You have failed me for the last time, Admiral Shack

Thanks to everybody who threw me pointers after Monday’s post on remote keyboard controls for Ardour. THE WINNERS ARE YOU! Also a winner is me, particularly thanks to If on Tumblr letting me know about OCS, a control protocol for sound software. Ardour supports it! Ardour was even an early adopter…

…which means they do everything differently to everyone else, which makes it L33T HAX TIEMS! Or, well, flaily hax tiems, to all honesty. So, in TouchOCS, I made a thing:

Devices!

…that also works on iPad…

BIGGER devices!

…and since TouchOSC exists on Android, it should work there too.

TouchOSC doesn’t want to talk the flavour of OSC that Ardour speaks, so it talks to a minor variation on this PureData script which translates it to Ardour’s dialect. So far all I can get working are transport controls, but that’s what I really need anyway. But look, it works!

If I have time I’ll learn more about PureData and add more commands. There are ways around the limitations of TouchOSC, they just aren’t accounted for in the script I pulled down off ardour.org.

Here’s the TouchOSC panel data file for the control surface in the pictures. Consider it Creative Commons Open Source yadayada go play with it. It’ll work with the stock PureData script I linked above, modulo the edits you have to make to have PureData running on your machine.

ALSO! You guys sent int two other good DIY toolkit pointers. They’re good for making haxy special controllers and I might yet use them for something else. First, lj:cdk pointed out that Ultimarc makes a bunch of interesting controller parts. Very cool stuff, lots of options for building. And second, an even more interesting device appears courtesy If, who pointed me at Makey Makey, an interface so flexible you can literally connect a banana and use it as a control toggle.

Obviously someone needs to use a banana to drive Fruit Ninja.

Thanks again to everybody who threw out ideas and suggestions!

If you haven’t seen this, it’s video of Heather Dale of The Heather Dale Band, trying to get YouTube’s attention. They tried to sign up to get micropayments off of YouTube’s royalty micropayment system, but YouTube has decided that they don’t actually own and didn’t actually write their music.

Now, this is bullshit, of course, and Heather has provided (and can again provide) all the evidence of ownership needed. But she’s not merely been told she didn’t write her own material, she’s been told she and her band can’t even contest this ruling, or even further contact the programme. And all attempts to contact YouTube at any level have been rebuffed.

And this is, frankly, about par for the course for most of the “social media” environment. YouTube routinely makes bad decisions on ownership – not just bad, but laughably bad. I’ve had three of my own videos – solo live performances filmed myself or by fans – flagged as DMCA violations of other people’s work.

So far, I’ve been able contest successfully through their automated system, which has surprised me. But seeing Heather and Ben’s experiences, I’m becoming more convinced that this has a lot more to do with me not trying to monetise my YouTube channel than anything else. If YouTube doesn’t have to give me royalties, or even a meagre percentage of some royalty fractional micropayment, they don’t have much incentive to deny my counterclaims when someone or something – more likely some software – throws a bullshit DMCA takedown claim at me.

But if I am trying to get money, well, that’s an entirely different story, and I think that’s where Heather and Ben are running into trouble.

YouTube really doesn’t have incentive for this system to work at all. I rather suspect it exists as a guard against infringement lawsuits. “See? We pay out.” But if you don’t have the money to hire a big enough lawyer to go up against Google when YouTube’s lackadaisical system fails, well, screw you.

Because honestly, what’s their incentive for having a good process, much less making the right decision? They’re a large, public corporation; if there’s not a monetary incentive, there is no incentive, and there’s not a monetary incentive here.

Simply put, such incentive doesn’t exist.

So. It ends up being once again who you know. They’re looking for an actual person inside YouTube or Google who can override the autoresponders and let them get the royalties they’re due under this programme. Are you that person? If not, do you know that person? Heather and Ben are more sanguine about that person being out there than am I. Hopefully, they’re right. Go tell them.

Over the last few days, I’ve realised there’s a studio toy I really want, but can’t quite find. If I can’t find it, maybe I can build it – or maybe that should be the other way ’round, eh? Regardless, maybe some of you guys can help.

One of the many cool things about midi is how you can have arbitrary controllers in variety of functionalities. You can, for example, buy banks of knobs and sliders. And all they do is send MIDI signals. This is great, because then you can assign them in whatever software you’re controlling to any function you want controlled. There are also banks of buttons, and so on. More commonly, you get mixed devices.

drool pad not included… or needed, really, but I would like this one or this one

I want that, but USB (or wireless-to-USB), and sending user-settable keyboard character combinations. I want a small remote pad that I can set up to have one button send a space, another button to send Shift-R, another button to send HOME, another to send END, and so on. Ideally, it should be able to send any button combination from a 101-key keyboard.

There are two reasons I want this.

One: If you’re surrounded by drums and mics (just for example) in my studio and you want to enable record and start the virtual transport, it’s difficult to do so in time to sync up with the pre-existing tracks you might be working against. Not that this was driving me crazy over the weekend or anything.

Two: Ardour is FULL of keyboard shortcuts. No, I mean full, like every goddamn key on the keyboard does some damn thing. If you’re reaching over something to get to some key or other (say, SHIFT-R, to enable master record), or in the wrong mode (which this mostly won’t fix), it is really easy to either hit the wrong key(s), or hit the right keys, but have them do different things, because not only are they loaded, they’re overloaded.

overconfidence not included

Basically I want a control panel that isn’t so overloaded, and I want it to go anywhere in the room.

I’ve thought about getting a minikeyboard, maybe a wireless minikeyboard, and hax0ring it. I may well do this, because I don’t want to build a USB interface and I don’t want to build a keyboard interface for that USB interface, and besides, I might want to add some more buttons later. But I worry about how easy (or difficult) it might be to send numeric keypad keys specifically, and how reliable soldering to surface pads will be, since I want to move this thing around a bit and it will get knocked about.

Now, there are some gamepads out there that might be good. The cheaper one I found doesn’t actually let you reprogramme what keys the pads send, and as annoying as I can find Ardour’s spaghetti of hotkeys, I don’t want to change them. I might want to use someone else’s workstation at some point. The ones which do let you reprogramme the pad’s keys are a bit spendier, and tend to be large and/or weird. But more importantly, they appear to require external software. This may just be for the purpose of changing key assignments, so I could run it once on a different machine and forget about it – but the data pages don’t make that entirely clear. If someone knows for sure, tell me?

Also I’d need to take a hacksaw to parts of it because of all the do-not-want.

Really, do I need to go all Arduino for this? I don’t want to. Anybody got ideas?

Today I get to do something new: mic a violin.

A lot of people out there have posted techniques on micing violins in the studio, and you can read a lot of ideas a lot of different places, but most of them come down to variations on the several shown at this Michigan Tech page. I don’t have a $2000 microphone shown in the photos to do this with, but I have some decent mics. That’s not the scary part.

The scary part is that most of these mic placements are quite a bit more distant from instrument than I’m used to using. Only one of them is really what I think of as close-micing; there’s a little to a lot of distance in every other one, which means there’s a little bit more of the room in every one. The space is going to be involved, as part of the instrument recording.

Now, as regular readers of this blog know, I’ve spent a lot of time working on this studio. You might remember this 360° turnaround video I posted, showing sound baffles I’ve made and placed; but click on the DIY category to see lots more. The goal has been to make the room better in every respect – evening its reflectiveness out, quietening it, blocking more outside noise, all that – but it’s also been about making it at least theoretically possible to do medium-distance micing.

Not this distant. But I may have a new project.

You see, for Dick Tracy Must Die, I couldn’t distance mic anything. I tried; a little of the distance-miced bamboo percussion stayed in (mostly in “When You Leave“), but almost all of that album was either close-micing or direct input. For Cracksman Betty, I had a little more breathing space – but not much. Only recently have I been able to put more distance between instrument and microphone.

Today’s the day I find out whether that all that work actually pays off. Can I really distance mic in here?

I sure hope so, because I need to. Let’s find out.

ps: I’ve been thinking of renaming this Supervillain Studios, instead of Criminal. I think it sounds cooler. Also, hey, I don’t just have a heat ray anymore, I have the Rainmaker, and multimonitor setups with mecha arms are pretty awesome – it may finally be worthy of the name Supervillain. Whaddya think, Minions?

It’s really weird when you’re done with your holidays but the big mass-culture one hasn’t quite happened yet because it’s on a kinda dumb calendar so everyone else is still in ramp-up mode and all the ads are going liek woah.

Except for Rite-Aid, which seems to be filling shelves with Valentine’s Day candy. Who knew?

Next week will be a huge recording week – I’ve been booked from the 26th through the 30th, by Leannan Sidhe, with backup time going to Bards of a Feather as available. I actually find I get a lot of things done that week, partly because nobody else is doing anything and therefore gets in your way. <3

Anyway, faithful minions who are reading these even now, have some fun links:

• Everybody knows that Kíli is really the prettiest, but nonetheless, do enjoy Thorin Dreamboatshield: An Unexpected Hotness of Dwarves.
• I kind of like these somewhat hipster vinyl-record-emulating placemats.
• Here’s Part I of a really quite good fan effort to re-imagine the lost Doctor Who serial, Power of the Daleks
• This isn’t new, but is nonetheless a really effective video (and yes, I figured it out from watching it): Finnish underwater ice-fishing.
• This is some fairly epic data centre hax0ring: 160 Mac Minis in a single rack. I love it.

Have fun, everybody, and if I don’t say it before the first – happy new year!

Fourteen hours in the studio yesterday. A bunch more the day before. I’m swamped, but it’s kind of awesome. I was up later than intended last night because I found this thing I can’t talk about in a mix for someone else’s song and it’s pretty awesome but I can’t talk about it.

hmph.

So instead, let’s see that dual-monitor setup! A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how old 4:3 monitors are basically free right now, and about what you need to set everything up. A couple of weeks in, I can report it works great, my workflow is tremendously improved, and I freed up SO much important desk space.

Enjoy some configuration photos:

Single-screen Windows, inside setup

For some reason, Windows XP only wants to use one of these cards at a time. If I boot up on the motherboard Intel video, it can see the Rage PCI card, but says it’s broken and can’t be used. If I boot up on the Rage PCI, it can’t see the motherboard card at all. I have no idea why, but since I don’t use XP for much, I don’t care enough to pursue it.

Single-screen Windows, inside setup

I’ll probably never use this configuration, but you never know.

Real work 1: inside setup, Ubuntu+Ardour

SO much real estate. I love it. I’ve played with it some more since I took this photo and for Ardour I’m actually separating the monitors a bit, and have editor view in one and mixer view in the other. This gets left monitor back to pretty much directly in front, which makes this a good editing arrangement.

Real work 2, outside setup, Ubuntu+Ardour

Good for recording other people. This is where I’ve been the last two days, pretty much nonstop. Again, pulling the monitors more apart a bit gives you better angles, and I’ve found myself doing that.

Here, I can look at performers and levels at the same time, and have full access to the control board. I angle the keyboard so it’s kind of between the two monitors, it’s awesome. I’ve found that I slide the audio interface forward for better access to the hardware controls, and that’s actually easier too because nothing’s in the way anymore.

Real work 3: self-recording

The instant I set this up, I reflexively tried using the screens as touchscreens, and was disappointed on some level when it didn’t work. If you have the dosh, do this with touchscreens – if they treat fingers as mice that’s good enough. I want this. I want it good.

The closest I’ve found to a downside is that this monitor stand holds altitude through friction and when you rotate the screen arms on the central post, it tends to sink a little. It doesn’t do this while stable, so once you set it, it’s good.

Anyway, no rest for the wicked. Ja ne!

My replacement iPad – a mini – is Somewhere. Nobody knows where. Somewhere. The Apple store got it Wednesday morning at 10:32 and sent it back. “I’d wait a few days and see what happens.” THANKS GUYES. Now I get to play phone warz with FedEx and the online Apple Store.

And I hate phones. I am so pissed off right now.

But! I, by contrast, have not lost the packages with CDs that people have ordered! I’ll be hand-delivering a few more this weekend, and that’s the last of what I have so far. If you’re thinking of elfmetal as stocking stuffers? ORDER SOON! For best shipping, anyway. Dick Tracy Must Die, Cracksman Betty, both on yummy holiday discount.

And since we’re going to be talking money, apparently…

If any of you are Leannan Sidhe fans – and I know a few of you are – let’s talk about them for a second. They’ve been recording here, and down in Oregon, for their next album. Mixing is already started, mostly down at Alec’s. They have all the money they need to get recording and mixing finished, but are tight on mastering funds, so’ve launched an indiegogo campaign going to make up the difference and raise replication money. Give it a look.

See, I’ve talked a lot about the business of indie music, particularly in the Post-Scarcity Model article series (The Problem with All of This, The Damage is Worse Than I Thought, Even Pressing Play Makes My Fingers Ache, Touring, Part I, Touring, Part II, The Long Tail of Zero is Still Zero, The Same Model as Music), and one of the things I talked about was up-front money through patronage. If people don’t buy music once it’s out there – and a lot of them pretty much just don’t – then getting dosh in advance to do new work becomes really critical. If people believe in you enough to back you up front (Part A), piracy becomes almost unimportant. Anything you sell after – Part B – is profit, ramp up for next go, souvenirs, and PR.

Leannan Sidhe need a little more money to do the new things. They need their Part A help right now.

Me, I need some of my minions to give my current CDs to other, potential minions. That’s the back side of any album project; I had money up front to record, now I try to bootstrap on post-creation sales. Part B.

And that’s how we hope it works. Cycles, where Part A leads to Part B leads back to Part A. I’m running a couple of them in parallel – I’ve already got the money for the soundtrack album, or most of it, via Anna’s book kickstarter. That’s another, separate, Part A.

With a little luck, and a little help, it can become a virtuous cycle, and everybody wins except the RIAA, who can go fuck themselves. But that only happens if the cycle builds. Otherwise, you’re back to the labels and the DRM and the lockdown model, and everything sucks. If you care about music as art, then when you’re thinking about your holiday spending – think about that.

Because Heather Dale recently linked to this article on the necessity of music. Music is entertainment – but it’s not just that. I like to say that music is the written language of emotion, and I mean that in a literal sense. It can be fiction, it can be nonfiction, we don’t have good language for this so I borrow words from literature which don’t quite work, but you get the idea.

Karl Paulnack goes further than I, in that aforementioned article, paraphrasing the ancient Greeks as saying it’s “…the opposite of entertainment… music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.”

There’s a whole hell of a lot of entertainment out there, and I don’t mean to disparage it; entertainment is healthful. It’s important, too. It’s approachable. It’s fun. You can get tired of it, but having your fill every so often is good for you.

But those of us who are, in our vain little ways, insisting on trying to do something more like art, more like that moving of invisible pieces inside our hearts – we’re not as approachable. We don’t pattern-match as well. It might have a good beat, but it can be pretty damned hard to dance to.

Are songs like Hide from Me “entertainment” music? Fuck no. It’s brutal and hard and mean and that’s on purpose. It’s on the album as a statement. And the same people who call you “quite brilliant” for it turn you down for tours because you’re not labelly enough.

That’s why we really need people who believe in what we’re doing – the people who throw in the up-front money, the people who think that art matters – to fuel that virtuous cycle.

So go give that Leannan Sidhe funding gap project a look. Be their Part A. Think about Dick Tracy Must Die and Cracksman Betty as gifts; fuel our Part B.

And maybe we’ll manage to epoxy something together out of all this yet.

Productive we so far; we got the last of Leannan Sidhe’s major guitar recording down in the lair. Still a few drop-ins to do, and fixes, but the heavy lifting in guitar is over. Yay!

Today, I’m busy building out melody parts for the Free Court of Seattle soundtrack album. I made learning tracks for the traditional music a couple of weeks ago, for the other musicians appearing on the album, but the fight scene set is really difficult to understand, so…

…I might explain what a learning track is. And a set, for that matter.

Okay! So, the basic element of Irish music is the “tune.” It’s a melody, typically in repeating parts (A/B, often A/B/C, sometimes A/B/C/D or more) which may and may not have basic chord and/or drum accompaniment. The melody is the defining element of the tune; the rest is optional. Here’s an example tune:

A set is simply a collection of tunes arranged together into a longer piece. As in hiphop, flow is critical, tho’ instead of lyric flow it’s melodic flow. These were historically performed in participatory playing circles, at pubs, in sessions. Those tend to look a bit like this:

The learning tracks I’ve been working on are rough mockups of some of the sets which will be appearing on the Free Court of Seattle book series soundtrack. (The link is to Book 1 on Amazon; also in print, B&N/Nook, and Kobo). You build learning tracks by taking other peoples’ performances and editing them together into a single recording that can be studied and learned from.

Most of the sets for this album are traditional; that’s intentional, being the music that informs the early parts of the book series. But for one set – for a conflict scene involving kitsune, a dragon, Our Heroes, and so on – we’re bringing in some Japanese traditional music.

To make this melding work, I’ve written a variation on one of the Irish standards as a bridging piece, and am not so much building a set as arranging the elements like one would for an orchestral piece. It’s… complicated.

And since some of this has never been recorded by anyone – my March towards Lisdoonvarna, mostly – the current learning track is a hideous mashup of flute and taiko, bagpipes and accordion, and me whistling something nobody’s heard before into a microphone.

Worst. Learning track. Evar. It’s totally incoherent.

So I’m currently learning all of these parts the hard way, and playing them on bouzouki. Once it’s all on the same instrument, it makes a lot more sense. But I’m not traditionally a big melody player on strings, which means I’m learning! new! skills! and means it’s taking for-bloody-evar.

But it’ll be cool.

Finally, a reminder from the Guild: don’t let the supervillain get bored. All CDs are on sale, so give them to friends and rivals, frenemies and nemeses, and help spread the rage. Besides, we need the money to record our new music. We can steal everything but time, and it’s just plain faster sometimes to buy things, you know? I mean honestly, who wants to spend time planning the grand supertheft of a breakfast bagel? I have better things to do. Or worse. Muah ha ha.

In much of the world now, it’s gift-giving season! So I’m putting the CD copy of Dick Tracy Must Die on special sale at Bandcamp: it’s $9.99, the same as the digital download.

Also, I’ve added a physical CD of Cracksman Betty, for $4.99, also the same price as the digital download. It’s the version we sell at shows.

If you like our music – and if you’re reading this I imagine you do – help us find new listeners and fans! Give these discounted copies to people you think would like them. At $4.99 and $9.99, they’ll make really good stocking stuffers.

Besides, it helps pay for the new album we’re working on, which is no small thing. Din of Thieves is going to be pretty epic if I have anything to say about it – and my Rainmaker 68000 says I do – but even volcano-powered generators aren’t free, and the more time we have to spend stealing things, the less time we have to work on the album.

And we all want us working on the album, rather than working on taking over the west coast, don’t we?

I thought so.

So! Spread the love. Or the terror. Whatever. Buy copies to give to other people. Warn them we’re coming, muah ha ha. If you’re nervous about buying straight from the supervillain, Dick Tracy Must Die is also on CD Baby, and they’re… ugh… reputable and shit.

So go! Spread the holiday fear! And as always, minions, you have a special place in my heart, so – try not to die, okay? Thanks.