After accomplishing a ton on all of that, I worked with my FCB1010 pedal and Mobius to no avail. The FCB1010 is the most complex piece of hardware I have ever owned and trying to get it programmed and working properly has taken far longer than I had hoped. After sifting through mountains of information online, some of it conflicting, I've found a ton of resources for learning the pedal and for using it with various different software that I own. Mobius is a free looping program that seems to be pretty popular and sounds, as per the myriad youtube videos out there about it, pretty easy to use. However, somehow I think I did some things out of order and confused my system so that, though it was recognizing my audio interface, there was no audio coming out of my speakers (new speakers which I just bought and love!) even from youtube tutorial videos that I was watching. I think the software had some kind of glitch in it. It's all very confusing but I'll figure it out at some point.
This was all to prepare for a rehearsal with Lacy during which we had hoped to be able to use the pedal and looping software to try some things with some of her newer songs. I was ready to throw my computer, pedal, audio interface and guitar out the window by the time she showed up and it was already later than she had planned because of traffic, so we opted to go straight into acoustic stuff. Freddy's gave us 3 songs but we planned for five and rehearsed them all. The mic went quite well. We ended up going last out of five musicians that showed up…which, for the size of Freddy's backroom, felt like a crowd. The others were great as well. The one gentleman who was there the first time we did Freddy's a month ago was there again and played his signature goofy comedic songs (one, which I remember from last time, was about meeting a lesbian at a bar and not realizing she was gay until he came back from the bathroom and she was with another woman). Another guitarist/singer opened up with a John Prine song, went into "One" by U2 and then played an original of his and yet another skilled blues guitarist rocked out an original tune of his about teenagers from outer space, among others. Lastly, right before us, a woman who just moved from Canada brought us some great tunes of hers. Punxatawney Jesus, the organizer even closed out the show with a cover of "Secret Agent Man." Gotta love these open mics for their ability to attract such diverse musicians.
So, it was a big music day. And now I'm going to work more on Steve's music. I'm in that interesting part of the composing process where I've got the basic elements in place, for the most part, and am just settling on structure and dynamics of the piece and how to build it. This is when I feel most like an architect. It's very technical and involved, and it's not like that inspired moment where you the first idea comes to you in a flash and you scramble to write it down before it fades, but it's still fun. Especially since I can do it on the go with the laptop and I don't necessarily have to be at the apartment.
And I must say my setup is starting to really feel complete…despite the fact that I have no keyboard stand and must rest my keyboard on the bed and slide it underneath said bed when I'm done using it, oh and my desk is also my dresser.
I just feel so much more productive when things are in their right place and I have what I need. I'll feel so much better though on the day when I can have a set place for everything and leave it all set up all the time so I don't have to waste so much time plugging things up and getting hardware to recognize software, etc. That's the most frustrating part. That and little tiny things like I accidentally ordered a too short MIDI cable when I ordered the speakers you see in those pics and it barely reaches from the foot pedal on the floor up to where I keep the audio interface on top of the CPU.
But anyway, voice over coaching on Tuesday. Oh yeah, that other thing I do. I've felt a greater momentum with voice over since I pulled off those two jobs in one weekend last weekend. I've been auditioning online at voice123.com a lot in this past week and I've found that I have a lot more incentive to do it now because I've seen that I can get work that way. And I'm really looking forward to getting back in front of the mic with my coach. More on that later. For now, I'm signing off. Good night all!
No comments:
Post a Comment