I’m looking for a bass guitarist for an 8pm Thursday gig at the Norwescon Science Fiction Convention in Sea-Tac, Washington. I have two songs I’d like to do which really need their bass guitar parts: Stars and Let Me Help, both of which have bass guitar solos. (There’s no bass in Let Me Help until the bridge, so if you can’t hear it and you’re not at the bridge yet, well, that’s why.) Other songs may have basslines as well, but for me those are the big two.

Know anybody? Sadly, this is not a paying gig, but talk to me anyway if you do.

If you missed the weekend post about a new Trad O’ th’ Month recording, click here to enjoy Paddy Murphy! It’s a night I’ll never forget.

Finally, on a completely different topic, check out friend Jesse’s short film project on Kickstarter – he’s trying to raise money to do better short films. He’s a funny writer and I think with some real equipment could do some good stuff. You’ll find his project here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1447277338/the-xp

I also need to post about CD pre-orders! But that’ll wait ’till next time because this is too damn busy already.

I ought to post a picture with this but I don’t have one. THIS POST IS JUST FOR THE LITERATE! XD

The thing about Paddy Murphy . . . the thing everybody forgets about Paddy Murphy . . . is that Paddy Murphy . . . Well . . .  Paddy Murphy was a fine, upstanding . . .

. . . bootlegger. XD

Which explains a lot about this new Trad o’ th’ Month recording, doesn’t it? I like to think so. Enjoy:

So as I mentioned earlier, Leannan Sidhe had a camera rolling for part of the Valentine’s Day show, and I’ve merged that with the monophonic audio feed I got off the board, cropped things a bit, added titles, and voila! Video! I just wish I could pick the preview frame because there are lots of better ones than the one it picked. XD Despite that, enjoy:

The last couple of days haven’t been much about music, but have instead been about getting computers together and upgraded and stuff. I realised that while this isn’t the best time for a week of systems offline, it is as less-bad as it’s probably going to get for a while.

But much to my shock, everything kind of went… sanely. Almost smoothly. Ubuntu 10.04.1 is a lot smarter about letting you ditch PulseAudio and while the 8.04.1 upgrader didn’t work, downloading a DVD ISO and burning an install disc with a 10.04.1 upgrader mostly did work, and ripping out PulseAudio so JACK runs is about a hundred times easier than it used to be. (As in, it’s one command in the shell. After the 8.04 experience I expected to be pulling out spaghetti dependencies and trapdoors for three days, no lie.)

Anyway, check this out, the same day as I started a four-distributions-behind upgrade:

yep, that shit be workin’ – and at 20% of CPU.

And so far, it’s even behaving better than 8.04.1 did. Okay, that’s damning with faint praise, but I mean it: improvement is welcome. There are a bunch of small new features in Ardour that are adding up to a lot of usability improvement already, and JACK is – so far – more stable now, too. Hopefully I’m not jinxing it.

Also, the art machine is a Ye Olde Win2K box with SCSI drives (8! gigabytes!) that has slowly been decommissioning itself over the last few years, and the rate has accelerated as of late (PCI slots? Eh, fukkem, you don’t need them. Monitor card? Well, okay, but I’m gonna be weird about it. Monitor? lol, CRTs die, let’s help this one along) so I’ve virtualised it on my MacBook! Which is how you get this:

Photoshop 5.5 and Microsoft Publisher 98 for … OS X?

I finally have Photoshop on my Mac, like the gods intended, but it’s a perversion of holy writ, as it’s the Windows version run in a VM. XD

I can also hit a key and it’s all back running on a windowed Windows 2K desktop, which is actually the default. And it only took three tries to migrate the machine (aheh) but it did work! And is lots faster being on, um, much more modern hardware.

And! The CD duplicator arrived. In the snow. But! Mostly under the porch roof and the box hadn’t been there long and was still mostly dry even on the outside. (And completely dry on the inside.) Eeeeeee!

Now if the USB serial interface will get here, I can try to make my old Wacom tablet work. (Which is the real reason I didn’t want to decommission the old Win2k box – it’s a very nice tablet and still expensive to replace, and requires a Windows-driven serial port, no exceptions.)

But at this point I’m about five days ahead of schedule on all this IT noise, which means TIME FOR A NEW TRAD O’ TH’ MONTH TOMORROW! Yay! o/

Hey, taxes are done! Or not. But everything I can do before the worm dismantles irs.gov appointment I have with the accountant is done. Yay!

In other news, I’ve been playing with that audio recording I made of the live show last Valentine’s day with Leannan Sidhe. Shanti set up a camera and got a little over 40 minutes of video, too, so she wants to post some videos from the show. I’ve matched that up with the audio recording I got (a mono track from all mics with some audience noise, but I can work with that) and have a test video!

But I don’t want to post it until I get the signoff from Leannan Sidhe, even if holding off on something like that – even if it’s just a static-shot live video – makes my fingers itchy. AAAAAAAAH WANT TO POST NEW THING!

So it’ll have to wait until Leannan Sidhe say yes. I’ll toss a pointer here when it’s online. ^_^

PS: duplicator is ordered! omg yay! o/

I swear to all gods, I did not fake that.

Today is the last day of the Dick Tracy Must Duplicate Kickstarter project, so if you want to be a backer and aren’t, it’s today or… well, I’ll probably have some other project later. But it’s today! Or today.

Also today I have donned the Green-Brimmed Sorting Hat for the annual Great Tax Sorting. This is not only not an exaggeration, this is only part of the Great Sorting Field:

I’ll be buried a while, so see you… when I see you.

Or more likely, when I get bored and take a break. One of those. XD

…have a live recording of me doing the traditional song of “Danny Boy,” as an instrumental, live midway through the first set of the Leannan Sidhe show this past Valentine’s Day, wherein I was a guest musician. This is a free download, tho’ of course you can choose to throw money at if it you’d like. Such things are always appreciated!

There’s a bit of compressor-pumping on the recording. I pulled some of it out by ducking down the lower frequencies and throwing on a limiter and a couple of other things, but it’s still there. If you have specific experience with fixing that kind of problem, please let me know – Leannen Sidhe would like to use some of these recordings!

Session Two with Mark Guenther at Seattle Disc Mastering went well. We fixed the short list of problems I’d discovered, added track IDs, and also made a couple of small adjustments in equalisation for tracks two (Hide From Me) and twelve (Shout at the Desert), all in about 45 minutes.

And now I have Release Candidate 1 in my grubby little mitts! Once I’ve played it a couple more dozen times, and ripped it a couple of ways to see how it behaves, then, well, I’ll either find something I think needs to be fixed and get it fixed, or I won’t, and we’ll print the two golden masters. I went to Best Buy and played it on about a dozen CD players, and I’m pretty happy.

I’ve had a couple of people bring up pre-orders! Yay! Obviously, you can pre-order by being a $30 Kickstarter backer, and that’s super-awesome! But also more expensive than regular pre-orders. Those will start once the Kickstarter project closes. We have a booklet to print (and for that matter, to finish laying out – aheh, better get on that!) as well as actual physical duplicates to make and all that.

It’s amazing how many little decisions go into making a CD. We’re looking at a new type of CD case – easier to assemble, less fragile, more likely to be undamaged by shipping, cool things like that. I’m told they’re common in Asia and Australia, and am checking with people I know on the ground there to find out. I saw things that match their description in Japan, but used for games, rather than music. I’m hoping they’re available for CDs and look good, because they’d be a hell of a lot easier to assemble.

photo framegrab courtesy Leannan Sidhe

I’ve got a monophonic but I think pretty decent recording of my guest appearance with Leannan Sidhe, by the way. So I may have a free download for you guys in a few days. Watch for it!

My (Solarbird’s) guest appearance with Leannan Sidhe at the benefit today went well; thanks to the El Dorado for having us, and Shanti for inviting me to play! We may have some audio from it to share at some point, which would be fun. It’s not the sort of music I usually play but I enjoyed the gig.

I forgot to link last week to Paul’s webcomic, but anyone with a fondness for supervillainy should find last week’s Tuesday and Thursday strips to be relevant to their interests.

Sleep now. Better posts tomorrow. ^_^