Haven't updated the b_log in a while. Throughout these past couple months I took some dips, turns, and then came around and figured out what I really wanted to do in the end. Here's whats up:
-Finished my last talent show with my school, uploaded that monstrosity of a song onto soundcloud:
The talent show went mehh. Played the song right out of lmms. Mapped out some lapsda effects and a 10band eq onto my tablets running TOUCHosc. If I had more time to "rehearse" I probably would've made it out much better. My VJ created a program to send MIDI over WIFI, which is friggin awesome. However the data he got from the midi output I was sending out via LMMS wasn't really applicable in anyway. Instead he created a visualiser in blender and we tried to manually sync song+vis via spacebar. Was quite a fail.
-Finish up all of my old projects
With new LMMS updates coming out, I decided to just quickly finish up most of the old projects I have been working on. And going to start on a fresh plate. Nearly half of my WIP's aren't compatible with the new version of LMMS, a ton of glitches and just odd sounds from the synths, the other half are actually compatible. So I'm not sure where I'm going there.
-Worked up, found my niche, established a new technique for live shows, and then sucessfully played at my first ever festival
So after the talent show. I was actually asked to play at a small, local festival happening near my hometown. Maydaze 2014. First time doing a festival, unlike any other performance however I had the chance to actually sit-down and prepare myself haha. 2 months prep time.
After all of my fails so far in my performing career. I decided to look into new ways of performing electronic music. Dance music wasn't my forte. Most of my WIP's were actually from the heart. Slower, rnbish, ambient songs. So I decided to play to my strengths and go through with this instead of composing just a separate dance song like I did with the latest talent show.
Fellow Avelocity Member Umcaruje then showed me a AbletonLive-like program called Giada. Which actually saved my life haha. It's a looping machine, and quite brilliant really. Around this time I also started getting into musicans and groups such as Orbital and Flume. And after looking more into how these guys perform, I came around and finally started figuring out the what's and how's to preform.
Overall, the performance was great. I mapped most of the experimental WIP's I had that were really "finishable" at this point. Some of my first initial songs, such as Trippin in Space, etc. Stuff and genres I haven't really came back too. The crowd reactions were great. I was actually given two slots to play, and then some time in-between other musician's sets to DJ some. Most of my library for Djing was comprised of songs from the LMMS community, and my more new or more complicated songs that couldn't be mapped out on Giada (Until much later, after I gain more experience lol). Performing at this festival gave me a lot of experience in going through with this sort of scene, and it helped me reflect back to my core roots, and what type of music I do actually want to produce. I would recommend this opportunity to any EDM musician out there.
A bit more with my setup:
-Behringer XENYX302 Mixer/Audio interface. Helped me alot, especially since my laptop's internal soundcard is crap.
-Yamaha DD-50 Drumpads, taking a bit after Flume here. I plugged line-into my mixer and manually played percussion to most of my live-sets. Until it got really cold outside, my fingers were too numb to do anything
-the 2 tablet+router setup. Running touchosc, helped out alot. Couldn't go through the show without it. Mouse clicking with giada is ok and all. When it gets cold outside you will want to use a touchsurface rather than using muscles+joints to move a mouse around haha. Also a downside to this was, my router actually got hacked at some point. Forgot to set up a wifipassword and somebody went in and changed the admin user password to my router's gateway page. 20 minutes before my next set I had to go back and figure out how to reset my router (It's a fairly old router, the manual reset button was inside for some reason)
-earplugs, our setup table was right next to the subs and speakers.
-Hardrive, to carry song library around
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