Too many computer crashes tonight caused this to get posted very late.
After Mr. Neilathotep made the suggestion, it had to come out. Here’s a short interpretation of The Rainbow Connection on banjo, double bass and analogue synthesized flute. This really was done in an hour, though computer crashes had me screwing around with getting the damn thing out of my DAW for about 3 more hours. :/
thing-a-day #2: banjo. for an upcoming music track (hopefully later this month!) I wanted a realistic banjo strum. Here’s the best I could manage in 1 hour or less. Sample is from Sweetwater’s Stratus Sounds collection (Volume 3). Lots of tweaking, a bit of FX, and you’ve got the loop you hear here.
What do you think?
P.S. Euphonix update coming soon, I promise.
Introduction
After my photography buddies insisted that 90% of photography is your digital darkroom workflow, and convinced me to switch to Adobe Lightroom, I’ve been struggling to get my studio workflow similarly streamlined. I grew up on studio production in the late 1980s, meaning large analogue mixers, one channel per input, and everything mixed down to 8 sub-mixes running to a 1/2″ 8-channel reel-to-reel recorder (Tascam 38). I naturally think in terms of taking everything down to 8 busses, then doing a final mixdown “live” from tape to 2-track. It’s a two-step workflow that I can do in my sleep. It’s also 20 years out of date – long due for an overhaul.
So when I saw this press release from MOTU (makers of my DAW, Digital Perfomer, and my PCI-based audio interfaces) touting a new “high-end” control surface – the Euphonix Artist series – I decided the time had come to make a change. (The forthcoming MOTU Volta plugin pushed me over the top.) I’d heard of tons of difficulties using Mackie Controls and HUIs with DP previously, so reading an honest-to-goodness press release from MOTU left me hopeful they would proactively work to make the Euphonix devices the best control surface for DP. So, I bought a cheap used MOTU 24i to accompany my 1224, and ran every device in my studio directly into the computer. Knowing some of the limitations I might experience being an early adopter, I spent the cash on the MC Mix. I figured that 8 tracks of full-motion faders and endless rotary encoders (MC Mix) would be preferable to 4 tracks + a touchscreen (MC Console), as I’m used to grabbing for knobs and only looking at a meter bridge. Later, I rationalized, I could add the MC Console if I wanted. Also, my friend dys4iK gave me a Shuttle Xpress, which I use as a jog/shuttle/transport device – meaning I don’t need another one just now. (Review forthcoming.)
Unboxing
The MC Mix comes well-packed in an attractive box. The device itself is well weighted, and feels solid in your hands. A big kudos to Euphonix for only using red, yellow and green LEDs; no bright blue LEDs blinding you from this device! The OLED track indicators are also quite attractive and understated, with very little lag and no discernible flicker in my incandescent-lit studio. If I had any complaint about the physical device, it’d be that the rotary and fader knobs are made from metallized plastic. I guess for the powered faders this is understandable – less mass to push around – but a bit surprising based on their look. Still, they slide nicely, and after the initial “plastic surprise,” I haven’t thought twice about the build quality. The box also includes a hefty power supply, and a piece of 6-foot Cat 5 Ethernet cable. This went straight into the second NIC of my DAW. I would have preferred a slightly longer cable coming from the line-mounted power brick to the MC Mix itself, but I can’t complain, really.
Setup
Installation was straightforward under OSX 10.5.6. Connect power and the networking cable to the MC Mix, then load the OSX driver. As Euphonix frequently releases driver updates (especially targeted at improving Digital Performer compatibility!) it’s best to download the latest drivers from Euphonix’ site directly, ignoring the packed-in CD-ROM. EuControl launches at boot with a spinning green logo in the Dock. After the EuControl driver detects the MC Mix, the logo stops spinning, and the 8 MC Mix OLED displays change from the Euphonix logo to 8 dotted boxes — a gratifying indication that communication has been established. The control panel for the driver has a large “Upgrade Firmware” button that does exactly what it says, trouble-free. There are also settings to fix specific tracks to specific sliders (“layouts”), as well as toggle various behaviour of the device. I left all of these on their defaults.
The quick start and user guide for the MC Mix are straightforward, and worth a good read. Five buttons on the left of the device select various modes – what the manual calls knob sets. Used in various combinations, you can access all of the features of a traditional mixing console, as well as settings for plug-ins / channel inserts. By selecting a specific channel in the CHAN mode, parameters for a single channel are spread out across the 8 rotary encoders, and can be paged through separately. This is a particularly nice feature, though there are some implementation problems in the current driver that cause difficulty with DP6 (see below).
One interesting shortcut mentioned in the manual – holding Shift and touching a fader – will reset it to 0.0dB. Looking at the silkscreening on my MC Mix, when zeroing the fader the value is actually about 0.5dB; it would be nice if there was a calibration feature in the driver to align 0.0dB exactly with the silkscreened position. As it stands, I’ll just look at the value on the OLED display or my monitor instead.
In Action – CueMix
Before jumping into Digital Performer, I figured I’d give the surface a spin with CueMix, using the Mackie Control and HUI emulation modes. Often I’m just jamming in my studio, and don’t want the weight (and intimidation!) of a full DAW. CueMix most closely matches the analogue mixer I used to use for just this purpose, letting me set pans and levels via faders and knobs, controlling the rest via MIDI routing. This requires drag-and-dropping the CueMix application onto the Euphonix control panel, selecting the correct emulation mode, and rebooting (!) Once you’ve finished that, you create a new Mackie Control or HUI device in Audio MIDI Setup, connecting the new Euphonix MIDI device to the Mackie Control or HUI device via one in and one out port. Be sure to set the manufacturer and device in Audio MIDI; CueMix uses this to determine the correct emulation mode. (The Euphonix MIDI device sports 4 pairs of in-out MIDI ports, presumably necessary if you link together up to 4 MC Mixes or 3 MC Mixes and 1 MC Control. I just used the first pair of MIDI ports.) Finally, you enable and configure the control surface from the Control Surfaces menu in CueMix. I checked the Application Follows Control Surface setting in the menu, in the hopes that CueMix would scroll horizontally as I paged left and right with the MC Mix. Sadly it doesn’t, even with EuControl set to Auto-bank to selected track and CueMix set to Application Follows Control Surface. (Incidentally, it’s disappointing that CueMix doesn’t get wide enough to shall all of my channels, even though I have the screen real estate. CueMix will show a maximum of 24 channels + 1 master horizontally. Fixing either of these two problems would result in a useful workaround.)
Immediately upon trying the Mackie Control emulation mode, I encountered a problem. The track titles displayed on the MC Mix OLED displays were actually the track title for the first channel, spread out across the first 6-7 OLED displays. Switching to HUI mode correctly assigned track names to each track, but there are still bugs: I can only display the first 3 letters of a track name, plus a single digit. As an example, a track named “CS-80 L” displays as “CS-” only. I also noticed that CueMix’s faders go from -inf to 0dB, while the silk-screening on the MC Mix goes from -inf to +12dB. Not a problem – EuControl maps +12dB (MC Mix) to 0.0.dB (CueMix), giving you the full slider length for use in CueMix. Support still isn’t perfect: the MC Mix shortcut of holding shift and tapping a fader to set it to 0.0dB still uses the (approximate) silkscreen 0.0dB level, which translates to -4.9dB in CueMix. Similarly, the gain for each track displayed on the OLED is with respect to the silkscreening, not the CueMix level (-inf to +12.0 dB). So, with the fader all the way up, the OLED displays +12.0 dB, but CueMix recognizes it as 0.0dB. This is a minor nuisance, but one I’d have not expected, especially in emulation mode. This is further complicated by the fact that live channel levels don’t display on the MC Mix – only in CueMix itself. (Sadly, this limitation still exists in DP6 as well.) The blame here may well lay with MOTU in their HUI control of CueMix; I’ve not used a real HUI with CueMix so I don’t know if it has the same limitations.
Of the other controls, mute and solo work as expected, except for the fact that the MC Mix has an “ON” button instead of a “mute” button. This is a strange choice on the part of Euphonix, but one I can live with – as long as I make the mental shift to expect the button to be lit instead of extinguished. Bank Left and Right, along with Nudge Left and Right, work as expected, shifting channels by 8 or 1 across the surface of the MC Mix. OLED displays and illuminated indicators shift along as expected. Pan works fine – though the rotary encoders are a bit jumpy with fast movements, they’re just fine at slower speeds. Oddly, trim mode won’t stay selected; after a fraction of a second, the rotary controls switch back to pan mode. This is a definite bug. Finally, none of the other knob set buttons have any effect. As a result there’s no way to access input mutes from the MC Mix, nor the CueMix talkback buttons.
This one isn’t documented, but is very helpful: switching CueMix’s console between output buses is accomplished using the Mix button and each fader’s SEL button. In this mode, each channel represents a pair of outputs, with bus muting working via each channel’s On button. Once you’ve switched to the bus you want to work with, use the Input button to return to channel mode. Once I discovered this, it was a snap to mix and assign my 34 inputs across the 14 outputs I have between my MOTU 1224 and 24i interfaces.
In short – despite its many small bugs, HUI mode for CueMix is functional, allowing me access to volume, pan, mute and solo across all available CueMix buses. Hopefully, MOTU will bring native EuControl support to CueMix as well, possibly updating the application to match their newer CueMix FX application for FireWire interfaces. (A girl can dream, can’t she?)
Tomorrow: the MC Mix under Digital Performer 6.01.
Read Lt. Starbuck…Lost in Castration by Dirk Benedict, the original Lt. Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica, and Face from the A-Team.
There was a time, I know I was there, when men were men, women were women and sometimes a cigar was just a good smoke. But 40 years of feminism have taken their toll. The war against masculinity has been won. Everything has turned into its opposite, so that what was once flirting and smoking is now sexual harassment and criminal. And everyone is more lonely and miserable as a result.
I agree with my friend Hooch: “But my first reaction, aside from that he does raise some valid concerns and issues, is that he forgot to add at the end ‘And get off my lawn!'”
Today a friend linked me to this article in the NY Times about networks, the US presidential inauguration, and twitter. Here’s the key quote, emphasis his/mine:
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said the company was hoping to sidestep network hiccups. He is not expecting the same traffic spikes as during the election, when the site was flooded with as many as 10 messages a second, but says the service “will nevertheless be doubling our through-put capacity before Tuesday.â€
Because of all the hype Twitter gets, I couldn’t believe the figure was so low, so I checked elsewhere. “Twitter had by one measure over 3 million accounts and, by another, well over 5 million visitors in September 2008.” Simple math says there’s about 2.5 million seconds in a month, so 5 million impressions translates to one request every half a second. Presuming each query pulls a few pictures as well as text, 10 messages a second sounds about right based on published data. Let’s further assume each message is the size of an average Twitter page; mine came in at 34,100 bytes just now, or 341,000 bytes a second.
Bandwidth wise, that’s 2.728 Mbit/s, or roughly the bandwidth of 2 T1s. My home DSL line can push 700 kbit/s. With 5-6 of them bonded together, and the appropriate back end servers, I could run Twitter out of my basement.
It also isn’t very much, if you compare it with other semi-synchronous messaging technologies like IRC, Jabber and IM servers, who have been capable of pushing more data per second since well over 15 years ago. I’m sure mainframes were doing similar amounts of data I/O 30 years ago.
The snarky nerd in me wants to smear Ruby on Rails, the technology platform on which Twitter relies, but others did that 2 years ago already (and yes, that link defends the technology, and makes the ridiculous assumption that you can’t build in scalability.) I’m convinced it’s the incorrect application of a specific technology to solve a problem for which it is ill-suited. Perhaps the Twitter infrastructure never planned to expand so greatly, but I find it laughable that we’re in 2009 and that “important” services like Twitter can’t survive a “flood” of 10 messages a second. My friend agrees: “no i’m sure facebook is laughing at the 10 messages/a second ‘flood’ too.”
I’m also quite surprised that such a “popular” site, one that gets so much hype and marketing, really doesn’t get that much use. For comparison, here’s the figures for the Top 10 sites. Being generous and assuming those 5 million hits for Twitter are all unique visitors, that means the largest sites see more than 25 times the traffic it does. Facebook sees at least 10 times the number of unique visitors, and certainly will push more content, what with all the pictures and rich media it has vs. twitter’s limited use of graphics (small avatars only). Of course, none of this even gets into what AWS/S3 and content accelerators push from a pure bandwidth standpoint.
Increasingly, I’m convinced microblogging sites are hiveminds for particular flavours of individual. Disingenuously: StumbleUpon/Digg are “OMG LOOK AT THIS LINK!” Twitter feels like “marketing marketing SEO yadda yadda bend to my will.” Plurk is “cheerleader YAY happy happy dancing banana.” BrightKite is “mommy! mommy! look at me now!” And yes, IRC is probably the Wild Wild West. Others I know have made similar comparisons between LiveJournal, mySpace, Facebook and Friendster. I’m not sure what predestines a technology for a specific sort of person, but the link is there. This might make a good research paper. ;)
You might have noticed that my last few posts have been image-less. This isn’t because I’m protesting visual communication. I love it – in fact, I’m downright jealous of what most other bloggers pull off with the visual design of their sites!
My camera died. Yeah, the “new old” Olympus C-5050 I bought broke. I only have myself to blame. The camera was on my kitchen counter. I reached for it, but scooted it off the counter, dashing it on the floor. The damage could have been worse – only the mode dial came off. I can’t just reattach it using the screw hack someone posted, because the impact on the floor cut through traces on the flexible PCB. And they’re too fine to bridge easily. Besides, disassembling to the point where I could even consider repairing that damage ended up cracking a couple of very delicate plastic tabs, ones designed to hold the whole thing together. I could try and glue all of it together, but…
Someone on eBay has the entire mode dial assembly for $39, plus $8 for shipping to Canada. Soon I’ll have a working camera again, and by then the studio should be warmer, so lots more pictures and music for everyone.
Oh, and I’ll have my first actual honest to goodness conference submission done by then too (deadline: Dec. 18th). It’s been a long time coming but it’s good to have actual research data and prepare it for publication again. YES!
Straight from the New York Times, this is something I’ve made countless times and love making this time of year. I made minor modifications for ingredients on hand and to suit my tastes. Also, I used some turkey broth left over from this year’s Canadian Thanksgiving, which is far less salty than the store-bought kind and added a nice buttery texture. Thanks for the reminder, Martha Rose Shulman!
I ate this with one chicken enchilada mole wrap, and some more of the apple thing. The mole sauce tastes even better after having been frozen!
Ingredients
Directions
1. Heat the oil in a heavy soup pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until tender, about 5 minutes. Add the ginger and stir together until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the squash, sweet potatoes, regular potato, and water or stock, and bring to a simmer. Add salt to taste, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes, or until all of the ingredients are thoroughly tender.
2. Using an immersion blender, puree the soup (or you can put it through the fine blade of a food mill or use a regular blender, working in batches and placing a kitchen towel over the top to avoid splashing). Return to the pot and stir with a whisk to even out the texture. Heat through, adjust salt and add pepper to taste.
Ingredients
Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F. In a small bowl place cherries, cranberries and rum. Microwave on high for 2 minutes.
Combine flour and 175g sugar. Add cubes of butter and rub in until mixture darkens and looks like dark bread crumbs.
In a 9 inch or similar round casserole, place apples, 4 tablespoons sugar, lemon juice. Mix. Add fruit/rum mixture, maple syrup and cinnamon. Mix. Don’t break up apple slices. Cover in flour/sugar mixture. Cover with glass lid or aluminum foil. Bake for 40-45 minutes. Eat hot for best results.
I get organic groceries delivered each week. it saves me having to own or rent a car, and it’s only a $5-$10 delivery charge for some good produce, most of which is local. Recently I’ve been inundated in apples, a fruit I can only eat peeled due to an allergy. So I got a craving for dutch apple pancakes, made with Ontario organic Cortland apples. I adapted Mr. Breakfast‘s recipe as follows. Turned out great with powdered sugar and lemon wedges!
Ingredients
Directions
Pre-heat oven to 375°F. In a medium bowl, mix together the milk, eggs, flour and 3 tablespoons sugar until batter is of consistent thickness (no lumps). Stir in the Cognac.
In a heavy ovenproof (cast-iron) skillet, melt butter. Add apples, cinnamon and the remaining sugar. Reduce heat to medium and cook, stirring occasionally for 2-3 minutes, or until the apples are softened slightly. Remove pan from heat. Pour batter over the apples in pan. Place the pan in the oven and bake for 30-35 minutes, until the pancake is lightly browned and puffy.
Dust with powdered sugar and serve with lemon wedges.
Have a great breakfast!!!
Today, for the first time, I saw this Sesame Street clip in which the human cast explains to Big Bird that Mr. Hooper has died, and won’t be coming back. If you grew up on early Sesame Street, like I did, you may want to brace yourself for the footage’s emotional impact. A transcript is also available if you can’t view the video, or can’t bring yourself to watch it.
My long-time readers know that I’m a major proponent of the pedagogy behind and execution of the early works of the Children’s Television Sesame Workshop, and that one of my side projects helped push them into releasing some of the old content onto DVD. So why is this the first time that I’ve seen this clip? The truth is, when this first aired, I wasn’t allowed to watch it.