Weekend Update, May 15th

Busy week, per usual.

• Still doing the “get up at 5 AM and try to work” routine. It’s working most days, but man am I tired.

• Played a wedding with Downtown Band.

• Played at Church Of The City Downtown Nashville.

• Used my new keyboard rig for the first time live, and it went pretty good all things considered. Note to self: bring adapter cables for FOH inputs in the future.

Also, my power conditioner is going bad so that’ll need to get replaced (are ya’ll bored yet with this blog post? 😆)

Interesting stuff:

• With mask mandates lifted and me being fully vaxxed this weekend, it was strange to just waltz into a venue without a mask on. This is going to take some getting used to, and I think it’s going to be a little hard to navigate.

• Going on 4 hours sleep to get up for a Sunday morning rehearsal after a late gig gets harder the older you get. Mainly because with two young kids in the house they don’t exactly let you take it easy on Sunday afternoon. 😆

Keyboard Rig

Today’s the day! Just finished the hub of my keyboard rig, and made a video about it here. Didn’t get it right the first or second time, but the 3rd time seemed to do the trick.

Links

Lot of good content floating around the internet these days. Here’s a few fun links:

• Videoconferencing isn’t going anywhere, even post covid. This blog will help you not look like you don't care on camera going forward.

• If you’re looking to jump ship on Facebook, Facebook just gave you a life raft.

• James Brown is the most sampled artist of all time, not so much for his voice, but his grooves. For $49 you can have a buttload of James Brown’s drummer playing hit butt off in the studio.

• This is a powerful collection of photos of mothers. Some nudity involved, but tasteful.

• If you own Ableton Live, this is the most versatile upright sound I’ve ever heard for $49, and it’s available only for Live.

Weekend Update, May 8th

A busy week, and yet not a lot to talk about.

• I didn’t have any shows this weekend, so I spent a lot of time in the studio working on stuff. More details soon.

• My keyboard rig is almost finished! I ordered this line mixer from Sweetwater, and it came broken and the replacement unit came in today. The sliding rack comes in tomorrow, and I’ll be mounting everything and trouble shooting this week. Expect a very geeky post soon about the process.

• Having two kids under the age of four has been very challenging during a pandemic. This week I changed my schedule and started getting up around 4:30-5 AM and working until around 11 AM, and so far it’s been working incredibly well.

• I signed on to play a few shows with my friends in Apollo LTD over the summer, including opening for Switchfoot on July 2nd in Fremont, Nebraska. Once everything’s finalized I’ll post a list of shows here.

Non career related:

• If you’re coming to Nashville and want hot chicken, get Hattie B’s. We’ve been getting it almost every Sunday, and it’s the best in town.

That’s all for now. Here’s to a new week.

iConnectivity

I’m in the process of setting up the most complicated keyboard rig I’ve ever tried to put together (more on that soon), but I wanted to give a quick shout out to iConnectivity. They’re a small audio company out of Calgary, CA that make some really handy Swiss-army knife interfaces.

They make the iconnectaudio4+, and when you’re setting up a hybrid rig that has a LOT of complicated routing, their products are a game changer.

Here’s just a couple way’s I’m using the iConnectaudio4+ as the digital hub of my rig:

• I’m using the interface for three audio things: to process audio through fx on my computer, for software synths, and to input a mic for vocoder and vocal fx live. All of this could be handled by a lot of interfaces, but the following could not be done with most interfaces:

• I’m also using the second USB input on the unit to connect and power(!) my iPad for running Samplr and other plugins live. (If you haven’t heard of Samplr, it’s kind of as close and you’re going to get to an OP-1 on an iPad).

• I’m also using it route midi clock and other midi messages between all of my devices. This requires some serious filtering and routing options, and the iConnectaudio4+ has handled it pretty effortlessly so far.

• I need standalone operation so I don’t have to worry about losing the midi routing and the iPad when I’m only gigging with hardware (which is something I prefer to do most of the time). With the flash memory built in to the unit and a dedicated power supply, I don’t have to worry about hauling my computer along and not actually using it for anything but power.

Again, when I get the rig built I’ll try to post an in-depth explanation of how I did everything. In the meantime, it’s great to have good people making good products that make a difference. If you can, I recommend supporting them.

Thoughts On Epic Games Trial and The Fight For Privacy

Two things surrounding Apple that have been playing out over the last week: the Epic Trial against Apple, and the tracking opt-out option in iOS 14.5 that has really hurt Facebook’s ability to track users across platforms.

Both are unrelated, and I’m not going to even attempt to cover them in depth here. If you want to find out the gist of what’s up, here’s a good one on the Facebook problem, and one on the Epic trial.

Both have one thing in common: where you start building a company (or career, or family, etc) matters a lot.

Facebook and iOS 14.5

Facebook started with the idea of serving a very specific community, college kids. It quickly moved to serving a large community, to serving advertisers. Today Facebook doesn’t care that much about whether their service is useful to its users, as long as users keep using it.

That’s why it’s such a big deal that people can turn off a significant tool for advertisers. If Facebook had focused from the beginning on staying true to serving its customers and not its advertisers, they really wouldn’t care if ad revenue was slightly reduced.

Epic Trial

Epic Games is mad at Apple because they take about 30% of the revenue generated by in-app purchases. That’s about what Xbox, Sony, and other hardware devices charge, but Epic believes they shouldn’t have to pay it in the case of Apple. Their reasoning is pretty convoluted at best.

In their defense, 30% is fairly high, and Apple’s making a healthy profit from charging that fee. But it’s not a monopoly in the strict use of the word (well, we’ll see what the courts say in the end) and Apple built the platform (iOS).

I think what Epic is really upset about is that they didn’t build the platform, because they if you can pull it off, building a platform is where the real money is.

Takeaways

• If you’re building a company or a profession, build it on the right things, the right way. Design your career to be If your customer knew exactly what you were doing, and had to click a button on their phone for you to keep making money, they’d gladly do it.

• Build the platform, or don’t complain about paying a lot for access to the platform.

Weekend Update- May 1st

Lots of the normal things that keep me busy.

• Played a double set of shows with Downtown Band for a corporate event and a wedding in Versailles, KY and Cincinnati, OH. With most of the touring industry still down, about the only live music gigs around are those kind of shows. It was a wonderful weekend of playing music and hanging with friends. Also, tried Graeter’s ice cream for the first time ever. If you’re in Cincinnati and can get some, get some.

What else? Not much.

• Found this really cool tape plugin, thanks to a lead from a friend. Currently obsessed with the textures it can add.

• Relistened to “Punisher” by Phoebe Bridgers this weekend. Man, it’s good.

• Rekindled my love of a friend’s husband’s band, Howling Giant. It’s straight metal-influenced rock, and it rocks.

That’s it for now. Hope your week turns out well.

Earth Age

This is a truly spectacular way to look back and see the change happen. Small things really add up.

Weekend Update

So it’s late, but that’s ok, right?

Last week was a bit of a blur. Here’s the highlights:

• Launched a new product on www.patchfoundry.com called the Cover Band Collection.

• Did a co-write with the very talented Rachael Lampa

• Did an all-day keys tracking session for my friend Joe Banua’s (Brother Joe) new album

• Drove back on Sunday to St. Louis to teach a few of my students that I still teach remotely most of the time.

So that was the week. Hmm. . . not much to say on any of this stuff, since most of it won’t be dropping for awhile,

A few fun music related tidbits:

• Did a deep dive on Beyonce’s back catalogue and I finally get why people are gaga over her music. If you need a place to start, try Lemonade (if you don’t mind a lot of cursing).

• 21 Pilots did a mashup awhile ago with one of my favorite bands, Mutemath. The result is here. It’s still the most breathtaking pop collaboration ever and makes me so sad they were never officially a super group.

• I missed the Killer’s new album, until my 4 year old son heard one of the tracks and got stuck on it. We’ve been listening ever since, and it’s a darn fine Killers album.

Patch Foundry

In case you missed it, I run another website called www.patchfoundry.com. It was born from me messing around with MainStage patches about 10 years ago and posting them to this website, and grew into its own thing.

These days I’ve been having fun building sounds for The Nord Stage 3, and I just released the most comprehensive collection of song-specific patches commercially available.

If you’re feeling up to getting nerdy, check it out.