Phonography

Did a gig last night with a group of people I know: we have formed a Phonographers Union. Improve performance with audio recordings. Was in a small cafe, after it had closed so the crowd was there to see us and the group that followed. 40 people in the audience and they seemed appreciative. Strange to be sitting in front of a crowd looking mostly at the laptop and thinking like mad to work out what I should cue up or play with what is currently playing. Lots of fun though.

Clean out or else

Newest acquisition - a vintage (old enough for me to have owned after I left my first stint at post secondary education) Peavey keyboard amp. This is for the theremin that will be finished one day soon.

Using the one in / one out rule I had to finally clear out some of my other gear. This is going well and today's purchaser, I've sold six things so far, set me thinking about the people I've met buying and selling in the last little while.

In no particular order:

• Guitarist for a punkabilly band who also plays horns in a neo-Balkan gypsy collective.
• Electrical engineering PhD student who was a keyboard player for a bunch of bands in the 80's and 90's, who just happens to run a software company that produces editors for hardware synths - includng the new M-Audio Venom.
• Museum curator, another PhD, who is a synth collector and noise artist, also responsible for the care of John Lennon's yellow Rolls Royce.
• Former TV producer - SCTV - who is now an online media consultant and part time 60's band guitarist.
• Bass player of an indie band who is teaching privately and doing a Masters in classical bass at the university.
• School janitor who plays hard rock on his Les Paul, looks the part of a late 70's rocker too.
• Guy who teaches guitar out of his sound and audio rental store.
• and a bunch of regular people who just like to make music

Kind of an interesting cross section of the population. Just reinforces that all of us, with our different lives and ways of looking at the world, like to make music.

Banjos in the wild

Sort of.

Left work yesterday to come home for lunch. Have to take an hour lunch and I don't live very far away by bike so I go home. It's a break and I find if I stay at work I'm heading back to my desk after about 20 minutes.

Anyway....

On the way to the bike rack I heard snatches of banjo that I thought were coming from one of the other officewindows nearby. It turned out to be a twenty something young woman sitting outside the library in the sun playing a short phrase over and over. She was sitting there working something out, or not, I don't know what but she was playing in the way I often do, she had just found something that was interesting to her and kept repeating it.

Made my day.

Musings....

The last post went up just after my birthday, didn't notice until today. Am still busy at work, moved jobs and am in a newly revamped building. Library at a college that is in the learning commons model. Part of the reno included air handling (alluded to in the last post) and it may be flowing but it's doing so at an alrming volume, in terms of SPL that is. I'll have to find out if there is an SPL meter somewhere in one of the departments and check what the levels are. Not as noticable on weekdays, lots of mobile sound reflectors / absorbers then, but Saturdays are loud. Really noticed it for the first time when I found the universal key for the building opened a door that facilitates a shortcut to the washroom. Walking through that room is soothing. It's not a small space, about 900 square feet or so, but it is so calm in there. I guess the novelty of the new job in a new space has really worn off, or that I'm not as busy and running around as much as I did at the start of the semester.

A time away....

Been a while. Work became silly, changed jobs owing to a layoff. Budgetted out. Still in the same organisation, but different area. No more vending machine but a lot more air handling noise. A bit time challenged but making sound to try and stay sane.

Vending Machines

About two months ago the vending company who has the contract where I work put two machines just down the hall from my office. The only attempt at acoustic treatment in the building is the suspended ceiling, the rest of the surfaces are very reflective. I spend a lot of my days with the office door nearly or fully closed as the compressor on the pop machine sounds like a helicopter turbine starting up and running. Headphones help but that whine is always there. I'll have to record it and check to see what frequencies are involved. On the plus side it does harmonize pretty well with the whine from my laptop's power supply, so it's not all bad.

Rubycon and shortwave radio.

I was listening to some Tangerine Dream today and remembered that Rubycon was the first electronic music I owned. We lived in NZ at he time and somehow my parents had befriended a cook who worked on a ship. Ken was from England and came over for dinner when he was in town. On one of these visits, early 1976 I think, he brought a cassette of Rubycon for me to listen to. We had had a discussion about music on his previous visit and he thought I might like it. All I had to play it on was a mono cassette recorder that was a Christmas present a few years before. I spent hours listing to the tape through the tiny speaker of the cassette player.
The thing about it was that there was music that someone had made out of the sounds that I loved listening to on the radio I had in my bedroom, a 1957 "portable" multi band tube/valve thing my mum had bought for my dad before they were married. This was when shortwave was full of wonderful coded transmissions and other sounds that I would also listen to for hours. There were the often interesting programs in all sorts of languages but it was those wails and bleeps and undulating siren sounds that fascinated me. The radio is at my parent's house, it came back to Canada with us the next year and I have the tape here with the rest of the cassette collection on a shelf just over my head. I'll have to dig it out and see what it sounds like.
Rubycon and shortwave radio, another couple of things I have to remember to thank my parents for.