Lessons from FAWM 2009
It’s March! Another FAWM is over. Here’s what I learned. Not that I’ll listen to myself later.
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Ninjam Drum Sessions
Lately, I’ve been practicing my keyboard-drumming skills using the Battery 3 VST in the public Ninjam studios.
The jams range from a few minutes to 20+ minutes. They’re great practice, and a lot more fun to play in than to listen to. But here are a few highlights from this week:
Salsa Excerpt
Plat (Drums), HoraciosAllen (Piano), Mono (Guitar), BBAndTheMC (Bass)
Jazz Excerpt
Plat (Drums), HoraciosAllen (Keys), Mono (Guitar), BBAndTheMC (Bass)
Rock Excerpt
Plat (Drums), Slyos (Rhythm Guitar), Zden (Guitar Solos), Not NT (Rhythm Guitar), Fin (Bass)
These excerpts are covered under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Nur Ein! 2!
By 2, I mean 2. Not 2 factorial, which is also 2. It’s something I’m in, much like trouble.
It’s a songwriting competition, by the good community over in the Songfight Forums. Here’s how it works: they post a title and a mandatory challenge, we get ~5 days to record a song that fits, then we are judged and numbered. People with low numbers are gone-ified, and a new round begins.
Nur Ein means “only one”, which is approximately how many rounds I expect to last. Quick links:
Sidefight Threads (includes peanut-gallery commentaries of the Nur Ein rounds)
Official “Nur Ein” Web site (listen to the songs here)
My Nur Ein Entries (including CD-quality FLAC recordings)
Notes to My Future Album-Recording Self
Having attempted an album-in-a-day, an album-in-a-week, and an album-in-a-month (with varying results), here are some things I learned about my musical process. Hopefully this’ll help me refine my process for next time. For the rest of this article below,”you” get to be me… at least as far as pronouns are concerned.
Propagating Noise
This weekend, I took some steps to move the Dillfrog Noise site to a new home. A home that doesn’t fear more than 384kbps of traffic. A home with enough square footage (or square meter..age..?) to hold losslessly-compressed audio.
It’s a relatively-unusable work-in-progress, but at least it’s in progress!
Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
- PHP appears to be the ugly child of Perl, Java, and let’s say EMACS. I say “EMACS” because it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a hacked-together system with few intuitive design decisions. I’m new to PHP, and (flame-repellant) I don’t know much of EMACS either.
- Dreamhost likes to kill my processes when I don’t run them “nice -n19″. And even then, I’ve still (apparently) been a CPU hog. To their great credit, they added a feature to give “nice -n19″ apps a fair chance, after I submitted a support ticket. Major points for listening to their customers! I was running a lot of server-side FLAC -> Mp3 conversions to build the site.
- It’s easier than I expected to edit remote files without X11. See, I’m used to editing my code with “nedit” over X11, but Dreamhost doesn’t allow that. I searched around for programs that mapped SSH connections as network drives, automatically synchronized folders via FTP, etc. I found these, but none of them felt like a great idea. Eventually I realized that my already-favorite apps (WinSCP for Windows, and Cyberduck for OS X) already allow me to edit files locally and magically re-upload whenever I save them. WinSCP has been a little finicky, but Cyberduck treats me right.
I still need to clean up the UI, add graphics, build an authentication mechanism, an admin tool, AND ACTUALLY WRITE NEW SONGS, but it’s nice to see some progress.
The next challenge will be to either synchronize or move the Dillfrog account database to Dreamhost’s MySQL servers, so I can keep things personalized. Hopefully, like the Cyberduck/WinSCP example above, the solution is staring me in the face.
Help me test this out, won’tcha, and subscribe to the new Noise podcast feed.
Songfight! Live Santa Cruz; Aug 18-19
Uh oh, I have to play and sing a few songs live again, for the third time in my life. This time, it’s at Songfight! Live “High and Dry”, in good ol’ Santa Cruz, California. If you’re in the area, stop on by!
August 18-19, 2006
The Cayuga Vault
1100 Soquel Avenue
Santa Cruz, CA
Puce and I will be playing a small, combined set (a little over 30 minutes total, until we get kicked off the stage).
I don’t know specifically what day/time we’re on yet, but I’ll post more info on this entry as I learn it. You can learn more by visiting Songfight’s page about it (don’t get confused with the past events listed at the top). Or spy on the current chatter in the Songfight Forums.
I’m scared to death about singing and/or losing control of my pitch, even though it’s a handful of songs. I have no idea what temperature/humidity to expect. I will miss the comfort of my studio like a child misses his blankey. But vocals aside, though, I’m really looking forward to jamming with the other talented folks like Glenn, Blue and Puce.
If I don’t completely embarrass myself, I’ll probably post some recordings after the event. 
Update: we play on Saturday Aug 19th.