Steve’s Stuff

Allow me to preface this entry by saying that this is an assignment for class and of no interest to anyone not enrolled.

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For my part, finishing my project was nothing more than ‘time to stop composing and play what you have’. I came up with new material until the night before the opening. If I had another week, I’d probably have another two or three tunes to play. Sometimes a deadline is good because it lets you know when to stop. John Zorn theorizes that Schoenberg used poetry settings in so much of his music because his 12-tone system didn’t provide a clear way to know when the piece is finished and so he wrote until he ran out of words. Interesting. I guess I did that by writing until the show. I ended up with eight tunes, but even when stretched to ten minutes each, it’s still less than an hour and a half. The other thing is that since I was writing all in a short time period, a lot of the songs have a similar feel. Normally I’d spend this much time on one composition, but it would be a lot more complex. I don’t think it mattered ultimately because anyone seeing the show is probably going to hear one or two tunes tops.

The assignment was to be installed and ready by class on Wednesday, so Team USA made our way to 414 on Tuesday to set stuff up. Of course nobody was there yet, and strangely, many people didn’t show up at all. We started by covering the large windows in our back area. Keith was apparently fine with climbing the ladder a whole lot, so he did the nailing. We got our side finished pretty quickly.

After that, Tyler and Keith began installing the “disco” lights. Since we weren’t able to put nails in the wood, the engineers had to get creative. Luckily there were some wiring conduits and fixtures to hang out stuff. We experimented with strobe light placement and found that it worked best pointed at the back wall.

Keith N. was generous to let me borrow his PA system. He brought it that evening and we tested it with my laptop listening to some quasi-Arabic dance music and good ol’ Joe Satriani.

I didn’t go in on Thursday because Keith just needed to install the sensors. He ended up staying from 1:00-7:30pm. I think there were some setbacks or something because he described the installation processes and frustrating.

On Friday, I packed up my gear and went down town to get the music ready. I ended up getting it all to fit in three bags, plus a large midi keyboard, the CPU, and a monitor. Not bad. I unloaded and the made another trip to WSU to load up a table for my gear. Keith N. brought his awesome van to help me get the table down town.

It sure is easy to write when the topic isn’t thesis driven. I could crank out the descriptive crap all day long. I could crap out the descriptive crank all day long. I crank descriptive could all the crap long. Crap, I crank the descriptive day could all long. Could I crank out the long crap all day descriptive. Long crap descriptive crank I could long all day.

Installation of my sound gear was uneventful. I plugged everything in and it worked as intended. Keith’s sensors worked more-or-less as intended. In the end, they were tripped pretty frequently. We eventually decided to keep the spinning ball going the whole time to add some ambience.

The scales we backed (things we scaled back), were the number of sensors and the sound baffle. That looks like “sound waffle” - I wonder what that would look like. We didn’t construct the sound waffle for a few reasons. The walls from shift space were in bad shape. They were in such bad shape that I would have had to cut a 4-5 inches off each side and repaint. Plus, once I did that, I’d have to build a brace to keep them erect. If they could at least stand on their own, I’d have put them up. As it turned out, I played the music at a satisfying volume and didn’t get any complaints. It was nice to be able to see the whole gallery during my performances.

As I said before, our installation was uneventful. Keith’s sensors were simply a matter of plugging them into the wall - the logochip that is - he ran it off a cell phone charger so we avoided the battery issue.