Current music:	C.O.G. - 'It's Morally Wrong' (the testbed debugging song)
Entry tags:	c.o.g. stage tech

Confessions of a techno luddite!
What can I say, I like tech that works, and I like learning as much as possible about a piece of technology that proves itself. For this reason, I have an annoying tendency to keep using certain pieces of software and hardware WELL past their prime. Here's some cases in point: what do I edit all my videos with? Premiere 4.3, from 1996! My favorite DAW? Cakewalk 9, from 1999. My go-to WAV editor? CoolEdit96. C.O.G.'s stage video servers? OLD Amiga computers! (in fact, all the computers in the rack are rigged up to use an Amiga bus mouse for easy parallel KBM switching.) And what's the main computer the C.O.G. stage show's actually running on? Why no less than a 350Mhz AMD K6 based system (underclocked AT motherboard!) What's it running for an OS? Would you believe - Windows 95 OSR2?!??

C.O.G. Show Rack circa 2008



There's a method to my madness - it's called not making work for myself when such effort would bring me right back to where I started. I don't believe in putting out ANY effort if the audience can't perceive it - so if it ain't broke... A good case in point is the sound card that our sound is really based around. Drumbot's signature drum sound, the basis of the C.O.G.'s sound since 1996, is the Turtle Beach Tropez Plus sound card. This is a full length ISA sound card, and a very finicky one at that - and this is precisely the reason I'm using the antiquated motherboard, OS (no NT drivers for this card!) etc. But the MIDI sounds are the most important thing, and they're solid. The Tropez Plus is based on the Crystal Wavefront sound chip and has built in multi-effects and 12MB of sample uploading capability with easy patch editing. A bunch of the general MIDI sounds in our palette are samples I made myself, including all cymbal sounds. Even pro drum machines cannot match my cymbals (though drum sampling libraries have surpassed them in the last couple years.) When C.O.G. started out 12 years ago, it was about as good as you could get, esp. for the midi sounds.

I know I COULD just go over to going onstage to pre-mixed tracks, but I've refused to go that way. It just seems wrong... playing to a 'tape'. The sounds we use are all (well mostly) MIDI triggered samples. The keyboardist is a phantom and the drummer is a cartoon, but they ARE actually playing their parts. And the keyboardist MAY still get a virtual identity at some point in the future... not to mention, even if we went to linear WAV files for all our onstage sound tracks, I'd still need MIDI to drive the lights, video, etc.

Now this Tropez is a total dinosaur that admittedly takes way too long to load its sound banks (ISA bus, remember?), but I'm loathe to simply jump ship to a modern PCI sound card; our drum sounds would change for the worse (I haven't heard a good modern soundcard sample set yet) and amenities like onboard multieffects are out of vogue. When Creative bought up Turtle Beach, they ditched the Crystal Wavefront architecture. There is no worthy successor to the Tropez Plus in my opinion (the only other one I ever considered was the Kurtzweil chip based 'Pinnacle' sound card, also by Turtle Beach. Unfortunately it's also an ISA card!) Modern sound cards are about either delivering 5.1 surround for immersive gameplay (with fallback support for old school capabilities like MIDI), or absolutely purity of WAV reproduction with no support for MIDI sounds at all. This isn't what I'm after though!

Believe it or not, my caveman approach to tech actually seems to help more frequently than it hinders me. By combining modern hardware with old hardware and software, I can get things done EXTREMELY quickly - old software runs like a bat out of hell on modern hardware, when it can be made stable (and it can if you know how). I run for literally YEARS on the same stable configurations - the final output is really my ONLY concern! But occasionally it costs me some time at those rare junctions when I have to advance. The domino theory sometimes comes into effect...

Like just this last week. I shook up the show setup when I suddenly felt the urge to add DMX lighting control to the show system, in order to replace a klunky light board that never played well with my moving fixtures anyway. So I bought a Velleman DMX to USB interface and wrote a nice little applet to run my lights via MIDI control from the same computer the sequencer's running on. I tested it on my main computer and it worked. So the rest would probably be simple, right? Welllll... one little problem (domino #1) - Win95, which has ably and stably run my show setup for all these years, doesn't grok USB. There's a patch for adding USB to 95, but it's not actually stable or anything. And when I'm onstage, I above all need to be able to rely on my machines!

So, adding USB necessitated a move from Win95 OSR2 to Win98b. Only problem is, when I do that, my sequences, esp. the WAV audio intensive ones (streamed from disk), STOP in the middle of playback! Kicking back to my stable image of Win95, the problem goes away. What's going on, hmmmn!? Those two OS's are quite similar, and I'm having a hard time believing that USB's background overhead in the kernel is causing that strain. I'm considering the problem as possibly hard drive DMA, a squirrely IRQ conflict (remember those?), or simply a hard drive in the process of going out. So it's time do do some swapping back and forth between the various copies of the show computer hard drive (they're in handy pullout drive racks) and get this show stable again! I've got music to play tomorrow night and lights to program to be ready for the occasion.