Fun weekend
...started Friday by exercising my audio chops running sound for my friends in Love Zombie and Brah at One Eyed Jacks. In the process I also won some additional respect from Jay Holland, the club's sound man. Nice time spent running a big system - a massive Yamaha board from the late 80's. It's been a while since I ran a system with VCA groups. Very sensitive faders on this rig, boosting guitar solos required no more than 1/8" of fader movement. Since Brah had just bought a whole new lighting rig, I decided to bring my big HDV camera and videotape the entire show. The tape will prove valuable to them in honing a really pro looking new light rig. Man, I've gotta get C.O.G. some more intellibeams! (I also really should get down to programming the ones we have, not just letting them free run all the time.)

Friday I also got my mic boom stick (now I can yell "This is my boom stick!!!" and mean it) and a proper mic shockmount. Never had the proper equipment before now, and I'm certain it's going to make a great deal of difference. It's a fairly lightweight aluminum boom from K-Tek, and the suspension is Audio Technica to match my shotgun mic. (I made sure to get one that would also work well with my big AKG condensers.) Next I need to get a fuzzy windscreen (known in the industry as a dead cat) and a portable mixer.

Much of the rest of the weekend was spent working up two new songs we're debuting at BabelCon next weekend. I showed Drumbot how to play our new NIN sounding opus 'Too Many Atoms' and the theme from 'Dr. Who', and programmed lights for the two as well. Today I threw together some backscreen stuff for 'Atoms' but didn't have a chance to do anything for 'Dr. Who'... hopefully there'll be some time to get that together, as well as maybe some Drumbot intro patter. Which would help.

Oh, I also figured out what was locking my main computer up... it wasn't the memory DIMM. It was the damned SOCKET the memory was in. In other words, one of my mainboard's sockets produces memory errors no matter WHAT memory DIMM is in it. Unfortunately that's nonrepairable, so I bought a 1GB stick to get me through while I figure out whether there's any warranty recourse on this board (probably not with my luck.)

Monday night - a dress rehearsal w' our first C.O.G.-Podcast, and a chance to get the last few bumps ironed out of the setlist!