page last updated 2007 nov 13 tue

Monowheel Studio Log 2006

 
jun 5 mon  --  I played a last minute show last Thursday at The Vibe in Riverside, CA. E.N.D., an Order of the Fly side band, asked me to fill in for a band that cancelled.  It was really fun.  It's been a while since I played the electronic stuff (Return didn't seem like it counted because it was outdoors during the day).  There's nothing like playing in a dimly lit club with smoke and lights and [this place had] a kickin' sound system -way bigger than it's size requires.
   Technically, this was exciting for me, because it was the first time I didn't use any outside processing for neither vocals nor bass.  All the processing was done within Ableton Live, using their plug-ins, in fact, which sound great, I think.  I got several compliments on the sound and mixing, despite the sound guy.

may 12 fri -- I moved this last month, so the studio is in pieces right now. During all that, I played an acoustic show at Borders in Rancho Cucamonga and an electronic set at Return, an outdoor rave in the LA forest.
   Return was an hour long set.  I was originally supposed to play at sun down, but the sound crew was a bit late, and things got switched around and I ended up playing in the morning after sunrise.  So, my plans to use my new light-up drumsticks at night were foiled.  But I did get to try something new: live audience participation looping.  I set up four tracks that tapped into the mic input and mapped midi notes to Live session slots to those tracks, which were triggered from a foot pedal board.  Here's the fun technical part...  The foot pedal, Midi Buddy, only transmits CC data, so I had to use MidiOx to remap the controller values to note values and send them through a virtual midi port, thanks to MidiYoke, which is where I set Live to look for the notes.  Anyway, a couple guys said I changed their life because they heard their own voices in the mix at a huge rave. And it was a massive speaker system they had going there.
   The studio has been minimized and I've almost sold all of my hardware.  I made a battery pack for my Ozonic firewire controller and audio interface, so I can be portable while the studio gets finished. Just before the move, I finally decided on a name for the studio: "The Truing Room".  I used to true the wheels of neighborhood kids' bikes when I was in high school, living in Apple Valley.  I like the idea that the music is getting formed from a rough, wobbly sound, to a straight and smooth mix, like a freshly trued wheel.  Each turn of the knob on my controller is like a turn of the spoke wrench on a carefully selected spoke on each Monowheel mix.

mar 17 fri -- It's been a while since I've made a log entry. I've been playing a lot of acoustic stuff lately as well as cleaning up some of the recordings for the first full-length album, which will replace the EP and two singles I've been making by hand for the last couple years. This last week has been spent reinstalling XP and all of my music programs on my laptop. After a year of installs/uninstalls and windows updates, things just got irreversibly buggy. And when it started affecting my audio I decided to go for the clean sweep. The instrumental, "Inches", just got lyrics a month or so ago and I've been working on a remix of it for DJ Trauma, a good friend of mine that spins at Das Bunker up in LA. It is now called "Rebellion in Wisdom", the lyrics being about the revolutionary war. DJ Tony, another DJ friend of mine will be happy to know that as soon as the laptop is back up, his favorite instrumental, "Angst", will be adopting some lyrics and getting a workover as well.

Monowheel Studio Log 2005