Sunday, July 27, 2008

Linger, Home Repairs, GO RIDERS!! and Why MIDI is hard.

Well Linger had another good show last night at the Exchange. I thought we did well, and we put in 3 extra songs at the last minute out of nowhere. I think we did well on all points. A really new experience for me and ironically first tried onstage during soundcheck was to use Victors Mac to play a string arrangement in GarageBand using the computers keyboard.

Spent the entire 3 day weekend working on the house and doing laundry. Things are slow to progress around here, there's alot to be done and alot more comes everyday. But we got nearly all the fallen tree cleaned up today, just a couple more hours - maybe 3 to get the yard back to some semblance of normalcy. Eavestroughs went up really easily, but as was shown during the rain delay of the football game, they don't hold water! But that will be an easy fix. It was a good test, albeit a failed one. Bought 3 big barrels off of Used Regina for a great price to make into rain barrels. I'll have enough water to irrigate the Sahara.

5-0. I lived to see it. I said it before the season started. Let's have faith in Eric Tillman. He knows how to build a team. Even on a continuing rotation of quarterbacks and injuries that would make even the greats' knees buckle, the Riders set a record for season starting tonight. As in, it hasn't been done since they've been playing modern football. Keep up the good work boys... Calgary is going to be a major challenge on Saturday, and Henry is still mad at us.

Been spending what down time I have with my nose in my computer trying to get everything set up to use MY laptop on stage and in performance with my bass playing. I'm looking to hook in my footswitch pedal to my computer. I'll then use it to control sample software and digital synthesizers, while also using my computer keyboard to play more targeted lines. I hope to use this to add a super-low-end layer to Linger's stuff. It will need to be really rappy and deep to cut through the already pretty full Linger sound, but I think it could be cool. I already have plans for foot-controlled lines in Root of Truth, This Narrow Path and of course Melody for the Hanging. I've got some sample ideas for Brian and the Bomb and Swaying Image and steal sample cuing from Dave for Narrow Path and Precious.

This does create some difficulties. I'm considering picking up a professional package like Reason, Cubase or Cakewalk. I've been trying to make it happen with Open Source stuff and while it's highly, highly customizable, it's hard to install, hard to connect devices and Windows Vista is un-forgiving when it comes to some software installations and permissions. If anyone out there has had some good easy MIDI software that might meet my needs, let me know, I'd be anxious to hear it.

Well all, that's that for today I guess. Kinda want to do a funny post like I used to do back in year 1 and 2 of the blog. Life is too short to be so serious.

1 comment:

Pilon, A said...

Should've bought a mac.