bitflipper

First rock band I ever saw cover a Broadway musical number...sort of. Hadn't heard of them before catching them at a teen dance in Banbury, Oxfordshire, 1969. The following year, Emerson would form ELP in same mold as The Nice. This was actually a Top 40 hit in the UK.

Just the chin. Kinda sporting a Jordan Rudess look, I guess. It'd be nice if that turned out to be the secret of his keyboard prowess, but I doubt it.

After two outdoor gigs where I thought I was gonna die from heat exhaustion, and another outdoor stage today, I said f*k it, and shaved my head. Sheesh, I am so white. Other band members will be wearing shorts today, but I dare not, lest I completely blind the audience.

No doubt. Everything about this vehicle (well, most modern vehicles) looks like a nightmare to get into. They probably had to remove the dashboard and work upside-down to get it done. The days of quick backyard auto repairs are no more. I miss my old 1972 Dodge Tradesman, with its engine on the inside between the seats so you could work on it in the rain. Or my 1974 VW bus, which I'd pull over to the side of the freeway to quickly tune the timing for higher RPMs when driving long distances. It all started going downhill when they began putting fuel pumps inside gas tanks, and the public meekly said "OK, that makes sense".

Now, this is neither here nor there, but I had to laugh at my own expense and share my misery. This morning I took my van in to have the A/C repaired. I told them I'd wait, and had brought a book. But they said there was no guarantee it'd be done today and I should not wait. So they gave me a ride home. It was only after I got home that I realized my house keys were still on the keychain in the car at the dealer. So I've been sitting here for hours without access to my garage and the computer within, dozing off and sweating. It'll be OK, I said, as long as no customers call me with some emergency. Guess what happened. Somebody needed a crucial file from me RIGHT NOW. Installers would be getting on a plane tomorrow and needed the information RIGHT NOW. Sorry, I said. I'm, um, locked out of my office. So professional. Worse, a sizeable chunk of money was on the line, funds I've already spent on a new PA, and I wouldn't be getting paid until that installation was completed. All's well that ends better, though. They charged me $500 for a resistor. A frickin' resistor. They assured me it was a very nice, very special resistor and I was lucky they had one in stock. I got to send off the file. I got to have a cold drink from the fridge. And if anybody's looking for me this afternoon, I'll be in the car blasting cold air at my face.

What year was that recorded? It sounds amazing.

Yeh, I keep forgetting that's a plus for many people. For me it's just a reminder that I'm paying a premium so that all those cheapskates who are too tight-fisted to spring for full Kontakt can use it. Fleer, you're a philosopher. That's not elitist, is it?

That's my favorite song that we cover! Often a set closer. Janis is our singer's specialty, although we had to take away her Southern Comfort. btw, we do NOT include that awful guitar intro. LSD only works if you brought enough for everybody.

Sounds great. A bit too much overlap with the OTS Rickenbacker I already have, though, not counting the 5th string.

Just bear in mind that the DropoutMSec variable won't stop dropouts, but only raise the engine's tolerance toward them. it sets how long a dropout must last before the engine gives up, says "something's very wrong" and stops playback. If you experience a dropout longer than 250ms, then there is definitely something wrong. If you can live with it, that's fine - it won't affect your exports, you'll just have interruptions during playback.

I've done a duo, too. Twice, a total of 10 years total. When I did this as a full-time job it was with a trio. And yes, small groups are way more stable and convenient and conducive to impromptu improvisation and a large repertoire. My current band has been together for 17 years, and I've been with them for the past 8. I am their second keyboardist. Just since me joining we've had 3 bass players and two guitarists. The drummer can't leave because he's married to the singer.

Yeh. Driving home from last Saturday's gig with my bassist, I was trying to assuage his skepticism about the coming changes. At the end of my pitch, he turned and said "it also means you're gonna have a volume control for ME." Oops, cat's out of the bag.

Always reassuring when Mr. Roseberry and I are on the same page! Yeh, over the coming month the next step is going direct to the PA for guitar, bass and drums - no amps other than monitors. And because I'm re-purposing our old mains speakers (QSC K10.2s) as stage monitors, we're going to have really good monitoring. I use a QSC K8.2 on a stand at ear level as my own monitor, and it handles the added load of the keys with ease. Next year we'll likely transition to in-ears and have no onstage amplification at all. You're right on about the lights. All I have is a single tree with 4 Chauvet LED floods and a DMX controller that the bass player operates, plus a couple up-lights for the back of the stage. It's enough to keep us from playing in the dark, and give us some light for packing up. I'd like to add a second stand and maybe a strobe to see if I can make anybody puke. Exactly. My goal has always been to just play in a good band, period. But this year I've started thinking that making some money might not be a bad thing. Part of the plan is to land more corporate gigs, weddings and festivals, all of which pay better than bars. But they also expect a higher standard of look and sound. We've got the latter covered but still need to work on the former. I do wear a nice shirt on stage. That's a start.

Feeling more positive today. We have a candidate for our new guitarist coming over next Tuesday. Fingers crossed. Plus the new PA arrived today. I set it up all by myself despite my bum foot. Of course, I had to have a little sit-down afterward. And this is cool...those speaker poles have pneumatic lifts in them, strong enough to raise the speakers by themselves. However, I haven't yet figured out how to get them back down. In a couple weeks I'll start playing keyboards through the PA instead of separate amplifiers, so I had to set them up today to test that configuration. And yes, Bapu, that means I have instruments here (at least until Friday) and can now add a part to the new Citizen Regen project.

Despite the best efforts of the federal witness protection program, the Quebec mafia has detected Rain's presence in Las Vegas. Turns out, tall guys playing guitar loudly aren't that easy to hide. Consequently, he has gone underground and assumed a new identity. I will leave it to you to figure out his new forum handle.

I played keyboard bass for five years a la Manzerek, because the money was better that way and it was my sole source of income at the time. To this day I have to consciously avoid playing bass lines with my left hand, it had become so ingrained. Then for another five years I played in a duo with an acoustic 12-string guitarist. Again, for the money. But when I stopped playing as a job, money ceased to be a motivator and I vowed never to compromise again. I'd have a percussionist and a horn section if the stages we play were big enough to accommodate them. The irony is that although I now just play for the joy of it and don't care about money anymore, lack of money is the reason we're losing our current guitarist. He's 30 years old and desperately needs the money. It's sad not only because he's very good, he also has the strongest back among us and I've just upsized the PA.

Yes. He intends to pay me back once he's settled out in Minnesota. He's a stand-up guy, always been true to his word. I could demand it back, but wtf am I going to do with an overpowered guitar amplifier? I thought about that, but it'd be a major paradigm shift and a lot of work. Anyway, I'm looking forward to a break. We've been playing out every weekend since April, as is normal for us during the summer months, after which we've historically taken time off to woodshed and work up new material. All that stage time has made us very tight, but even with our extensive song list it still gets a little tedious playing the same stuff over and over. We're also in the process of a big gear change. I've been gradually working toward an amp-less stage, using amp sims and running everything through the PA. The current PA will be repurposed as stage monitors, and eventually those will be replaced by IEMs. That means we'll have a consistent mix volume onstage regardless of the venue, and it'll always sound the same to us as it does when we're rehearsing in my garage. One master fader makes the whole band louder or quieter as needed. After the transition to IEMs we'll be able to practice silently, even right before a gig. The final pieces of the new PA are supposed to arrive over the next 5 days, starting with a sub scheduled for delivery today. Via FedEx, though, so who knows.

Sadly, the Music Bank is no more. Back during the grunge era it spawned several bands, e.g. Alice in Chains probably being the most successful. (Sorry for the multiple posts. Took me a minute to find where they'd hidden the Edit button.)

Oh gawd, the ultimate sacrifice. Respect, man. For having the courage to do the unthinkable.

Never mind. He's a Brit. We have logistics challenges as it is.

A bit young, but he's got chops. Yah, we'd take him on.

I'm always the optimist. The pattern I extrapolate is it can only get better from here on out. Summer will end and we'll be back to loudouts in the rain and clapping hands to get the circulation going. It'll be great.

Our guitarist called me last night to say he'll be moving out of state in six weeks. Says he can't afford to live here anymore, which I get. This is an expensive area. The rest of us do OK because we all own our own homes, but he's renting and paying more for a small apartment than I do for my mortgage. He's agreed to stay through September 9th, which covers most of the dates currently on the books. So that's how long I have to find a replacement and get him up to speed. It'd be tight even if I found somebody today and they're a fast learner. I'm afraid we'll have to cancel some gigs and take at least a month off to get it done. So...know any guitarists in the Seattle area who'd like to play classic rock one or two days a week, and can sing both lead and harmony? And do it primarily for the love of music because the money's not good enough to be the prime motivator. And who doesn't have drug/alcohol/ego problems. I know, a guitarist without an oversized ego is a big ask.

Henrizzle's said he's already got buffers at max, and has already experimented with 64-bit option off and on. I doubt he's going to be able to configure his way out of this. I'm confused about the assumption that this is a thread synchronization issue. I know how semaphores and mutexes work, and they exist to negotiate resource contention, race problems, memory and I/O bandwidth restrictions - basically real-time issues. They should not be a factor in normal rendering, especially in a project that's almost entirely audio. Perhaps a more telling symptom is the dropouts in the exported audio. This shouldn't happen. In 20 years using Sonar/CbB, I have experienced dropouts while recording, dropouts while playing back, but never in an exported file. I agree that this is data corruption, but it's happening at a lower level than the application. Henrizzle, have you tried a real-time render?

Yah, I'm just trying to garner sympathy. Truth is, it looks much better today. After they scraped away the dead flesh and dried blood, it now looks like a skinless chicken breast, exposed raw meat but with a fresh sheen of oozing blood. A much healthier-looking color than the black hue from Sunday. I've got pics if you want... And it feels fine. That may be the oxycodone talking, but it feels fine. My painkillers are leftovers from my back surgery 10 years ago. That stuff apparently has a long shelf-life. As long as that supply holds out, I'll do fine at the gig. I have played on strong pain killers before. As long it's a slow blues in a minor key, it's all good. The trick will be convincing my bandmates that Piece of My Heart will go over as a slow blues.