Thursday and Friday, my friends from Tortoise were in San Francisco for a couple of days and I had a chance to hang out with them and catch the shows at the Independent. This tour was a little different since the headline act was the legendary Daniel Lanois! Ironically most people don’t know Mr. Lanois, but if you look at his list of credits, you would be more than familiar with his work as a producer with Peter Gabriel and U2. I discovered his solo work after hearing Gabriel’s US, and his album, “For the Beauty of Wynona” is still one of my all time favorite albums.

The Independent is an intimate venue that has been gaining popularity and featuring some pretty cool shows, but this was the first chance I’ve had to see a performance there. I was pleasantly surprised to see Gustavo Lanzas (old friend from Robotspeak) and his collaborator, Chris, opening the show as the act, “Audiotronic w/JK47″. The sound system at the independent was really nice and some of the bass tones from the Audiotronic performance would resonate right though your body!

Tortoise was on as the second act and featured quite a few favorite tracks. I phoned Johnny in the afternoon, before the show, and he said he his back was injured and had to see a doctor. Needless to say, i wasn’t sure how the show would be if Herndon was in pain. Apparently the doctor did an amazing job, and Johnny’s drumming was brilliant as usual.

Lanois came on and started performing a solo guitar piece on his Gibson Les Paul, and my jaw dropped when I heard the beautiful tone coming out of this instrument. This is aside from the prophetic virtuosity of Lanois’s skill as a player-That tone was amazing. He switched over to a pedal steel guitar for another solo, and he performed a lovely and emotional solo piece. Tortoise came on and joined Lanois, and it was quite a surreal experience since the two seem worlds apart, yet the collaboration seemed to fit together quite well.

I have to comment that the engineering was a little strange since you could barely hear some of the backing instruments during the Lanois show. It seemed like the engineer basically hit the mute button on Jeff’s guitar and the vibes. Shea, who does a live video presentation driven off the audio signals, confirmed that the close mics on the snares were muted. It definitely had the feel of being a different show from Tortoise.

Friday night, my cousins, Tamiko and Jasmine, joined up with us along with my friend Joe to have dinner then go to the show. We met up at this cool little bar/Ethiopian Restaurant called Club Waziema, a block down from the venue on Divisadero. It was cool to hang out with everyone, and catch up with what’s been going on. The food was pretty good as well, and we shared a variety of meat and vegetable dishes sans utensils.

Having sussed out the venue on the previous night, i brought along my camera and secured a nice position on the balcony to shoot some photos of Friday’s performance. Unfortunately, i didn’t realize how unstable the balcony is, and most of the shots were slightly blurry. I posted a few of the shots that weren’t too bad on flickr. I have to say, i enjoyed Tortoise’s performance better on Friday night better than Thursday, but Lanois was better on Thursday night, but the Friday crowd was definitely more into the show.

Afterwards, Johnny invited all of us backstage to hang out while they broke down the gear and load out. Lanois, in true rock legend form, went out of his way and introduced himself to my young cousins. Later i joked about it with Tamiko (who’s a massive U2 fan), “You touched the hand that touched Bono!” I had the chance to speak with him briefly, to thank him for the fantastic shows, and he said he was quite happy with the reception in San Francisco (sold out on both nights), and is thinking about more shows here in the future. For the Tortoise fans out there: McEntire mentioned some plans for a new Tortoise album for early next year, and possibly a box set later this year. Now all we need is for Case to come back for a reunion-ish tour.

Earlier this year, Groovebox Music introduced a series of video tutorials for Reason which are accessed through a subscription website. For quite sometime now, I’ve been in contact with Asa Doyle of Groovebox Music, and I’ve finally had a chance to go through and check things out.

The video tutorials are nice large 800×600 screen animation captures in Quicktime Movie format with a voiceover explaining the procedure as well as audio from Reason. The video animation medium is great educational delivery system and allow viewers to see mouse movements, which buttons to click, menu item selections, and at the same time, hear the audio feedback from the software.

As reason has evolved over the years, it still has a few idiosyncrasies that people, especially new users, have difficulty understanding, and these video tutorials are a way to learn by watching someone else use the software. The pace will most likely languish the seasoned user, but this is quite suitable for those who are just learning the software. The comprehensive content range covers the general Reason controls and operating procedures.

The only criticism I might add is that there are spans of time where you view absolutely no movement during the movie, and must concentrate on the dialogue only. These periods could benefit from a few splash pages that add visual cues to help people visualize what the dialogue is explaining. Of course, if you miss something, you can simply drag the progress bar back on the quicktime movie and repeat that portion of the tutorial. There are several free example chapters available, and all you need a is a fairly fast connection.

After several weeks of working with wp, i reasonably confident that the new peff dot com site is ready to go live. There is still quite a bit of content missing which will take many weeks to transfer into the database, but the important content is still available.

Thanks to Hami for a giving me the crash course on CSS and wp, and thanks to Paul for directing me to the PNG transparency hack for IE windows.

So with that welcome to the new site! Version 4 has been planned for well over a year, and I’ve been tinkering with designs for well over 2 years. It’s still not too complicated, but at least i know “how” it works and can maintain it without relying on others.

As far as browser compatibility is concerned, i’ve only tested it on Firefox, Safari, and IE 6, and i’m still not confident that pages will render properly in IE. Please bear with me on this, and drop a comment if you find a problem.

After years of talking about doing it, my friend, Mike, and I finally managed to take a dip into the waters of Monterey Bay. This was a first for both of us. It’s been a few years since I had scuba dived, and for me this was my first shore entry. This was also the first time I had to use a full body wetsuit. Mike, on the other hand, is a pretty experienced diver and worked with the coast guard. You can’t ask for a better dive partner than that! The day was perfect. Monterey Bay was calm, the water was glassy, and the fog had lifted by the time we rented our gear and hit the beach. Sounds like it would be a great day for a dive, but that’s where the day started going horribly wrong.

I have to admit, that I’ve been spoiled with my experiences with boat dives in the tropics, and I wasn’t fully prepared for the amount of effort involved with carrying weights, tanks, and all of the apparatus a few hundred yards from the truck to the beach. By the time we were suited up and in the water, I was pretty exhausted. My inexperience with cold water also took it’s toll, and the shock of the water temperature (50°F/10°c) took it’s toll and my respiration shot up. We managed to work our way out to the kelp beds, and prepared to descend. Loaded down with 30+ lbs of weight, a massive tank and a fullbody wetsuit, should have made sinking pretty easy, but both of us would attempt to go down, and would simply float back up. As I later discovered, there’s a strata of high salinity on the top of bay waters. Eventually we managed to get the hang of descending with a kick start. Actually, i was suprised that the water temperature was quite comfortable, and not as cold as I had imagined.

Mike and I made it down to the _Dangerous_ depths of about 20 feet (woo!) and started to see the sandy shelf covered with star fish and various creatures that zipped around between little holes like mini Dune-ish worms. The new problem was the limited visibility. We could only see about a meter, and we had to stay in arms reach which made it difficult to maneuver about and explore. Even Mike with his experience wasn’t too comfortable diving blind, and there’s no fun in not being able to see anything interesting if you dive. I came across a cute little jelly fish on my ascent, but other than that, I didn’t see much.

By the time we got back to shore, I was spent. We had to fight a bit of an undertow to get back on the beach, and in the process I lost my mask. That ended the day. Despite having only gone through 70% of one tank, we were out in the bay for a few hours, and it seemed worth the effort, but there was no way I could do a second dive.

At least I can say that i’ve done it now. I’m not against trying it again, but next time I think I will opt for a boat dive with an experienced crew who know where to go see interesting things - with better visibility.

After numerous tries, everything is almost finished with the site templates running on Wordpress.Thanks to Hami and others who have given me a crash course in CSS and tweaking WP, things have come together faster than i imagined.

I’m still dealing with the issue of the messageboard. I’ve set up the DC script template page with hacks of the page elements from the wordpress pages, but it’s pretty brutal. In an effort to get everything working properly, I’ve put the site online to see how it will function with the messageboard. This will be a temporary situation to see how it works. I might need to upgrade to the PHP version of the board from dcscripts.

The other concern is the IE6 for windows incompatibility with png images. There is only one instance of a png employed on the site, but it’s for the main logo on the masthead. I tried to gif it, but it looked horrible due to the slight alpha channel shadow. What’s worse, something in the stylesheet really tweaks out rendering. I can live with the funky image, but the bad formatting is unacceptable.

The rotating masthead concept seemed cool at first, but the images reload on each page-it slows down the page rendering process. I’m still deciding whether or not this should remain. The rotating image script is from Matt Mullenweg. Despite the time factor, it is cool to see the pages change

I took a little trip today to visit my friend, Rich who works at Electronic Arts for a game team that developed the upcoming James Bond title. The game is done and is getting ready for X-mas release, so he’s got a bit of downtime to recover from the months of work.

Rich gave me the quick tour of the EA campus and the audio facilities. They have a couple of nice rooms for editing and recording, but for the most part, the audio guys have workstations (more like coat rooms) where they edit and program cues. He showed me the game and the tools used to develop the sound cues and loops, along with the really cool surround pan/virtual microphone system as well as a game world sound placement application. It’s really quite amazing how the game takes bits of the orchestral soundtrack material that loop until different events occurred in the game. After seeing the editing application, i’ve found a new respect for the people who slave for hours over this tedious task.

I saw some interesting things including the Microsoft Xbox Devkits which are really G5 Towers as well as the debug units which display processed events as the game progresses. The game definitely looks great, and it’s cool to hear the voiceovers from Sean Connery!

I’ve finally finished up the second longer Triptronic TL24 Combinator patch along with a few example files and posted them up on the Reason Files pages.

These effects are tape loop configurations that emulate a technique of a long tape loop setup concocted by Brian Eno and used extensively by Robert Fripp, commonly called “Frippertronics.” These are intended for experimental ambient loop sampling, so synchronization is not enabled – it’s about generating an unconventional looping vibe.

The effect patches are limited to a maximum of eight seconds (TL8) and 24 seconds (TL24), by using ganged pairs of DDL-1 Digital delay lines. Extra delay lines can be inserted in the chain to extend the delay time, and modulation routings should be assigned to delay time and enable parameters. The Delay Lines are paired to create a stereo signal path, and pan modulation of the incoming signal adds an interesting motion characteristic.

TL Series Control Parameters

DELAY TIME control universally controls the delay time of all four delay lines, so delay time is a factor of 4. Delay time ranges from 4 milliseconds to 8000 milliseconds with the TL8 and from 24ms to 24 seconds with the TL24. Changing Delay time will create pitch shift artifacts, but this setting should be set before feeding the patch signals.

RECORD LEVEL controls the feedback level from the last delay output feeding into first delay line.

MONITOR LEVEL controls a dry level that passes through the effect. If the patch is connected as a send effect, this control should be set to zero.

TAPE SPEED is a fidelity control that filters off frequency range using a Scream 4 Tape Saturation algorithm. This parameter is only available in “Tape” mode. This control also modulates the TAPE HISS generator.

STOP DELAY Switch immediately shuts down the delay devices and feedback loop. This button resets the sample loop.

DIGITAL TAPE Switch toggles between a clean, purely digital sample loop signal and an effected “Tape” simulation sample loop signal.

COMPRESSION Switch changes the Compression amount when the TL8 is in “Tape” mode. Disabled is a low compression setting, and enabled is a moderate compression setting.

TAPE HISS Switch enables the noise generator that simulates tape hiss. A SubTractor Synthesizer perpetually generates a low-level noise signal that combines with input signals and feeds back through the loop circuit. The Tape Speed rotary control will shapes the noise characteristics.

I’ve been looking into updating the website with a content management system (CMS) that would simplify the work on my end, but integrate fairly seamlessly with the old site design. This task has been a lot more confusing than anything else. I’ve been working in HTML for so many years, that I’ve developed a method of working which involves formatting, layout, and writing all at the same time. With these blog applications, it seems like you have to work in pieces adding the text, then images along predefined layouts. Of course, i know very little about CSS and PHP, so this task is going to be a lot more work than simply adding content to static pages.

So far Wordpress has been the fastest, but it is primarily a blogging application which will work great for part of the site. I’m just having a hard time figuring out how to devise a system for the downloads that feels like the V3 system which relies mainly on tables. I know it’s possible, but it will take awhile to learn all of this new stuff.

I like the flexibility of Textpattern, but it is slow by comparison to WP. There are other CMS systems available, but I do want something that is really efficient. I hear Adobe released Cold Fusion for Xserve. This might be a cool option should i decide to get a new server.

Hayden Bursk

Last night i caught the Reason 3.0 US tour at the Guitar Center in San Francisco where i had a chance to meet with Timothy Self (Propellerhead Director of US Markets) and Hayden Bursk, Propellerhead Reason Product Specialist with Line 6, who is touring the states and spreading the gospel of Reason. Hayden is getting ready for a big tour for Line 6 and Propellerheads. Line 6 will be showing Reason at AES in New York, as well. I thought I might go to the Fall AES show this year, but chances are that i can’t make it…

Line 6 Tone Port

Line 6 is introducing a new USB audio interface called the TonePort, which I also had the chance to see at the Reason 3.0 demo at GC. It’s more than just an audio interface because it features mic and instrument inputs which can be directed through some amplifier and microphone simulator plugins that emulate some of the classics.

After the Reason demo, Hayden grabbed a guitar (afterall it was “Guitar Center”) and plugged it in to give us a demo of the amp and distortion effect simulators. For the price ($129) including the software this is a killer deal. It’s worth it for audio interface alone!

After way too much time, I finally had the opportunity to meet Josh Mobley aka Neoverse. Josh has been in LA all summer working on the soundtrack for the show WANTED on TNT. It was a last minute deal where I had a loaner car for the weekend while my baby was in the shop, so I drove the 300 miles down to LA to meet up with him.

We hung out at the Studio where he’s working and he showed me some of his Pro Tools sessions for the show. The most impressive part was when he started playing out some live drums on Reason Drum Kits through his Kontrol49. He was coming up with some killer breaks - in real time!

Despite spending more time in LA than I ever have, Josh had not really seen the sites. So I suggested we cruise around a bit. We did all of the normal sites like cruising sunset blvd on Saturday Night, Up around Griffith Park, and Muholland, and that’s when I got lost. Eventually we made it to downtown LA, and I was going to take wilshire back to Century City where we were stayin, but tthere were roadbloacks for some film shoot, and the series of turns i had to make sent us into East LA where once again, I was seriously Lost. Josh starteded to get a little worried when we passed a few store with some LAPD cruisers at the scene of some crime. There were also a couple of police choppers overhead with their spotlights seeking out something. Finally we managed to get out of the dogdy area, and took the long way around to Century City (via pasadena then a U-turn then back down through LA). Next time… i’m taking the car with GPS.

I had to drive back up so I put on about 700 miles on that loaner in the span of 30 hours

To some surprise, ReBirth does run in OSX Classic mode with certain limitations. If you want to use ReBirth on a Mac, ultimately it’s best to use an older system that supports MacOS 9.2.2 with OMS for MIDI support and compatibility with certain audio interfaces. ReWire is not supported when running ReBirth in Classic Mode, and ReBirth will not interface with Reason 3.0 in OSX. Another limitation exists with MacOS X Classic mode and audio interfaces, and ReBirth in Classic mode will only function with built-in audio ports of Apple machines. Trust me, this is not impossible, but it might not be as convenient as it was in 1997.

Classic Mode Install

Before you start, you must have a MacOS 9.2.2 installed on your hard drive. For most new systems, you should have a CD-Rom called “Additional Software & Apple Hardware Test” which contains the installer for a Classic System.

Once classic mode is installed you can launch MacOS 9 from the system preferences menu in the System/Classic item.

Installing ReBirth

You will need is the ReBirth RB-338 image file for MacOS. This is the file that ends with the “.img” or “.cdr” extension. These are available on the bittorrents issued from the ReBirth Museum. There are two downloads available for Mac users and both will work for installing and running ReBirth in OSX. If you plan to install ReBirth on a dedicated MacOS 9 machine, download the “.img” file.

Once you have an image file on your system, simply double click it, and Disk Utility will mount the CD-Rom on your desktop. Within the the ReBirth RB-338 2.0 CD, you will find the installer. Double click on the install package, and install the application on your system. Launching the ReBirth installer will automatically start up Classic Mode. Proceed with the process and install ReBirth in your applications folder.

Now simply launch ReBirth…unless you have an audio interface… then check the next paragraph.

Sound Card Issue

Screenshot

Audio Interfaces may not be fully compatible with Mac OS X Classic Mode, and if you launch ReBirth, you may encounter an error that states “ReBirth RB-338 can not access any sound card. It/they might be in use by other application(s).” You will be prompted to Quit. It seems that classic mode only finds built-in audio appealing, and you will not be able to run ReBirth through some audio interfaces.

First Shut down Classic Mode, and then open the Audio MIDI Setup Utility (found in the applications\utilities directory). Set the default output to “ Built-in Audio”, and then Relaunch Classic Mode. Now ReBirth will find a suitable audio port and get past the pesky sound card check.

Optimizing the Prefs

Once ReBirth is running, access the Preferences found in the Edit Menu. Set the sound manager audio settings to “Crackle Safe”, and the buffer size to “1/8(512)”. Other settings may work, but you may encounter problems with the GUI animation and occasional audio glitches (I know some of you will think this is cool… try setting the buffer to 8(32768) for some nasty audio glitching).

Memory Settings

For those who never experienced MacOS 9, the operating system features settings which allow you to dedicate how much memory is used by each application. Classic Applications still feature this setting, and if you intend to install a lot of ReBirth Mods, you must change the memory allocation to accommodate the extra samples and graphics.

Quit ReBirth and find the application in the ReBirth RB-338 2.0 directory. Click on ReBirth RB-338 (only one click) to select it and select “Get Info” from the File Menu. Expand the “Memory” pane by clicking on the fold down icon (triangle) and set the Preferred Size to a value of 65000 or greater. This will allocate 64megs of ram to ReBirth which should handle all of the mods available from this site as well as the ReBirth Museum. Close the info window, and relaunch ReBirth.

Alternate Connections

Despite the limitations like a lack of audio hardware support and midi, it’s still nice to take a look back at the old mods. One option is to connect the built-in audio outputs to your audio interface. If you’re interface has lightpipe S/PDIF inputs, you can route built-in audio via a fiberoptic cable from your new generation G5 or Powerbook. Yes these are limitations, but it should be reassuring that it’s still possible to use ReBirth!