How is it Wednesday? How did that even happen?

I’m working my ass off right now trying to figure out how to update the MBR on a new hard drive in my audio workstation. Basically, my DAW has had two hard drives in it for a while because… oh fukkit there is no good reason. Laziness and It Seemed A Good Idea At The Time. I’m paying for it now, trying to combine them onto a single physical drive.

So here’s a music-acquired roundup from nwcMUSIC 2013/Norwescon 36:

• Experimutations and Counting Sheep from Jonny Nero Action Hero, who has a particularly dynamic live show, double-particularly for a chiptunes artist.
• Geek Girl, Infinity Right Now, and Sidekick and Other Songs from Hello, The Future! Technically Anna bought these but it’s a community property and gay marriage because Fuck Yeah Cascadia, and besides, I already had one of these from Bandcamp
• Temptations of the Fresh, from Klopfenpop, which I downloaded but don’t have the deluxe physical edition yet because he left it at home, and
• The Campaign Mixtape, from Shubzilla, who I actually met there during Jonny Nero’s show. It’s a four-track EP of quality, you should get it.

We had a bunch of out-of-nowhere tech problems including the various components of the sound system – which communicate over IP – all deciding not to talk to any of the other parts on Friday night. Nicole Dieker (Hello, The Future!) had to perform with the emergency backup kit, but fortunately, the emergency backup kit is good kit. And I shot some pretty decent actually video of the second half of her show.

Seriously, it was fucked up. I had to go find a paper clip so John could do some hardcore factory reset action. But that, followed by reprogramming from backup, got it to come back up in time for the Leannan Sidhe show, and it stayed up thereafter.

Cascadia’s Got Talent! got rocky, too – at scheduled start time we had one (1) contestant. Happily we ended up with six, and the Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly of nwcMUSIC (Death*Star) worked really well with Nicole Dieker (who could be our… Ruth Buzzi, perhaps?) and lots of fun was had by most. Scott’s trophy got a great reception, and our terrible vacation tour was to Prohibition boomtown turned suburban hell Kenmore. (“Kenmore! It’s on the way to Bothell. Kenmore! Where the appliances to go die. Kenmore! We used to be interesting; thank god that’s over.”)

The Saturday night concert set – that was pretty epic. We had four for the last-minute open mic, and actually filled the time pretty well. HeyLasFas’s guitarist – whose name I have dropped not in the sense of name-dropping but in the sense of forgetting it right now – did a couple of numbers solo. Then HeyLasFas proper, followed by Alexander James Adams – who packed the room, as always, and incidentally impressed the hell out of Molly Lewis – and then Molly Lewis herself, with Vixy & Tony dropping in as a backup band.

We ran a little late, but that was okay because this time filk was in the same room! And the filkers were all in the audience. I had fun playing with the lateness – walking up to stage carrying the all clock like I was going to be all cranky, holding it up in front of Tony… and setting it back 20 minutes. XD

Molly drew a genuine spontaneous encore. That’s an nwcMUSIC first.

Anyway, time to burn a new live CD and see if I can use it to rebuild the new drive’s MBR. If you know what that means, pop on to chat somewhere and help me, because honestly, WHY CAN’T I JUST EDIT THIS?! I mean damn.

The second ‘reverb trick’ they’re talking about in this article isn’t explained very well, I don’t think, because the critical element is kind of tossed out there in a side comment.

That critical element is the compression. If you just follow their steps – take a synth track, add reverb, record the reverb separately, put that in a second track, looped – you don’t get anything that’s hugely different to just adding reverb.

But if you do all those things, then also add a bunch of competitive compression – by which I mean, have your intermittent signal (the notes of the synth, when struck) close to the maximum output volume your compressor allows, which causes the compressor to scale back other simultaneous, continuous sounds – you get that interesting effect where the notes have very little immediate reverb, but between the notes, the reverb effect pops back up. It’s like the note is played without reverb, then after the note is over, the reverb pops up, delayed just a bit.

That effect is what’s adding the second implied beat, the semi-syncopation which livens their sample track up so well.

It’s an interesting application of side-chain effects. I think this is one to use sparingly; it’d be awfully fatiguing after a while.

Hooo, that was a lot of fun! Thanks to the Dread Captain Marcos, our guest villain last night, and Jeri Lynn Cornish, our hostage du jour, and most of all, The Cosmic Ray Show for having us all on!

The show is already archived, by the way. Click on the link above and you’ll find it. We’re the final guests, so about 15 minutes before the end of the show, if you want to skip ahead. Or if you’re into space exploration – like Curiosity Rover and all that? Watch the whole show.

I haven’t talked much about DIY day lately, but setting up for this appearance gave me a great chance to use my art degree in a set-lighting environment, and it’s led to a DIY opportunity!

Here are two pictures. One is four days ago; the other was today. The physical setup of the room is unchanged – the angle of the camera is a little different, but not that much.

Basic front lighting

Improved front lighting

According to everyone who has seen both today, the bottom shot is better; I of course agree. It has more depth to it – it’s less flat, more 3D – there’s better presence, and what you can’t see here is that performers pop off that second backdrop WAY better – there’s no fading into the background here.

What do you think the difference is? If you guessed less light, that’s not it. If you guess a lot more light, actually, that’s not it either. Total lighting amount is unchanged; no fixtures were replaced. Camera settings? Also unchanged.

Two things are different. One, I have a glare shield around the webcam. I made it with white cardstock. It keeps ambient light from the side of the camera from affecting the image, and by doing so, boosts contrast:

The 5¢ Anti-Glare Shield

The second is that I warmed the light in the foreground by putting sheets of gold paper behind the light sources, and specifically cooled the light in the background by putting sheets of blue paper behind those light sources, all off camera. The primary line-of-light is not tinted at all, but the first and brightest sets of reflected light is all warmer (in front) or cooler (in back). This also increases visual contrast.

Just as importantly, this also creates an optic architectural layer; it divides the space into two spaces, a bit, in your brain, which makes the more distance space be processed as further away in your head. This is how architectural layering works in physical objects, too; a small room can be made to feel larger by putting a divider into it, one that you can see around – say, a stub wall coming down from the ceiling, or a bar, or an archway. Your brain will see two spaces instead of one; it will treat the second as further away, making the whole stage feels larger.

And since there’s actually more light, the people in front (once there) really pop forward. Again; bright foreground, darker background, more depth.

It still doesn’t look like a huge environment, but it looks a lot less cramped, and gave the video compression software a better chance not to do horrible things. Having looked at the stream a bit, compression still did some weird things, but the result is far better than tests we ran against the original lighting setup. The lighting shift didn’t change the visual world of the shot; it improved it, in subtle but meaningful ways.

And that’s basically just 12 sheets of creatively-placed coloured paper. Lighting is fun!

My studio is currently a total disaster zone. Cables everywhere, stuff piled up in strange places (but not on top of each other, at least not in bad ways) – really, it looks like this:

That’s all to make this illusion, out the camera atop the laptop screen:

…which is, in turn, what you’ll see on The Cosmic Ray Show on Tuesday, March 19th, when we’re performing.

Of course, people will be involved, so you’ll have folks standing behind those microphones, such as, you know, me. Also Jeri Lynn Cornish and Marcos Duran, both doing guest appearances on backup vocals. So it’ll be all populated and stuff.

But yeah, I set it up in “TV studio mode” yesterday, for tech rehearsal. It’s the most complicated in-studio live setup I’ve ever arranged and I’m just going to rehearse and practice in this mode until then, so I don’t have to screw with it and get it wrong later. Everybody has earbud monitors, everybody has mics, we’ll get a recording out of it as it’s webcast live, straight off the interface into my Zoom. We made a couple of minor adjustments during the dry run last night, but things went well.

Assuming it works as well as it has in testing (yeek), this should be pretty cool. I hope it doesn’t look too cramped. This was as visually large as I could make it without having to rip out the desk and my entire recording structure, which, yeah, let’s not.

It’s supposed to look like my studio and informal. But I have to tell you, this much ordinary day-to-day naturalistic setup is a whole hell of a lot of work to fake. I’m not the first to make that observation, but after five hours of futzing yesterday, I have the right ot say it again.

See you Tuesday, right? 8pm Cascadian/Pacific, 11pm Eastern, 12:30am Newfoundland.

Via John Scalzi: Random House is trying to adopt ALL the wretched, musician-bankrupting models of the record labels, and force them onto writers, all at once.

I DO NOT HAVE STRONG ENOUGH WORDS FOR THIS: DO. NOT. BUY. IN.

John’s post, with all the gruesome details. The imprint is called “Hydra,” but it’s Random House.

DO NOT BUY IN. DO NOT LET FRIENDS BUY IN.

This is EXACTLY the model that labels have used to take ALL the money from the artists – ALL of it, so strings of chart-topping hits never “make money” and send artists into bankruptcy after years of below-minimum-wage returns.

DO NOT BUY IN. RUN from this. Run from it, and STOP OTHERS FROM SIGNING.

Seriously. This new model from Random House is the EXACT model musicians are trying to work around and recover from. IT IS BUILT TO STRIP MINE YOU FOR EVERY PENNY YOU EVER MAKE, AND MORE.

There is no winning here; not just for anyone who signs this agreement, but every other writer trying to sell their work. EVERYBODY loses – except the imprint, of course. And eventually even they even lose.

DO. NOT. BUY. IN. And tell others. This cannot be allowed to fly.

PLAN 34!

http://www.luth.org/plans/instrument_plans.html#plan34

This is not what I’m actually trying to do, but not completely different either. Swap the guitar stick with a bass stick, move the harp strings below the bass and have them going higher in pitch, not lower. BUT IT COULD BE DONE.

The ghost of Admiral Shack continues to fail me.

I thought I’d already choked this guy to death.

I mean honestly, how do you even get here? In an adaptor, I mean. With a cable it’d be easy, but adaptors are solid pieces of shaped metal. I didn’t even cheat to make this happen.

You are in command now, Admiral Monoprice!

place your bets

I’m going to end up walking off the bridge in silent rage again, aren’t I?

I am thinking really hard about starting a geekmusic podcast.

In fact, I’m thinking so hard about it that I want to do a pilot episode. The idea would be for it to be released in early March, before Norwescon. I could bring in a few people who are going to be at nwcMUSIC, so it’d serve a dual role – pre-event publicity and pilot episode! – while having a bunch of different people on, to keep it interesting. Then, maybe monthly.

I’ve already made a bumper.

What sorts of things would make you, personally, interested in listening to a geekmusic podcast? Yes, I’m looking for content ideas here, because I’ve never done a podcast before, and while once upon a time I was in radio, I didn’t do that kind of programming – I was a DJ at one station, in sports at another, and sports director at my college station. But no interviews.

(Yes, me being sports director is in fact hilarious. But we had the best women’s basketball coverage in the city, so take that.)

Playing some music? DIY? Interviews? About what, particularly? Other musicians not on the show? Vicious backbiting? History of geekmusic?

What would make you interested in listening?

I’ve been thinking for a while that Criminal Studios wasn’t quite the right name for the Lair’s recording environment, and that Supervillain Studios might be better. But while a heat ray is pretty damn neat, I haven’t been entirely convinced it’s enough to merit exactly that much better.

But now that I have the Rainmaker, and other villains showing up in the Lair? I think it’s time for an upgrade. Criminality is fine, but Supervillainy? That’s awesome.

I do worry a little bit about the whole name recognition thing (“What happened to Criminal Studios?” “I dunno. Bumped off, I guess.”). But at my scale I think it’s safe not to think too much about that.

More importantly, there’s a videogame company in California called Supervillain Studios. Do I need to care about that?

Maybe Supervillain Sound. That seems to solve it, while still being significantly sibilant. Also, touches on the Puget part of the Salish Sea.

We don’t have a logo, tho’. Should I make a logo?

I wanted to have a second on-air sign for inside the studio, so I could see whether the signs were on or off an keep track more easily. The second was a duplication of the first, the one that I posted about already.

But I’ve had problems with minions (particularly Minion Paul) coming to the door and being afraid to enter or knock because there’s no sign out there. With a second controller already being in place, it’s really quite simple to make a third, hanging off the same controller, so I did. But being out of LEDs, I made a different kind this time.

Bento compartment box plus…

hee hee hee hee hee

I love my light-dotted I. It’s silly, but I love it so. 😀

Do you think there’re enough hipsters on Etsy to buy the ones I make out of cassette cases? The bento box ones probably aren’t retro enough, but the cassette case ones, maybe. What do you think?

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