I’ll tell you about rehearsal later, but take a look at the basic setup for the PA system. As you see, five of the eight channels are already being used and the addition of a guitar player and second microphone will make that seven. There is technically a way to hook up ten instruments to this puppy, but they would be sharing a setting. Eight channels is the minimum needed for a duo, yet some people cannot grasp this.
If you can look closely enough, you can see the tiny MP3 player on the table to the lower right of the amp. Cowboy Mike is incredulous at this technology, I’ve advised him to switch totally over from CD audio. Oh, and he admits it is his CD burner/player that is causing the skips when he burns disks.
These places advertise as if they are recruiting you to as a worker to go into stores and play customer, and that you will be paid “up to $50,000” per year once you get good at “writing reports”. In the fine print, I dug out that they wanted money for “certification” and later to view a list of “300 companies” that hire secret shoppers. From there I proceeded to show her the company had 98 complaints of which only 55 were resolved within the year. The complaints ranged from unauthorized credit card charges, to high-pressure sales tactics to sending outdated lists. Further, the Trade Commission rates all such businesses as “not worth considering”.
I also used the day to get all my anti-virus and anti-adware software updates. I found a bad IDE cable in cubicle 01, wow that turned out to be a hard problem to troubleshoot. It is just not one of those things you go looking for. I borrowed a big set of metal sheers and put the cable permanently out of commission. Wasted a half-hour of my time.
To be fair, I feel it right to inform you there are a few valid places that hire on the Internet, but go back and read my statement. I said businesses that originated on the Internet were bad, not the ones that existed before the Internet and later set up a web site. I would go so far as to say check to see if any company on the Internet was there before 1991 before you send them any money for work-at-home or self-employment material.
Speaking of the Runt, he’s posting again, or at least his evil twin is at it. He has been rode out of this town, so now he is back being a total jerk on the Miami lists. He has several accounts set up and uses them to flag anything that does not match his twisted view of things and also to pretend he is part of a group. Believe me, only group he belongs to have to attend funny meetings several times a week.
Get this, the reason we went looking for him is because he disappeared and there was speculation he had been thrown in jail again. A simple post brought the little bastard out, frothing at the mouth and whining like a baby. So I’m kind of half-admitting we found him out of concern that he had been picked up by the authorities, not that we would have lost any sleep over it. I wonder what he would do if he ever found out he is being made a fool of by a group of used car salesmen in Doral. A group I trained to use the Internet. The Runt sometimes goes on about how these people have no life and spend all their time on the Internet, but the Runt is apparently too dumb to figure out that is really what such people do most of the day.
The summer afternoon rain showers are back. Every day between 4 and 6, a good tropical downpour. It is tough for bicycle riders, and long afterward also, because the cities here were designed without adequate drainage and you must avoid both the puddles and the cars that splash through them later.
Last, Cowboy Mike was over and we spent three hours going over the Blues material. We have to devote extra time to keeping things tight, as he is used to doing solos and will often drop chords. Hey, it is a problem I wish I had, but usually only vocalists have that quirk, although I’ve seen guitar soloists do the same. They don’t allow for the other musicians to play out the measures. We have twelve tunes worked out, half what we need for a basic gig.
The progress is very rapid in terms of organizing a new band. For some reason we don’t seem to require the period of familiarization most new groups go through, that is if they even get through it at all. My difficulty is that most of the tunes still sound alike to me, but if I can get through country tunes, I can do the same with Blues. Hey, ten years ago, you could not have twisted my arm to play country music. (This is not to say I never have, because in the end every group I ever started eventually wound up with country music in around 25% of the set lists, but we were not a country band by any standard.)
It is no big deal, but Cowboy Mike has the same simplistic attitude toward a drum box as a lot of people in Florida. He is open-minded about the machine and wants it incorporated, which is the opposite of people who hate the machine – but both parties share the attitude that it is easy [for me] to “play” the thing. I have no idea where they get this strange idea, but what is certain is that they are not experienced drummers. It is almost as if they feel that “programming” the drum box is a matter of sitting down and scrolling through all the built-in factory beats until you find one that is close enough to get by.
Let me take a moment to enlighten anyone who thinks that properly working a drum box is easy. Number one, as I said, you probably know nothing about drumming but think you do. Next, you have not read the drum box manual because then you would know it requires brains and skill to operate it correctly. What’s more, you do not just go in there and “layer up” by adding tracks on top of each other unless you really love that “ticky-bop” sound. For realistic sounds, you have to go in there and pick the correctly sampled drum for each tune, and some drum kits are a real mixture of different manufacturers. If you don’t know the sound of a Tama snare or a Zildjan cymbal, you have a long, long, long way to go before you are qualified to talk with me about drum machines.
For openers, you may have noticed these things come with hundred page manuals and on-line documentation and forums. You can buy magazines that discuss professional settings. I assure you the manuals are written for people who already know about how artificial drum signals are synthesized and who are already knowledgeable drummers. You could begin by learning each drum has a voice, velocity, quantization, beat length and decay.
Later, I’m asked about velocity. This could also be called attack volume. Better quality drum boxes (such as the one I use) can allow for the fact that every given drum sounds differently when it is struck harder, and after a point the sound is different without getting appreciably louder.
The trickiest part is the quantization, which determines the “looseness” in the way a pattern plays. Leave it at default, and you get a techno-perfect U2 sound which is useless for ordinary stage work. Real drummers have slight timing differences and often play slightly before or after the beat – something the human ear can easily detect up to 1/384th of a second. For this reason alone, I need some commitment from everyone in the band that we will play a certain tune before I even think to program it.
Why? Easy - it takes an average of two hours per tune to do it right. Yes, it could be done quicker, and no, that would not be better. Furthermore, you don’t just “program” a drum box and then sit back and watch it play. I am often picking a bass line that has a melody to it, and that pattern rarely matches the drumming back beat. I need time to get coordinated with each song. I notice many guitar players stop singing while they do a lead break. They screw up the timing royally if they try to do both at once. Same concept is at work playing bass and stop-starting a drum box, except I have to do it in almost every song.
So there.
