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This past weekend, Soundwave came together at my new place to record two new songs, and we got quite a bit done. I still have a lot of mixing to do, but the new studio is definitely helping. Check out the pics below:
On a side note, the piano was tuned last week, and I’ve got the next podcast recorded. I’m a bit rusty so it’s taking me longer than normal to edit, but I hope to finish it tonight. Stay tuned!
The past few weekends have been non-stop family and Soundwave. We had the “Night of Worship” on the 21st of November which encompassed a day of practice, Thanksgiving with the family the following weekend, two entire weekends of Soundwave recording, mixing, and mastering here in the studio after that, and I’ll be out in Sonora, TX hunting at the deer lease with dad and all my brothers this weekend. My goal is to take down the buck I passed on last season. (see last year’s blog and Youtube video) I’ll try and send out some tweets about the hunting experience if I can get online. The best part of it is going to be chillin’ with all my bros, David, Adam, and Josh for the first time in a very long time.
Here’s the song we recorded. Jeremy wrote it for the DCYC event we’ll be serving an entire weekend at in late January. It is going to be awesome!
Actually, the site hit 10,000 a little over a week ago, I just haven’t had a chance to blog about it till now. Yoko and I have been pretty occupied with house hunting. We’ve decided to wait it out and save as much as possible right now with the current condition of the economy though. Maybe in a few years we’ll look at picking up some land. Anyway, just wanted to shout out a big “Thank You” to everyone who is subscribed to the podcast or uses the website regularly for prayer. There have been over 10,000 plays and downloads of the podcasts since I launched the website late July of ’08. One of these days I’ll have to blog about the different countries all over the world I’ve seen download the podcast. It is truly amazing – they don’t call it the “world wide web” for nothing! I hope and pray the music continues to be a blessing to you – that is reward enough for me. The plan is to have “Week 28″ posted by tomorrow evening. Thanks again, and God bless!
This has actually been broken for a while. Some of you may experience garbled audio if you try to use the “Play Now” feature available in the MTPB Blogs, downloads, and archives. This appears to only affect Flash Player 10. A workaround would be to either use the “download” link, subscribe to the podcast, or downgrade to Flash Player 9. I’ve tried this version on both a Mac and a PC and it works fine. I hope to find a solution soon and will let you know when it’s fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I was able to search through the text of a database backup from a month ago and replace the PodPress settings record in the corrupted database! I don’t know why I didn’t think to try this last night/this morning. At any rate, the iTunes Store has the podcast cached from when things were broken so if you try to subscribe through iTunes right now, it probably won’t work until they update the podcast, but things should be good to go by tomorrow. The “play” and “download” links on the website are working, and if you use anything other than iTunes for podcasting, you should be good to go as well.
On a side note – you might be wondering what kind of vacation could possibly be had in Sonora, TX. Well, I’ll be sure to blog all about it when I get back. 
God bless!
Last night around 8:00 PM, I was trying to fix the MTPB WordPress Stats. It hasn’t been working since I updated to 2.6.5 a few days ago. I read something about modifying the theme to fix it. When I did this, Podpress broke and began complaining about the same thing. I worked on it until 4:00 AM this morning and tried everything I could think of including restoring the website completely from a backup. I’m pretty sure it has to do with a corrupt database entry which I do not have a recent backup of. At any rate, I am completely exhausted and fed up with Podpress. I have totally run out of ideas so I will ask around and try to get some help on this. Unfortunately, I leave tomorrow with my brothers out to Sonora on vacation and will have very little time to work on this till I get back next week. In the meantime, the podcast directory where you can manually play and/or download the audio files is here. I’m really sorry about this. Also, there won’t be a podcast this week since I’ll be out of town.
Here’s what happened:
It’s Saturday noonish, and I have a Soundwave gig in a few hours and need to get the podcast done before then. So, is the microphone positioned perfectly in the sweet spot with input levels properly adjusted on the R-09HR?
Check.
Music picked out to play in case a song is needed?
Check check…
Ice maker turned off?
Chiggidy check…
A/C turned off?
That would be a….. CHECK!
Cell phone on vibrate?
Big Phat Check!
Dogs outside?
Diggidy dog check!
Parrot upstairs in the study?
….that would be affirmative
Yoko and SanBan upstairs in the bedroom keeping quiet for the next 30-40 minutes?
ccchhhhheeeeeaaaaaakkkkkkk!
Everything is ready to go so, I hit record on the R-09HR remote and begin to worship with music. I just had the piano tuned and it’s sounding beautiful! I feel the Holy Spirit fill the room and find myself thinking, this is going to be the best podcast yet! I finish the last song thinking that has to be right at 30 minutes excited about mixing since this was going to be the first podcast right after a tuning, and I look at the R-09HR and see this:
I know it’s blurry, but it says “standby”, which means the entire time I was playing, the recorder was waiting for me to press “record” one more time! DOPE! In the past, I’ve always checked to make sure it was recording before starting. This time, I was so excited about getting started that this was the ONE thing I completely forgot to CHECK! As you can imagine, I hadn’t been that frustrated in a very long time. But after a few minutes of banging my head against the wall, I realized that it was by no means a waste since my LORD heard every note played, and that made all the time spent in preparation and playing totally worth it. I pray next week will be even better!
Just wanted to shout out a big “Thank You” to all of you who have subscribed to the podcast or use the website regularly for prayer. There have been over 1,000 plays and downloads of the MTPB blog since it was started less than 2 months ago. Watching as people all over the world download and play the podcasts has been very encouraging, and I plan to continue providing music to pray by for as long as I’m able!
God bless!
Last night at practice for church, there was a fellow keyboardist there who showed a bit of interest in my setup and was impressed with some of the sounds, so I thought a blog about the “gig rig” might be interesting to some of you.
The guts: I do something very few live keyboard performers do, but more and more are moving toward. I trust a standard computer to produce live, real time sounds as I play. I use a program called Main Stage by Apple. It is bundled with Logic Studio 8, and has literally changed the way I think about keyboards. It is fully customizable based on the controller hardware you have and comes with a huge selection of software synthesizers and samplers. You also have the ability to add 3rd party software synths for even more sounds. I was given IKMultimedia’s Philharmonik which has some beautiful orchestral sounds as well as some very real grand piano samples. The install is almost 50 Gig, but the sounds that are produced are the closest to the “real thing” I’ve ever heard to date.
The computer: A very solid Apple MacBook Pro with a 2.4 Ghz Intel Dual Core proc, 4 Gig of RAM, 160 GB 7200 RPM HD, and a high res 1920×1200 display. Even with this much power, Main Stage can still buckle if too many sounds or effect plugins are layered so there is still a balance to maintain. Part of the problem with processing power is the USB audio interface built into my VX8. If I were to move to firewire, this would help substancially, but so far I’ve been able to work within the constraints.
The Bottom Stack: My main controller is the CME VX8 88-key controller with a lot of nice features, but it weighs a ton! This doesn’t really make it ideal for a gig rig, but it does help me stay in shape. The weighted action has a good feel, but it makes a clicking metal-on-metal sound when certain black and white keys are played in sequence which can be annoying. I swapped this keyboard out 3 times and every one of them did the same thing so it appears to be a manufacturing defect. Another problem is the USB ports. I’ve only been using this keyboard for about 6 months and I can already tell that the USB ports are going to wear out eventually and I’ll be forced to move to another audio interface, which will likely be the Apogee Duet. Other than these flaws, this keyboard has served me well so far this year.
The top stack: A Korg Triton Extreme. Ever since Korg came out with the Triton over 7 years ago, I’ve owned one. It started with the standard Triton Pro x, then to the Trinity, then the Triton Studio Pro, and now the Triton Extreme. This keyboard makes up for the heaviness of the VX8 weighing much less, but only providing 61 keys – enough to play organ riffs all night long! My favorite thing about this product line is the synth pads you can create. This also can be used as a backup if my laptop decides to stop working, which has happened once or twice when I first made the move to this rig back in December of ’07. It also has a USB midi out so I have it configured it as a controller in Main Stage as well.
The Sound: I prefer to use my Westone ES2 in-ear monitors if the venue permits, but if not, I use some Yamaha MSR100′s. I run everything through a Mackie 802-VLZ3 mixer which opens up a number of options. One of the options is to restrict the output to only my keyboards if I have an overall mix being fed into the mixer or if I feed the output of my R-09HR to hear the “room” when I use the Westones. The mixer also has XLR outs which eliminate the need for direct boxes.
The stands: For the keyboards, I use the Ultimate V-Stand. I do have the laptop attachment, but the vibration was a bit much so I moved the MacBook Pro over to an insTand, which has worked out nicely. For the Yamahas, when I use them, I have some standard 45 degree angled guitar amp stands. They’ve held up pretty well so far. The one thing that hasn’t held up well is the second tier of the V-Stand. The adapter to attach the second tier stripped out after about 6 months of use.
Well, that about covers it. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them. I’d be happy to answer any questions or discuss any of the parts that make up the gig rig with you.
After waiting over 2 weeks, I finally received confirmation from (ISC)2 that I passed the CISSP exam! Thank you for your prayers and support.
The iPhone 2.1 update came out today. I’ve upgraded but haven’t had a chance to see if there’s an improvement in 3G performance. Apple said this update is supposed to fix the 3G signal problems as well as the following:
I went ahead and got the Roland Edirol R-09HR for recording the Music To Pray By blog. I’ll also be using it as a stereo mic when I use in-ear monitors during live performance in order to hear the room since the Westones block out everything. I currently do this with the R-09′s and it works really well. I’ve already recorded some of this week’s posting with the R-09HR, but haven’t had a chance to compare yet. I hope it’s an improvement in sound quality over the R-09. According to Roland, the mic pre’s are supposed to be better, and it records at 24 bit 96k, which is double the sample over the older version. I’ll be listing the R-09 on eBay this Tuesday to recoup some of the costs. Why Tuesday you might ask? Ask me in a comment and I’ll elaborate…
Because of hurricane Ike, I decided to pull my antenna that was mounted on the side of my house and move it inside, and surprisingly enough, Windows Vista Media Center is reporting better signals inside at a lower altitude than what I was getting outside with it mounted much higher. It must have been the attenuation of the added cable and grounding required. On a side note, my family is in the path of this hurricane so please be in prayer for them as they ride it out.
Week 8′s podcast will be posted sometime tomorrow as long as we don’t loose power. Based on the current Ike forecast, that shouldn’t be an issue – just a bunch of much needed rain.
I have some tech stuff to blog about:
First, as some of you know, I’ve been studying very hard for the past few months for the CISSP examination, which turned out to be a big waste of time since most of what I studied was material NOT on the exam. I woke up early this morning, drove to San Antonio, sat down to take the test at 8:45 AM and didn’t leave till 2:30 PM. It is by far the hardest written exam I’ve ever taken. Also, they must have recently changed the structure of the exam because I was expecting to see a lot more technical questions, and there were around 5 out of 250. At least I know I got 5 of the questions right! I won’t find out what my score is for a while. They told me up to 6 weeks, but I’m sure I’ll blog or twit about it as soon as the results come in.
Secondly, I have to apologize for the most recent podcast. I forgot that my R-09 was set to record to MP3 instead of WAV. This got changed when I used it to record a practice for the upcoming Austin Jazz Music Festival gig next weekend and I needed extra recording time. Of course, an R-09HR with a 32GB SD Card would fix this. Okay, I pledge to use any donations minus 10% for tithe towards the purchase of one! I’ve been listening to the podcast as I write this post and I’ve noticed that it has a darker sound than my previous podcasts. I had the R-09 positioned like I always do. It either had to be converting MP3 to WAV while importing the audio into Logic Pro, then back to MP3 for the post, or the way the R-09 handles recording to MP3. There may have been some stuff I could have done with EQ, but initially I didn’t really hear any difference on my studio monitors. I should have done a comparison with previous podcast audio prior to bouncing… Lesson learned.
Lastly, as you may have heard, the iPhone 3G signal problem has been narrowed down to the Infineon chipset used in the manufacturing of the new iPhone. Apple has been very quiet about this whole thing, but Steve Jobs wrote a letter to some complaining customers that this issue affects approximately 2% of iPhone 3G owners which comes out to around 60,000 iPhones. Personally, I believe it’s much more than that since I haven’t seen an iPhone 3G that didn’t have the same issue as mine, plus like I mentioned before, I’m on my 3rd one. On a positive note, Jobs assured the customers in the letter that this issue can be resolved with a firmware update. Unfortunately, the recent 2.0.2 update didn’t resolve it, although it did fix some problems I was having with software hanging and GPS seems to come up faster. I really want my 3G though! Come on Apple – help out a loyal fan!
I just wanted to talk about the recent music post and bring a couple of things to your attention. There are a few things that are different between week 1 and week 2′s recording. On the Roland R-09, I used the auto gain control with a low mic gain setting for week 2 whereas with week 1, AGC was off, and I had the mic gain set to high. This resulted in a more balanced recording with much less overhead to work with so a lot of noise was induced when I normalized the track. Thanks to Micah Petrea‘s hookup last night, we were able to reduce the noise a little. I also used 24 bit 48k during week 2 vs. 16 bit 44.1k for week 1. Of course, I compress to mp3 at 192kbps using VBR after touching up a little, but some would argue starting with a higher quality signal can make a difference. Next week, I’ll try AGC with the mic gain up and see what happens. If you’d like, comment here which week sounds better in your opinion.
Just finished posting the original Music To Pray By album here. Feel free to download all of the tracks and use them however you’d like. The MTPB blog will be similar only an acoustic grand piano will be used, and the recording will not be broken down into tracks. I hope you enjoy the album!
