Of lights, tunnels...

There's something odd but marvelous to me about how I can get only 3 and 1/2 hours of sleep due to being woken up by two phone calls, be sluggish all afternoon and evening (even after several cups of green tea and a bottle of yerba mate) and then somehow catch a second wind around this hour of the night.  I'm covering vacations for George this week and next, so I'm on the overnight shift Sunday through Thursday two weeks in a row.  A great time for this crap considering all the exciting things I have going on that are taking up all my time and energy.  But the light at the end of the tunnel is becoming clearer.  I have now glimpsed my work schedule for the month of June and I can see my last overnight shift, June 4th clear as day and can tell you with confidence that my days off (two whole glorious days in a row) are going to be Wednesday and Thursday and that my shift on Sunday does not interfere with choir rehearsals and I will need no nap before work every friggin' Sunday of my life.  I almost cried when it started to dawn on me.

Giddiness is coming from all directions nowadays, despite the still harrowing nature of surviving in this city.  I got another voice over gig, this one voicing videos for a vacation rental property business in Santa Barbara, CA.  Sent in my first takes on Friday evening and now I wait to hear if I need to revise or not.

On top of that, I'm working hard as ever on the film score while simultaneously preparing for my New England premiere this Saturday in Cambridge at the Lily Pad.  Bolt Bus again and I'm not sure where I'm staying yet but it should be a fun whirlwind weekend.  In addition, I'm highly anticipating the show at Galapagos Art Space next Thursday the 10th.  The prospect of performing this piece for piano and laptop is extremely exciting to me.  Up until a few weeks ago, I didn't know how I was going to achieve the outcomes I was hoping for with this piece.  In graduate school, I was inspired by the works my classmates were doing using Max/MSP to sample live performances of acoustic instruments and twist the sound using complex scripts and audio programs that they wrote themselves.  A lot of it was random and dynamic but the ultimate outcome being determined by what they had programmed their patches to do.  I wanted to have more control over the outcome but was hard-pressed to find a program that would allow me to sample and process the resulting sound on the fly that I wasn't going to have to spend weeks programming to my needs.  Until I started to think about what I was trying to do a little bit differently.  I was trying to build a veritable arsenal of audio samples that I could trigger with the push of a key or button or some kind of MIDI message.  My first idea was pretty intensive and it was dizzying to think of trying to attempt it during a performance on stage.  I found a better way though.  Basically, I found a program modeled after old school hardware loopers called Mobius and after fooling around with it for a bit, I realized that I could use the program's multi track, multi loop capabilities to essentially store audio samples/loops that I could play back at will by switching between them to create the soundscapes I was attempting.  It is also capable of performing simple operations on audio as it's playing back (like reversing it, speeding it up and slowing it down, repitching it and randomly shuffling it) so there was my solution for affecting the audio once it was recorded and looped.

So I spent the last few weeks building a workflow and programming my keyboard and Mainstage (a live performance tool packaged with Apple's Logic audio software) to do what I needed.  Here's a blog I wrote on the main site about it.

I'm really hoping some of you New Yorkers can come out to this concert.  It's going to be awesome.  Plus, this venue is incredible.  They have a freakin' lake in the middle of the seating area for cryin' out loud!  Check out the photo tour if you've never been.

Anyway, I'd better get back to work on the film score presently.