[Various] New stuff and Edinburgh

Just recorded and uploaded a new track for the CWK 0015 Survey called Plasticked. It's also on my website. It's bits and pieces of the Und soundtrack that I put together for the Edinburgh Fringe performances, very heavily processed by using Soundflower to route the audio from QLab into my realtime Pd patches. It sounds quite strange and very granular.

Speaking of Und the performances are still attracting quite a few people every night which is great and the performance really seems to vary quite a lot from night to night in terms of delivery and pace, which I am enjoying - generally they're just getting better every time.

We've had a couple of good reviews as well... apparently. I have no idea where they are!

Had a day off performing today but it was still filled with job applications and music making.

Time for bed.

[Und] We seem to be settling in

Last night's performance seemed to go well, in fact it was the best so far, so we're improving each time. I only missed about 2 sound cues out of 124, so not bad. Annette was great and the live sound by Igne and Eli gets better every night. The balloon popping moment made everyone jump and the performance was pretty dark (I know that sentence seems pretty paradoxical but you have to be there to understand).

I made myself jump out of my skin when I played a sound that was cued up and ready to go - I thought it was something quiet but it was the loudest part of the audio for the play - it was in the right place, my mind wasn't. That made me jump too.

[Und] At the Edinburgh Fringe

After rehearsing most of last week and composing bits and pieces of sound for the performance of Und in Bristol we arrived in Edinburgh on Friday night after a long drive (thanks Martin and Anna!) and dragged all of the (fairly extensive) set into the venue. We had a tech run through on Saturday night from 11pm until dawn and then a dress rehearsal from 8.30 am, followed by the first performance at 11.15pm. A gruelling 48 hours during which I think I managed to get about 30 mins sleep.

I didn't really feel that my audio stuff really sounded all that great. In part because I am using samples that are faded out - this means that even though they have been treated with reverb and, in places, with delay, there are no reverb tails after the sounds have finished. To my ears that doesn't sound good or "right" and certainly isn't natural.  In the end I came up with using SoundFlower to route the audio from QLab to the main output and also to Garage Band (!!) where I can add various AU effects to the audio. This seems to work but GB complains about feedback every so often and decides this is bad and stops processing audio. This is a bit of a concern if I am going to try this method of effects processing tonight. I can't work out how or why it would be feeding back as the documentation for SoundFlower implies that the output from GB and QLab should be mixed at the output stage, I must be missing something.

Also, thanks to Anna for showing me QLab, I thought it was a really expensive application but in fact the standard and free version of it does everything I need it to. It's a little weird to understand at first as it simply has a linear timeline but it is possible to have sounds mixing into each other and crossfading, it just isn't immediately obvious this can be done. That said it has saved my bacon for these performances which are mainly sample based.

You can buy tickets for Und here, should you wish to.

And thanks, Jay and Mikey for making it to the performance last night - really good to have friendly faces in the audience.

Already feeling a bit homesick to be honest and I am here until the 29th of August... Maybe I am just tired, Edinburgh is a nice city to spend time in.

[Web] Updated

Just spent some time updating my website - I've added some extra information about things I am working on at the moment, the next month's gigs and I've changed the URLs using aliases to much more friendly ones, which seems to make more sense to me.

No new audio yet, but I want to upload either a video or audio from the MAO-A play that I was performing in Bristol recently.

[EDIT] You can see a video of the MAOA "experiment" slideshow on my site here.