bitflipper

Such is the wisdom only experience can provide. As the saying goes, don't wrestle with pigs; you'll both just get dirty but the pig likes it. Good thing I didn't mention that we were - shudder - forced to use the dishwasher for a week because it still had hot water.

Since my back surgery 10 years ago, there are certain things I just can't do anymore. Like trimming my toenails. Or crawling under the kitchen sink. Correction: I can get under the sink, but I can't get back out unless someone's there to drag me out by my ankles. Consequently, routine home repairs that in the past I'd have done myself I now have to turn over to professionals. My latest plumbing money-sink began when my granddaughter dropped the sprayer into the sink and broke its plastic handle. Because the sprayer is integral to the faucet assembly and cannot be replaced separately, that meant buying a new faucet. I liked the old faucet just fine, but OK, at this point I'm only out $280. When it came time to install it, I drafted my grandson into being the guy under the sink. But he couldn't turn off the hot water. I figured it was a disintegrated o-ring in the shutoff valve and we could live with it being stuck open, so I shut off the main water and proceeded with the installation. But after we were done, no hot water came out of the faucet. Now I know I've got to replace the shutoff valve, but I'm not going to trust my grandson to replace it. So I brace myself and hire a plumber, thinking it'll be a couple hundred bucks. Nope. $1,007.45. Ouch. But at least I know it's been done right. The o-ring had indeed disintegrated, and little pieces of rubber gasket had been sucked up into the faucet. Next day my daughter reports that it's dripping. With no youthful helpers around, I do my best to crawl under there and tighten the fitting. That only slowed the drip. Another call to the plumber, who I reminded had promised that the work was warrantied. Plumber comes out, says no, the warranty doesn't apply because the leak is from the hose going up to the faucet, not the part he replaced. He'll fix it, but it'll be another $335. For want of one little piece of broken plastic, I'm out $1,600. So how is this music-related? That money was going to be spent on a musical instrument. But at least I have hot water now, so I will just sing to myself as I wash the dishes.

Such thoughts have flitted through my head from time to time, too. But they don't take hold, for two reasons. First, I enjoy my own music. How could I not, given that it's custom tailored for an audience of one? I took out all the things I didn't want to hear and put in things that I did want to hear. When I'm falling asleep with headphones on, and the player lands on one of my own tunes, especially if I haven't heard it in awhile, I genuinely like it. Not necessarily because it's great or inspired or breaks new ground, but because I made it for me and I know what me likes. Second, these days I'm putting a lot of energy into live performance. Talk about a potential waste of time - live music happens in the moment and then it's gone forever. Nobody outside the people in that room will ever hear it. That truly is the essence of music: here's me putting something into your ear right now in real time. If you don't like it we can both pretend it never happened, but even if it works neither of us have any proof that it did. Either way, it's meant to be enjoyed in the moment, like most of the best parts of life.

I think of ba-midi often. Years ago when I was very poor due to a problematic relationship with the IRS, he gifted me a license for FabFilter Pro-Q, which remains my most-used plugin to this day. So yeh, I think of Billie every time I Ioad it up. He inspired me to pay it forward whenever an opportunity arose, mostly by gifting gear to other musicians. Which reminds me, I need to create a will. I'd hate to have all my stuff end up in a yard sale to be snatched up by Craigslist resellers.

That's the punchline of an old joke about dropping a piano down a mineshaft.

Well, I didn't know "CAPTCHA" was an acronym. I thought it was just part of the internet's ubiquitous propensity for mis-spellings and random capitalization. RAWK on, DOOD.

Psst. There's another key right next to it called - get this - "B" minor. Yup, it's real and it's a whole 'nother world. There are even rumors of some foolish explorers venturing out into a dark creepy dungeon known only as (shudder) A flat minor. Oxygen not included.

Don't be depressed by this. Rather, think of it as a call to arms. You are a music creator and nobody's telling you what kind of music to create. Plus you know you'll probably never make gobs of money at it anyway, so go wild and express yourself. Need help breaking out of Am? Consult a saxophonist. Want to get away from 4/4? Ask a drummer.

I gotta imagine it causes traffic jams.

Dave Rat gives a tour and delivers the technical specs. Each box contains either 80 or 96 speakers, each with their own amplifier. They go for $36-38K apiece, so I won't be adding any to my rig, although it would be fun to be able to target sound at that one guy in the audience who's being a jerk. This gear is amazing. I've never heard of directionality like this, outside of sonic military weapons. Even though you're in a sphere, which should be the worst-possible acoustical environment, you don't hear the room.

Hey, I'm a singer, too.

I'm just the opposite. Being able to run them off phantom power was a major selling point. The bass player's sansamp runs off phantom, too. We have just one critical piece of gear that needs batteries, which is our singer's wireless mic. It has caused more than one panic 7-11 run right before showtime. I should probably buy them in bulk at Costco, but dagnabit, I supply the PA; she can be responsible for her own damn batteries.

Good for you, John. As gratifying as it is to whine and moan when we're mistreated, at the end of the day we bear the responsibility for our own signal quality. You have reminded me that I cheaped out on DIs and bought - shudder - Behringer DIs for guitar and drums. Knock wood, they haven't failed us yet.

No, it's the name of the band. We do cover the song, though, even though nowadays most gigs are done well before midnight. Which is OK by me. Same here. If you want to get a sense of how arrogant some FoH guys are, spend some time on the r/livesound subreddit. They are embarrassingly dismissive of the performers' wishes (well, to be fair, a lot of musicians ARE a-holes), e.g. telling them to set the volume to 10 on every amp and instrument and never touch those knobs, because the mix is their exclusive purview (I am not making that up). And don't dare post asking for advice if you're a singer-songwriter who plays 50-person house parties because somebody will tell you that nothing less than an L'Acoustics line array with flown subs will work. At one gig I sang an entire song with my mic muted. I could not get the FoH "engineer's" attention because he wasn't even at his desk. And to add further insult, we had to pay him out of our wages. A few weeks ago we were on a stage where half the floor monitors were shut off and only drums were coming through the other half. Our "monitor" was the echo coming off the back wall of the room 100' away (yes, that's a 200 millisecond round trip, not conducive to a tight performance). We were recently offered our choice of dates at a local brewery. They said that in winter the bands play indoors and have a sound system and engineer, but in summer they play outdoors and have to bring their own PA. We asked for a date in July. It's such a joy and relief when we luck out and get somebody who understands the equipment, knows how to mix, and pays attention to what's going on.

Yeh, it did get cropped. I was the only one who noticed. I have always wondered what would happen if I just insisted on bringing my own PA and running sound myself, because 80% of the time I'm sure I could do better. But I'm afraid that would be diplomatically impossible. We have a gig coming up where I've seen the PA that'll be used and already know it's a Frankenstein assemblage of garage-sale components, and the guy running it has no clue what he's doing. Unfortunately, he is also the promoter of the event and could have additional work for us. Whether that turns into a recurring thing depends on how well it ends up paying, as we'll be getting only ticket sales. I don't do this for the money, so the bucks have to be substantial before I'll tolerate a bad-sounding performance. Such was the case last night. There is a monetary threshold beyond which I am able to suck it up and just cash the check.

It was exactly the nightmare I'd expected. FoH guy talked a good talk, and had nice gear (JBL line array, Yamaha TF board). But you couldn't have made it sound worse if you tried. The room is extremely reverberant, and not at all in a nice way. But check out CraigB's light show! Blame my granddaughter for the lo-res image. I guess she's got her camera preferences set to very low resolution. But we got a lot of compliments about the background video. Thanks again, Craig! Sure, we sounded awful. But we got free food, the paycheck was substantial, and we've been asked back.

That's pretty meta, KK. I'm adding that to my "best forum quotes" file. I don't mean to dismiss your premise, which has some merit. Consolidation generally does not encourage innovation in any industry and is in fact more likely to shift focus to maximizing profit - after all, somebody's gotta pay for those acquisitions. But I do not despair because the barrier to entry into the music software business is still quite low. There will always be guys intensely flipping bits in their basements trying to make something cool enough to maybe provide a decent income for them.

I'm not even a drummer but I learned at least one thing from this I didn't know before: Stewart's a Yank. I'd always assumed he was a Brit. Then again, I was not a big Police fan back in the day. I was still listening to classic prog, long after it had fallen from fashion. Still am, come to think of it.

I usually use a dynamic EQ sidechained from the conflicting track. My go-to used to be Meldaproductions' MDynamicEQ before FabFilter added the dynamic option to Pro-Q. For even finer tracking, you can also sidechain MSpectralDynamics. I think iZotope's dynamic EQ can be sidechained as well, if you have the Advanced edition that supplies each module as a standalone plugin.

Yes, it's an infomercial for Gullfoss. But it includes relatable demonstrations of frequency masking that makes it worth a watch. During the month of November, Gullfoss is 40% off. Be aware, though, that this plugin uses Pace copy protection and requires an iLok account. For me, that means Gullfoss will never be part of my collection. Fortunately, I have other, non-iLok, processors that resolve frequency masking well enough.

The same people that record audio at 192KHz and complain that their interface doesn't support 384KHz.

We called it the "UTK Interface" when documenting service calls that turned out to be user error. (User-to-keyboard interface) And yes, it's common that the resolution you see on your device is streamed at a lower resolution than the original file. It may have been for bandwidth conservation, to accommodate limitations of the target device, or even an excuse to charge extra for higher resolution (see YouTube's "1080p Premium HD feature).

Our previous guitarist was 27 when he first came to us, and one of our demands before we'd take him in was that he not die. We celebrated his 28th birthday with some relief.

Actually, that's not far from the initial SMS response I got from our singer after I sent her Craig's link. We have a running in-joke about how she's easily distracted by shiny things. I have explicitly instructed her to not turn around while on stage, lest we risk her getting getting befuddled by the visuals. Fortunately, as a longtime professional myself, I can be counted on to remain laser-focused on the important stuff: girls in short skirts on the dance floor.

I first thought that was a scene from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The thugs who had the privilege of being beat up by Jason Statham before he was famous.