Music

This is great news. It's about time someone hit back against the RIAA. Let's hope there are more to follow.

I found this on the MythTV Users mailing list. A commenter there wrote:

I recently read an interesting quote, from none other than Courtney Love, (paraphrased):

Piracy is the act of taking someone's music with absolutely no intention of ever paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster, I'm talking about a modern recording industry contract.

Perfect! 16 of 16. Not that it was difficult or anything...

My Musicians' Friend order arrived today. The screws to assemble the keyboard stand are missing. Everything else appears to be intact.

One problem I noticed the other day. I downloaded the owner's manual for the keyboard and found out there are no MIDI ports. The keyboard supports MIDI over USB only. This should be interesting getting this thing to work with linux.

Unfortunately, there's a LUG meeting tonight (that's where I'm blogging from) so I can't play with it yet....

Update: I got to play with the keyboard last night after the meeting.  It works with linux using the USB MIDI connection.  :-)  Tonight I'll try syncing with the AW1600 via USB.

I have a M-Audio Audiophile USB interface that I bought to use with my laptop and synch with my Yamaha AW1600 Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). I have been having problems getting it all to work together. In previous sessions, I had battled getting the DAW to control the midi sequencer on the PC. I think I have that under control at this point. This afternoon's problem was getting Timidity to work with museseq.

The laptop does not have a midi synthesizer on it. Timidity is supposed to be a software midi synthesizer and should take the place of the missing piece of hardware. I got it to work fine from Kmid when it was running as a service. Unfortunately, when I started jackd and museseq, no noise came forth.

Tonight I was looking through the man page and noticed that Timidity can be told to output to jack. I tried setting that instead of alsa and suddenly museseq makes noise. Hopefully I'll find time tomorrow night to take it downstairs and test it with the DAW.

The other day I ordered a Yamaha PSR-E403 keyboard. I'm expecting it to arrive within a couple of days. UPS tracking says it left Kansas City late Friday night. Maybe it will show up Tuesday or Wednesday. Then I can try driving a keyboard through the M-Audio interface.

I have a couple of posts here about my band 9 Feet Tall and a recording project I'm doing with some friends that I was in a band called Mantis with in High School. I haven't really had any great insights that I thought worthy of recording here in the blog but thought I would launch a recording of my history in music and audio on the occassion of having bought a Yamaha AW1600 digital multitrack recorder for myself.

I haven't entered any updates here on the Mantis recordings but we've been busy. We've been meeting almost every Sunday for the last four months or so with some breaks over the holidays. We spent quite a bit of time trying to get some decent drums sounds and finally settled on triggering the drumset while miking the cymbals. We also added a couple of ambient mikes which pick up the cymbals nicely. We have one song just about done except for a couple of leads and the vocals.

I recently saw a Kodak digital camera at a decent price and we recently got good news on our taxes (we don't owe nearly as much as I expected) so I bought it. I brought it along the yesterday's session and took a bunch of pictures. Click on the pictures for larger versions.

Unspoken returns to the Joy Underground on April 2.

Gerry just called me to pass on the word that Alfred Batista from the band Crownd has died from a ruptured spleen. Crownd played at the Joy Underground last year. Our prayers go out to his family and the band.

Janira will be at the Joy Underground this Saturday.

My friend Gerry Piazza is the drummer for 9 Feet Tall. He runs a coffee house in the basement of his church on the first Saturday of each month. I help him out by running the sound board. The next event is on February 5.

I play guitar in a band called 9 Feet Tall. The band was created in early 2002 by Kathy Anderson who writes most of the music. The members have been playing together for many years having met as members of a church worship group. Check out our web site. We have a CD that you can buy there. Samples of the songs on the CD are also available as well as a calendar of events.

When I was in high school, I was in a band. I played bass guitar.

Fast forward 25 years...

Kevin, the lead guitarist, decides he wants to get us all back together again and put together a CD. Rather than pay other people to rent studio time which could get very expensive, he decided to build a studio in his house. A few weeks ago, we started doing some recording.

He really did a good job on the studio. It's double-wall construction so you can hardly hear anything outside. He bought a lot of good microphones and a Roland VS2480CD workstation.

We've been getting together on Sunday afternoons to do a few hours worth of work. We started learning to use the workstation while practicing Dean's new song. Dean plays rhythm guitar and drums.

I'll post updates to our progress in future entries here.