a second copy of Usine (one of the things I like about it is that there’s no install, and nothing in the registry), with a separate config (Windows/Usine tends to freak out a little when all of the devices it’s expecting aren’t there - I’ve had some re-mapping in the patches going on, which wasn’t fun to recover from).

We got home from the gig last night about 10:30ish, and unloaded the truck, and then I spent the next little while programming the laptop software, imagining in my head (I didn’t want to get everything out and set up) how everything was going to hang together. Dan and I got to the church this morning a little earlier than normal, but were still up against the clock. Somehow, we managed to set up, debug, sound check (which doubled as a quick rehearsal), and get through the other practice (the regular service stuff), and still have some time left over for other special music to get in some practice time. Amazing. It all went perfectly, too. Well, OK, maybe not perfectly - I couldn’t hear myself very well for our one song (I had a headphone monitor, but it needed more gain than I could give it - I’ll have to work on that), but I got through it OK - I even nailed the solo!

A regular gig for us is 12 songs, so technically this was 1/12th of a gig, but I’m adding the other 5/12ths for all the work that was needed to get there. Hopefully, as it’s pretty inevitable we’ll be asked to do more things on short notice, or more confined spaces, that this “B” rig will work out for a lot of the things we do. It might take some re-working, but we should be able to pull it off. Eventually, I can see phasing out the Karma in the B rig in favour of my CME controller, and relying more on soft-synths.

This afternoon, we’re off to Barnegat, NJ (the Shore!) to lead worship at the Bayside Chapel. it’s a smaller set, but we’ll have the full rig with us (we might use their sound system), and it should be a little more relaxed.

I went to a talk given by an engineer from SGI the other day. I was thinking, as he talked about their Intel-based products geared toward clustering, parallel systems and storage, how far the company has come from the uber-cool graphics hardware I used to drool over as an undergrad over a decade ago. As a member of the executive of the computer club in the CS department at Guelph (President for two years), we had a prof who had connections to SGI via Alias, which was based in Toronto. We used to borrow large machines from them periodically for the club, and we always got lots of time on them. We had access to our own SGIs in the department, but these were always bigger systems with the high-end graphics boards.

One of the changes SGI has gone through in recent years is their re-branding, which meant a new logo. I always loved the 3D SGI logo, and was sad to see it go (I still have a small embossed version of it that I appropriated from an older, recycled machine stuck to one of my monitor bezels).
As part of the talk, we got a pile of literature, some swag, and a business card from the sales rep for our area. I had taken it all back to my office, put it on my desk, and happened to turn the card over. I was happy to see the old logo on the back. It makes me wonder how many people there miss the old days too.

I’ve had problems with my MacBook Pro since I took it out of it’s box in June of 2006, so when the latest problems got too great to ignore, I found myself pining for the old days of Dell support, where next day, they would have someone come to my office, and fix the issue while I watched (yeah, I’ve had lousy laptop experiences).  So even though the university where I work has a hardware support group that would fix it themselves or handle things with Apple, I was still contemplating a long separation from my shiny newish toy.  I brought it in on a Tuesday afternoon, and right away, with 3 separate issues, they told me they have to send these to Apple.  Not looking good.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to get an email Friday saying the laptop was back, and I could come and pick it up.  I did, all the issues had been fixed, and it’s been working flawlessly since then.  Well done, Apple, and good to know that my future repairs (oh, they’ll be needed, I can almost guarantee it) can be anticipated with a little less fear of a long withdrawal!

Ah, the joys of being a tech geek and a musician. There’s nothing better: so much wonderful technology out there for making music. Infinite possibilities in infinite combinations. One can spend more time playing with the technology than actually playing music (a danger I must constantly avoid). But it’s so much fun, and so very satisfying to coax amazing, warm sounds from the “soulless machines”.

And then you decide to play live. Whether there’s an inherent anti-social tendency in these machines, or just shy and nervousness, things can and do go wrong. And the effect is amplified when they’re in groups. I know this for two reasons. First, the band I’m in only has two members, and we have a lot of gear to compensate.

The second reason is that the band I’m in is about to start gigging for the new year, and as this is the first official gig with this incarnation (last year the band had 5 members), we had what could be considered a “dress rehearsal”: we tore everything down from our practice room, packed it all in vehicles, drove to our church, set everything up on stage there, and ran through our set. I had more problems that day than I think I’ve ever had: stuck notes on one keyboard (MIDI issues), computer problems (OS crashes that nuked the configuration of my music software), and controllers that flat-out refused to do anything. The most interesting problem was in the aftermath of the crash. My music software has a configuration option for “CPU protection”. The idea is that if the CPU load goes above a certain threshold, settable as a percentage, the music software will stop processing things. Undesirable in a live setting, but better than the machine crashing completely. Unbeknownst to me, this got reset from it’s normal value of 90% to 0%. I’m trying to figure out why nothing is working (everything in my live rig goes through the computer at once point or other), but looks normal. That took a few minutes.

There are those who will point out that if the “dress rehearsal” went badly, the “production” should then go really well, and I’m still optimistic, but when you’re placing yourself in the hands of your technology, in front of people (oh, and did I mention that a lot of people we know are going to be there?), you have to prepare for the possibilities, and, well, I have to confess to being a little bit nervous.

I am glad we did this, if only for the fact that now I have a better idea of how things could go wrong. What’s interesting about this goes back to what I mentioned at the beginning: notice I didn’t once talk about the music itself; my nervousness stems from the technological uncertainties, not that I’m playing music in front of a crowd. If I was sitting at a piano all night, it would be completely different. It’s all part of the fun, I suppose. I’ll be sure to do a follow-up after the gig to let you know how it went.

With reverential’s reduction in size, I’m going to be doing more on stage, and that means I need to be more versatile. There are an amazing number of great-quality, free VST plugins available out there, as well as hosts, and I’ve been looking to add a computer to my setup to run these for a while now. Those of you who know me know that computing power is not a problem; the problem is the connection between my keyboards and a computer: MIDI, and that all-important factor, the audio interface. Well, that problem got rather neatly solved in the form of the Novation X-Station 25 (click here for a bigger image). This is not only an amazing piece of gear, but provided the solutions to several problems or gaps I had in my rig. In addition to a nifty little synth on-board, the X-Station provides, via USB, a MIDI interface and a bi-directional audio interface, as well as a fully-programmable MIDI control surface and 2 channels of audio processing for external gear, complete with effects. This is a beautifully-designed, well-constructed instrument, and it works flawlessly in every regard.

The downside of now owning something that unlocks the VST plugin world for me is that it’s going to take years to play with everything out there long enough to know if it’s going to be useful to me live, then get the sounds programmed/tweaked, and then program the X-Station’s control surface to control it live. Not to mention learning the onboard synth. It’s a daunting task, but wow, is it ever *fun*. I haven’t been this excited about programming patches and MIDI and audio routing in years.

Once I get the new live rig assembled, I’ll be posting some pictures and descriptions (I hope to diagram out the MIDI routing and post that too, along with all the details of reverential’s stage setup). Stay tuned!

Last week was one that could very well be looked back on as a turning point for the band I’m in: after learning that our lead guitarist and bassist wanted out, we got word that our drummer was leaving, too. Fortunately, all the “important” people (sorry, guys!) are left: my friend, Dan, and I. Yup, reverential is now a duo. Which is fine: a lot of the artists I listen to are either solo acts or duos, so this can work. And, thanks to a little technology, we’re going to make it work.

Dan is the creative force behind this endevour. He’s on vocals and guitar, but he’s also the songwriter, and is a wizard with Live, Reason, and putting songs together. As the keyboardist in the group, it was sometimes hard to find that sonic space in the song to put my stuff, but that just got easier, even if it’s more demanding. To that end, I’ve been working on changing my live setup. It’s not finalized yet, but in addition to the Karma and the UF7, I’ll be adding a 25-key controller/synth of some sort (very likely either a Novation X-Station or XioSynth), and a laptop with softsynths. By the time I’m done, it will look a little different from the past.

Stay tuned for updates, pictures and gear/software descriptions!

This weekend, one of the inverters in our solar array was showing a fault, and was off-line. Normally, this would have been a problem, because it would have meant calling the company that installed it. Now, they did a good job with the installation, and I have no problem with their technical expertise with these systems, but there were issues during the installation, and there is still one outstanding issue with them that they refuse to communicate with us on. So while they are obligated to support the system, and I would call them if there was something wrong, I’m going to explore other options first.

I checked the manual for meaning of the error code, which explained it and basically said “call the manufacturer (of the inverter)”. Not good so far. I went to their website, where I knew they had a forum, and was able to find a post with the same problem, and the tech had pointed that person to a technical document they had published, saying that it was possible to fix this problem in the field.

I downloaded the 4 page PDF, and started to read, immediately seeing the words “The Sunny Boy Inverters operate with potentially lethal voltage and current from multiple power sources. Only qualified personnel should attempt to work on the inverter”. It promised to be interesting…

It turned out to be a fairly simple proceedure, jumpering a couple of sets of pins on the main board, applying DC power, removing the jumpers in a certain order, and applying AC power, but it was done with the cover off and all sorts of warnings of lethal voltages visible. Really steady-hand-inspiring stuff.

Everything worked the first time, the inverter came back online, and all is well. I’m still not sure if I should be thinking “nice job”, or “what was I thinking?”, but I still have my healthy respect for potentially lethal voltages and currents, so I’m going with the former.

Some keywords which might help other owners: SMA SunnyBoy 2500U EEPROM_d error

In a few minutes, I’ll be off to Portland, OR, for this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference. I was there last year, and it was a great time. I hadn’t been in a few years, so it was interesting to see the changes, and now that I know some of what to expect, I’m really looking forward to this year. I also have the added bonus of travelling with a friend and colleague who hasn’t been to OSCON or Portland before, so I get to do a bit of tour guide. Promises to be a great week! Stay tuned, more here as the week progresses!

Although this is probably the first time I’ve blogged about it (mostly due to procrastination), it was exactly one year ago today that our solar panel array went live. It took some doing to get to that point, but looking back over the collected data (note: I don’t have all the numbers right now - I’m working on compiling them, and I’ll update this post when they’re available on the website), it was definitly worth the hassle. The system has performed very well (beyond our expectations, but to size the system we had to rely on electric bills from the previous owners, who had a different lifestyle from ours, so we suspected it might perform better than projected), and there were no problems with the system at all in the first year. Not that it would have been a major issue: the company that installs it supports the system for the first five years: something that tells you right off that not too many problem tend to occur. The best part of the year was discovering that the spring months are so optimal for power generation, that we built up a credit with the power company large enough that we should have at least one free summer month.

This morning, I brought my car in for regular service, and decided to wait for it (I wouldn’t have had to, they would happily provide me with a loaner, but this was only going to be a couple of hours, and they have wired & wireless Internet access).  5 minutes before my service manager walked in to tell me my car was ready, I already knew: I happened to be looking at my phone and noticed it had connected to the car!  I’m not sure exactly where the service bays were from where I was, but I suspect it was the other side of the wall, and my car was close enough to establish contact with the phone when they started it to bring it around.  Nice.