It’s time to open another set of books for the band. I’ve been slowly accumulating all the little cables and hardware and the days of the ten cent hose clamp are gone. (They are sixty cents apiece.) Furthermore, I know I’ve taken snipes at Barnett’s over on Dixie for high prices, but I shop there because they seem to have everything.
As mentioned, I’m building a handcart to wheel around my bass amp and related gear. You can see the first shelf installed, this hold the Alexis drum box, the Ampeg rests on the bottom plate. Of course, there are no standard bolt hole sizes, as opposed to the bolts themselves, so I wound up drilling completely new bracket holes. Use imagination to see that all the cords for this system will be run in behind the handcart, out of the way.Peering closer, you can see my work area in the background, along with the Jamus mountain bike I will try to sell tomorrow. Plus, drop off the Ross to get new brake cables. Steve was around today with lots of stuff but nothing I could use. And I’m still looking for a $50 hitch bike carrier.
The carrier on my bike is too rinky-dink. It wavers side to side when I put a 12-pack of soda on it. I went to the bike shop on Federal and see they have heavy duty carriers. The problem is mainly that everything like that is a permanent install, where I like something I can remove easily. What I found costs more than the bicycle. It was an interesting tour of bicycle land, mind you, just to see what is there. I stopped across the road for coffee and chatted with Legs for five minutes. Pity, she has really gone downhill and is showing all the classical symptoms of severe disillusionment over initial bad decisions.
Look close and you’ll see me gripping the handlebars of a $400 “Chopper” bicycle. It has extended forks and lines like a hog. No bike that nice or that expensive will last long in this town. The bike techs tell me that there is no device made for one bike to tow another because it is just too dangerous. They also have a locksmith corner and they are looking for a trainee. I talked with the clerk to discover that a trained locksmith only makes “$12 to $18” per hour. Glad I didn’t choose that career, especially for a job that requires a drug test and registration with the authorities. I mean, that is a bit like telling the police you know how to crack safes.Rewind to 1972, I sent an apology over the Internet today, hoping that through the thousands of miles and 34 years, it finds the right party. There was a guy who used to chase my girlfriend when I was 19 and he was 30. I could not figure out why he didn’t either get one his own age, or if he was after the young ones, why didn’t he leave mine alone. Oh yes, now I thoroughly understand, but back then I severely ran him down. I told him I will never forgive him trying to steal my gal, but I was sorry for not understanding his motives. Who knows?
In the shop, all my computers are acting up. Cube 3 won’t boot every time, cube 4 takes 5 minutes to boot, cube 1 is still not on-line and cube 5 is too slow and should be junked. On the return ride, my bike chain snapped off and this time it needs total replacement. I stopped at the Frog Swap and found a place that sells crib (Cribbage) boards. Too expensive for today but I’ll break down and at least I know they still make them. I was beginning to wonder.
Back home for the evening, I got a set of MIDI cables. First in my life. I’m usually the last to get anything that is not live music with, you know, the exception of a drum box but you can thank drummers and their flakey attitudes for that. I have no idea how MIDI works, only that it has been around for a long, long time. My plan is to rig up the Alexis through the Yamaha keyboard and use those to trigger the drum sounds I’m after.
The cables were $12 a set. All this ads up quickly, so yeah, I’ll sign off soon and set up the books to keep track of all this. $30 worth of hardware so far, and $9.33 in auto expenses to go to rehearsal. It is the people that don’t keep track of this that have trouble staying in a band. Latecomer or not, I will still be the first to use MIDI in my crowd, all of whom have been playing more than twenty years. I have no idea where MIDI will take me, but I will quickly establish a dominating head start.
Remember that tone corrector? It is a device that makes sure you don’t sing “in the cracks”. It was a novel device twenty years ago but frightfully expensive. The cracks is a metaphor that the wrong vocal notes are usually between two piano keys. I am finally frustrated enough to look into the gizmo again, and sure enough, they no longer make it. It’s called an AVP-1 by Antares. The existing models go for $400 on eBay.
Later, the music books are set up. There are two ways to interpret the $1,730 worth of gear I’ve collected, considering I did not even own a guitar pick when I arrived. One, you could conclude that is a cheap-ass amount for a musician these days. But that would just be revealing your true character, because it also shows that since I am ready to start another band, my musical ability rests on talent, not massive amounts of gear. So there. I have not played anywhere yet but I’ve already lost $27.13 this week. Unlike the G, I know how much I’ve lost, and make no mistake, if the truth were known most musicians don’t make very much money.
Also, my research begins. MIDI came around in 1983. Alexis uses a great simile, that MIDI replaces music sheets written exclusively as symbols. I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. MIDI in and out indicate the direction the data flows for each device. A MIDI through jack just duplicates out whatever comes via the MIDI in jack. This is logical because sooner or later all these MIDI jacks must stop and make a sound.
Sequencing is the MIDI equivalent of tape recording. “Drum Sound Expander Module” is repeatedly mentioned without any definition of exactly what the hell it is. AT about this point, the usefulness of the Alexis manual drops off. And I could quit calling the Alesis as Alexis. It is supposed to be Alesis.
[Author's note 2016: I finally did not pursue MIDI for a simple reason. I could not get a straight answer out of anybody. The salesmen explain how the theory works, which is not what I need to know. I want to see somebody actually "program" the thing and show me how to do it. Nope, it was not so much they wouldn't take time to teach, rather they to a one reacted as even even attempting to teach would reveal they did not know the answers themselves. I finally hung it up.
I offer the same reward, a hundred bucks. To anybody who will show me how Internet ISP works, to anybody who will explain to me how to co integral calculus, and to anybody who will teach me how to make MIDI work for me.
The condition? You have to answer the questions I ask, not get off track, and not waste me time. I know the textbook answers and have passed the tests. That is not the information I seek, that information is useless toward understanding the process.]
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