Jazz-Sax.Com

Covid-19 lockdown has lead to some experimentation. And some rethinking of what I wanted the pedal board to be able to do.

First, when doing gigs, sometimes you get a venue where they insist on doing their own sound. Fine. But then they have a “board” which has 16 inputs. And the keyboard player needs stereo input. And so does the guitarist. And the singer’s multi-effects pedal is stereo. And so…..there are now no inputs left. So the EWI you brought along can’t be used.

OR the venue has a “sound guy” who’s really just there for the free drinks and the people. The “sound guy” is not going to be adjusting any volumes. Well, depends if he has a drink or not.

And….what if you want to run the EWI through an effects chain? And the sax? Can you do both at the same time?

Pedalboard 1.0 attempted to address this by using the Eventide MixingLink. However, I could never get the volumes of the two inputs to be close to the same. Generally, the sax mic was a lot louder than the EWI. Even with the MXR MicroAmp on it, it was sort of hit and miss.

Pedalboard 2.0 didn’t really fix the problem of the EWI, and introduced a POG, and a Pageturner.

Pedalboard 3 ushered in a smaller board, and me giving up on trying to get the EWI on the effects chain. Pedalboard 3.1 had some changes. I dumped the POG, added a reverb, and made an Arduino page turner. The EWI was still not included.

Which now brings us to Pedalboard 4.0……

Read More “Pedalboard 4.0” »

If you can forgive the Youtube videos they have up of a guy clearly in need of some serious Jonathan Van Ness intervention, a company called Vindor has a intriguing, reasonably priced wind controller that is actually shipping. I believe they had a version 1 of this but I never heard of it.

Anyhow, it features:

1. Louder integrated speaker with clearer sound*.
2. Use MIDI, built-in oscillators, internal physical model or sample player (using SD card).
3. Pitch bending and effects through gestures.
4. USB-C connector*.
5. MIDI through USB or DIN via inexpensive external adapter*.
6. Works with Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
7. Playback through USB (Vindor ES becomes headphones and microphone).
8. 4 hours of untethered play time if using headphones.
9. 1/4″ jack for connecting with amplifiers and effects pedals.
10. OLED screen for interactive configuration.
11. HiRes MIDI support provides 14-bit resolution (16000 steps vs 127) for synths that support it.

One of the MOST important things to do is backup your music files. It doesn’t matter if you use Finale, Sibelius, Musescore, or whatever. You need to back it up. And sometimes, you need to just backup the whole folder just to have a copy “just in case”.

I’ve been using a script on my Mac to do this. It makes an archive, using Keka, and puts it in a path where it gets Synced to Google Drive. And it will also go through and delete archives older than 100 days. I generally also move things to another folder on Google drive to have a monthly archive of stuff as well.

Anyhow, the script is this. It is triggered by crontab.

#!/bin/bash
cd /Volumes/mygoogledrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/

/Applications/Keka.app/Contents/Resources/keka7z a -t7z -r -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on FinaleArchive-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').7z /Volumes/mygoogledrive/FinaleDocs/

find /Volumes/mygoogledrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/ -type f -name '*.7z' -mtime +100 -delete

UPDATE: Did a little tweaking, moved to using ExpanDrive, and the original script was not working right. Here is the updated one.

#!/bin/bash
ArchiveName=FinaleArchive-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').7z
/Applications/Keka.app/Contents/Resources/keka7z a -t7z -r -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on $ArchiveName /Volumes/GoogleDrive/FinaleDocs/*
mv $ArchiveName /Volumes/GoogleDrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/
find /Volumes/GoogleDrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/ -type f -name '*.7z' -mtime +100 -delete

Since I pay for a google business account, I was using Google Filestream. But this will also work with Google Backup and Sync. Or things like InSync or ExpanDrive (highly recommended). Keep in mind if you use Backup and Sync, or InSync, the archives stay on your computer. Using ExpanDrive or Filestream puts them into a temp space while it gets uploaded to Google. But you can adapt the basic idea to whatever online storage thingy you have. OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

BUT PLEASE BACKUP. There is NOTHING worse than losing something you have spent hours on. Time Machine, Backblaze, whatever. But do something.

There is a lot of development using various powerful, low-cost sensors, computers, etc, to augment a musical performance. The idea of taking brain waves and maybe having it start triggering something is very interesting.

Bret Pimentel has a great article about using an EWI as “silent” practice tool for saxophone, clarinet, or other woodwinds.

I agree with his view point.

Following up from the last post, another company to watch is Berglund Instruments. They currently make an EVI (Electric Valve Instrument) that looks and sounds great. If you follow their instagram account, it seems they are working on a EWI version. And I want one. Seriously. I’ve contacted them.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Johan Berglund (Berglund Instruments) (@trasselfrisyr)

Emeo Music dropped another video of their forthcoming “digital practice horn for saxophone players”. I’m a little confused as to why it is marketed as this. While it does seem to have a rather cool looking body with fully articulating saxophone keys, it doesn’t have a mouthpiece. In fact, it just seems to be some tube you blow into. Which is fine, but…..is that really a “practice horn” then?

I think the better play is to market this as a higher end wind controller with a more “realistic” feel.

We had some downtime yesterday. The computer that has been running the sites, while working fine, was on a dead end path. It was running Ubuntu 18.04 that was 32bit. There is no real upgrade path from there, and moving to 64bit Ubuntu 20.04 proved to be a couple hour endeavor yesterday.

Anyhow, it seems most everything is working fine right now. There are still a couple of backend things that I need to sort out, but the web part seems fine now.

Like 90% of the world, I’ve had to spend a LOT more time on the computer than I want. Don’t get me wrong, I spend a lot of time doing stuff on the computer, but it’s become quite a bit more.

The browser of choice is Chrome. There are plenty of extensions what make the browser more versatile and just better. Chris Betcher has two posts on his favorite extensions. I generally agree. Some good picks in there.

I would add the extension Print Friendly & PDF for making PDFs of webpages. Honey for saving money while shopping Online. And 1Password which is a paid service, but it is so worth it. Have ONE password to rule them all, and it manages all the others. And tells you when you reuse a password. And when a password on a site might be compromised.

Anyone have any extensions they use a lot?

Yes, it’s hard to do the Zoom lesson. However, there is one great program that makes it easier to use two microphones while doing a lesson. Audio Hijack. I have a little complex setup that allows me to use the MacBook’s mic, but when the instrument mic kicks in, Audio Hijack “ducks” the MacBook’s mic down. Meaning it lowers the volume so you get the real mic not the crappy MacBook Mic.

Anyhow, Audio Hijack has been essential in teaching. I love it. Here is my setup.