Life goes on?

Posted by audiosquid on July 2, 2007
Posted in: live sound, music. Leave a comment

Life goes on I guess, looking at it all through a reflection in a lamp at the Dour Fir in Portland, Or.
A short tour with the group Hot Chip, 6 shows in 7 days, starting in Portland, down the coast, across the country to Bonnaroo, and then back the other way for what was a heavy dance show in Lawrence, KS, and our final show in Denver, Co. Amazing that these Soundcraft Series IV’s are still going out here.


Kraftverk style the band is a line across the front of the stage of keyboard fun.

The extra great bit about these guys is that they actually play all the bits, rather than a computer somewhere playing back some tracks. Bonnaroo was well run this year, at least our stage, festivals are always a bit of a mess but it all worked out well. Sadly I sent a couple of Meyer subs into thermal protection, but with only 3 each side and a low end heavy mix, what else can ya do? All was good, that’s what the protection was for, and I was actually quite impressed with the low end coming out of the Milo’s above when the subs stopped working for a bit. On the funny end of things, as the band leaves the stage well before there set time is up, at front of house, knowing there is lots of time left, I expect that they will come back out for an encore if asked for, and sure enough it’s asked for. On the flip side of the coin, the local monitor system tech, thinking our show is over, recalls the generic zeroed setting for the PM-5D in monitor world, and sadly, our monitor engineer had not saved his settings, so the band comes back up on the stage, and all the monitor mixes are gone. Bravely the band carries on, and with no monitors on stage, I suddenly notice that my mix is clear as a bell, and the vocals are quite easy to get where I want them to be. I guess the monitors and the slap off the tent roof were effecting my quite a bit. So while the band and our monitor engineer were having a bit of a difficult time, I was having the time of my life. As the second song of the encore rolls around, my vocals suddenly have a “blur” effect on them, which I take as an indication that now the monitors are working again.
The Tour finishes in Denver, and I say goodbye to the band the next morning as they head off to the UK, to return home for a bit, and then play the Glastonbury festival. I stay in town for a bit to visit family and friends, and a bit of light work on my next project……..

Patrick Michael Shaw – Loving father, son, brother, friend

Posted by audiosquid on May 7, 2007
Posted in: family. Leave a comment


OLEAN, NY – Patrick M. Shaw of 332 N. 8th St. died Monday May 7th, 2007 at home following a heart attack. Born August 18th, 1948 in Olean, he was the son of Donald R. and Beatrice “Betty” Gaino Shaw.
Mr. Shaw was a graduate of Archbishop Walsh High School, class of 1966, and was employed at Dresser-Rand Co.

He was a member of St. Mary of the Angels Church, the Friends of Good Music, the Pine Acres Golf Club, and was a past member of Bartlett Country Club and was an Eagle Scout. He also enjoyed playing softball (Don’s, Kamerys, B&N Tropies to name a few) and was an avid bridge player who achieved Life Master status in 2003.

Surviving are his mother of Olean, his son, James A Shaw of San Francisco, Ca; two brothers, Michael F (Susan) Shaw of Savannah, GA, and Mark D (Judy) Shaw of Olean; a sister, Mary L Henning of Olean, and several nieces, nephews, and cousins.

He was predeceased by his father on June 19, 2006.

Viewing and scripture wake service were held at Guenther Funeral Home on May 9th and 10th, and a Mass of Christian Burial was held at St. Mary of the Angels church with Father Gregory Dobson as celebrant.

Memorials may be made to the American Heart Association, the Special Olympics, or St. Mary of the Angels Church.

Coachella Festival

Posted by audiosquid on April 12, 2007
Posted in: live sound, music. Leave a comment

Coming up next in the “touring” schedule, the Coachella Festival in Indio, Ca. About 2.5 hours east of Los Angeles. I’ll be there with Peaches, as we play on the tba stage. PA will be provided by Rat Sound. Looks like I will have a Heritage 3000 at FOH with a V-Dosc rig. If it’s not too windy it should be fun. There are also 2 Heritage’s at FOH, so I’m thinking I will have time to set myself up on one while the previous band is playing through the other. That will make for a much less stressful change over. On stage, our monitor engineer Adam gets to work on a Yamaha PM5D, of which there are also 2. This will probably be the last show with Peaches and Herms for awhile as her touring schedule winds down.

My G4 Powerbook gets fixed

Posted by audiosquid on April 4, 2007
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Finally I take my G4 powerbook to the apple store here in San Francisco to get fixed, hopefully for free with applecare. Last August the powerbooks’ screen started flickering in and out. If I moved the screen a small bit I could get it to stop. It was acting like there was a loose connection somewhere… As this started I had to head off to London for a tour of the EU. Upon arrival at the hotel in London I came upon two very sad realizations. One, that I have seemed to have left my cell phone in the taxi, and two, only the top half of the screen will show me anything. This is very sad indeed. With no time in the UK to take care of it I’m off to Reading and Leeds festivals. Then we went to Berlin, where luckily we had a bit more than a weeks time for me to work on it.

First I tried calling applecare, I found numbers in the EU, but was having some translation issues. Then I tried calling applecare US with skype, but found myself on hold for hours on end. Searching around on the web to find local applecare approved repair does not look to promising. And during working on all this I’m using the bands computer to make the calls, and continue on advancing shows and whatnot, booting via target disk mode, so everything is as I expect and I don’t mess with the bands computer too much.

Eventually I decide that I’m just going to have to get a new computer and work on fixing this one latter. Keyboards are a bit different in the EU, a bit too different than I liked, so I had my friends at Powermax in Portland Oregon ship me one of the first macbookpro’s. On with a long tour with the intel as the not pro macbook (amateur?) sat on the bus. Using the intel I lost the gumption to take care of getting the other one fixed, as I didn’t have an immediate need for it and the applecare was still good for a couple of years. Finally with time to spare I make an appointment with the genius bar at the apple store here in San Francisco…

After about a 15 minute wait I show my G4 to a genius, the problem was pretty obvious, and he tells me it needs to be sent in and here sign this and here’s your tracking number and off I go. This was on Friday.

Wednesday the computer shows up at my house, and has been fixed, covered by applecare! Boots up and works just fine. There wasn’t much info in the box on what they did, seems they replaced the screen (though not the outer shell as all my stickers were still there). They also took out half of my memory, a 512k chip, which was in a plastic bag and sent back with the computer. When I bought the computer from Powermax I had them beef it up to 1Gb of RAM, and they basically put in a 512 chip. When apple repaired the screen they took this chip out, and the documentation seemed to suggest that this “3rd party part” was either causing the issue or was not passing their diagnostic test in general. It’s really easy to install memory on the powerbook G4, four screws, off comes a plate, and there you are. So I put the memory back in, and all seems to be fine. I’ll have to do some other tests and talk to Powermax about it, but at the time I’m guessing it’s something they have to do legally for some reason, since they didn’t put it in (though I purchased it that way).

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it, as now I have 3 computers. The original G3 powerbook which is serving this blog, the G4 powerbook that I just got fixed, and the intel macbookpro that I now do all my work on. I could see using the two live if I feel like carrying two around, one for work work, and the other at FOH to play music and record and/or analyze the show, or maybe as an effect box…..

New Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau Recording

Posted by audiosquid on March 28, 2007
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I bought the new album by Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, or I guess to be more specific the Metheny Mahldau Quartet. Not bad, but nothing that grabbed me right off the bat. There are some sound issues on the second track, the sound of the low bass strings on Pat’s 42 stringed guitar sounding a bit… amateur, not his playing, but that DI’d in your face farting string buzzing sound is a bit… amateur. I think I like the previous album that Pat and Brad worked on a bit better than this one, but I’m not disappointed I got it.

I still buy CD’s, and very rarely download music. Nothing wrong with the download thing, I just like to have the highest quality version I can get if I’m going to spend money on it. I am picky like that being a sound engineer. I also like having the package, the collection, and my own “master copy”. If I really like the music on the disk I’ll end up importing it into itunes, many times as an mp3 at 192k or so, which on close examination sounds inferior to the original, but for casual listening that fine, and I have the CD if I really want to get into it. And if my hard drive holding this music goes boom, I have my “master copy” to go back to.

Like many other live sound engineers these day I’m using computer file playback (or ipod for some) instead of a CD to listen to refrence material on a sound system, when I import music I’m going to use for refrence into itunes, a either import as a aiff at 16bit 44.1k (which should be an exact copy), or with apples lossless encoder. I have heard rumors engineers out their using an ipod with 128k mp3’s to listen to their reference over a pa. For walk in, sure, for reference?

In other music news, as you might see on the sidebar to the left, I’ve figured out how to add a couple of iteresting things into the blog. The first being the top 10 artists I have been listening to, via last.fm. You can click on the list if you want to find out more.

I’ve also added the box showing my google reader sharred RSS’s. RSS’s….. lots of s going on there. This is a list of RSS items I have come across that you might find interesting, if you find things that I find interesting, interesting. Basically, your bored, on the web, reading my posts, what to do next? Well, click on these and watch the time fly by…

And finally, so you can always know the current status of our nation, for your convience I have also included the terriost allert level, or whatever, brought to you be aqua teen hunger force.

Now was that some mind blogaling blogging or what??

A weekend of geeking out.

Posted by audiosquid on March 14, 2007
Posted in: compy. Leave a comment

A weekend spent learning how to get a blog working on my server. As you might notice from past posts, I had switched from a hand made blog using Freeway Express to one made using iWeb. It was very enjoyable and simple to set things up with iWeb but I ran into some limitations. I’m not using .mac to host my iWeb site, so I had to upload the entire site anytime I changed anything. There was also some post processing I would have to do to the iWeb site to make it totally ready to post.

So I started looking into other solutions. First I created a blog on blogger and thought that would be cool, but blogger 2.0 doesn’t work with Journler (at least not yet), and I still wanted to explore posting my blog and running my own server on a computer sitting here otherwise doing nothing. Then my journey began in learning wordpress, php, and mysql. The server part, getting php and mysql to work was the trickiest. While there are some somewhat clear instructions on setting up such things on a mac client,  I still had to do allot of trial and error changing of files, installing, un-installing, re-installing things. Finally in the end I got it all to work out (I think).

So I’m back to using Freeway Express to make web pages, and I’ve updated my audiojack@earthlink site and added a new site address for the new blog. So now there is the following:

www.audiojack.selfip.net – the main portal to my “web presence”, which will automatically redirect you to my earthlink hosted site

www.squidaudio.selfip.net – the new blog, if you have the old RSS address in your reader, replace it with the one you can find here

You can even make comments on my blog now to posts! (I’ll have to test that out….) The blog still needs alot of work but that will all come in due time.

In the time this weekend I wasn’t geeking out on the interveb stuff I was working on the filemaker pro touring databases, which are getting every so closer to being finished.

Will Journler work well with iWeb?

Posted by audiosquid on November 6, 2006
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Working on changing the way my blog system works. Currently I’m using Freeway express to make my web pages, and building blogs “by hand”, moving the text about, changing links, creating the rss file… Getting a bit tedious for just putting up some quick updates. I still want to run it all per se, that is, see if I can do it without using blogger.com or similar, cause if I can why not? And I’m always a bit interested in digging deeper into something to see how it all works. Always had a thing for doing it for myself…

So, now the question is weather Journler, a piece of free-ware I have which seems pretty cool for keeping journals, not that I have ever kept such a thing before, but if I can do the blog in a couple of different formats maybe it will last a bit longer… Or maybe I’ll put some other stuff in this journal, a bit doubtful but… also, maybe Journler would work well as a data organizer for tour logistics. I’m currently using omnioutliner to keep a to-do list and data in outside of my itinerary database…

We shall see, but for now, lets see how well this moves over to iWeb, I just press that blog button up there and we shall see what happens….

Poof! and here I am in iweb, just a tiny bit of tweaking to do, add a picture (which I could have sent with Journler I think), and wa la.

eX-Girl – US West Coast Tour – April 2006

Posted by audiosquid on April 22, 2006
Posted in: live sound, tour. Leave a comment

Another tour with eX-Girl from Japan on the record books. This time a short trip down the west coast of the US. Seems it’s near impossible to rent a 15 passenger van in San Francisco now. There is Bandago, but the insurance options made that more expensive than renting two mini-vans. So Brendan and I grab a van in SF and head up to Seattle. Next day in Seattle we grab another van, pick up the girls at the airport, and head off to the first show, supporting Quasi at Neumo’s in Seattle. The band surprises me with a last minute request to take care of some video projection for the intro. They have the intro on DVD, but upon closer inspection to the DVD player they brought to play the disc on, we find that it’s really a VCR. DOH! Luckily my mac has a DVD player and an s-video out, so after a quick trip out to buy a cable, we are good to go.

The next day a short drive to Olympia for a show at a small bar called the China Clipper. Not a well attended show, but it was Easter Sunday. None the less they put on a good show and I have some fun projection some screen savers and whatnot during the show.

Another short drive the next day to Portland for a show at Lola’s Room, which is right below the Crystal Ballroom. Here I find a little Midas Venice, and learn that you really need to make sure the projector is high enough to get over everyones head…

Then we had a couple of days to make our way to San Francisco, so on the way we made some stops around Mt. Shasta is the girls could reconnect with the God Mountain.

Right before we finished the trip to San Francisco we made a stop at the Marine Headlands, where they could get a great view of the city, a trip to the beach, and a look at some old WWII bunkers.

An evening off in San Francisco to rest from the past two days drive, and we play yet another show at the Bottom of the Hill where the Allen and Heath is still kicking, though I’m not sure the eq’s actually do anything…

The next day we drive down to Hollywood, and with not too much traffic to deal with we find our way to the in-famous Hollywood Motel 6. Not all that bad really… Next day we make our way to Spaceland for the last show of the tour. Ken Samurai opens the show with his movie inspired comedy act

The next day is off in LA as I hang with fellow Tön Meister, college class mate, and now grammy winner Greg Collins (congrats to him on his work on U2’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”). Early early early the next morning we take everyone to the airport for their trip back to Japan, return one rental van, and then Brendan and I make our way back to San Francisco, and with little traffic we have a smooth 6 hour trip.