Mike O’Connor

I decided to take a picture of the current state of the music workstation.  I wish I'd done this a few times in the past so I could reflect on how it evolves but there you go.  Anyway, here's the first in a series.

List of Stuff

Computer -- home-brew PC (hidden behind a wall so's not to noise-pollute the mic when I'm podcasting)

Software -- SONAR 8.5 Producer, Jamstix

Keyboards

Yamaha PSR-1500 (my favorite for banging around in a jam session)

Yamaha S-08 (the "serious hard-core" keyboard)

Edirol PCR-300 (the little one -- super handy for composition)

Tenori-On -- a gizmo I'm still trying to figure out

Audio -- Crown Powertech 3.1 (500 watts/channel at 8 ohms) into EV Sx300 speakers, couple Behringer mixers, MXL-2001 mics

Update -- about a year later -- June 3rd, 2011

My goodness what a difference a year makes.  Here's the current state of affairs.  I finally switched back to the Mac for music-making after a long time away.  I gave up on the PC -- the platform was just too unstable.  Yes, I changed everything (hardware, software, peripherals, cables) trying to diagnose the repeated-crashing/freezing problems.  Don't want to go there.  The Mac "just works" and it's on a laptop so I can haul it around with me.  I'm now enjoying a much higher ratio of "making music" to "fixing the setup" time.

The new additions:

MacBook Pro

Logic Pro

M-Audio Axiom Pro

The old Roland JV880 (hanging on the music stand down there under the S08)

I'm liking this new rig a lot.

Gracious.  A fella gets going fixing one little thing on a music-making workstation and the next thing you know a year has gone by and about 42 jillion other things have broken and needed fixing.  Meanwhile, no music has happened.

So today I just pushed through all the crud and said "dang it, today I'm going to produce a tune for the blog, no matter what."

Click HERE to listen to the result.

Complete geek heaven.  Great band.  Great Rube Goldberg device.  4 videos describing the collaboration they put together. Must see, if you're a geek.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/

One of the joys of moving is that you find old stuff that folks have been wondering about. Our move didn't find some photos that Dad is looking for, but it did turn up the disks for Gracie's old music box.

We pulled the music box out today and fired it up. It still works, although the the workings sound like they need cleaning and oiling -- no wonder, it's been in our closet for at least 25 years and probably hasn't been used in 75.

Here's the music box, all closed up.

Here's the nameplate -- J. Werner of Hamburg, a "Musikwaaren Fabrik" made in Hamburg. My guess would be late 1800's, but it's hard to tell. Not much comes up when I do a search on those terms.

Here's the box all opened up. Dang, I wish Mom hadn't used masking tape to hold that glass lid in place. I'm going to have to find some magic goo to get that stuff off without lifting the finish.

Here's a picture of the combs -- looks like 2 combs t'me. Some more cool goo, plus some gentle work with the Dremel tool, required to clean those up.

Here's the first of two name-stickers on the inside of the music box. It's interesting that both this one and the other one (see below) have had a corner cut out of them. Since it's the same corner, and it's clearly on purpose, one wonders what was going on here.

See? They really went after this one with their razor knife. Strange

Here's a detail shot of the combs. There are little dampers off to the right side of each comb that quiet the note before it's plucked again. Some of those dampers look pretty narly.

Here's a disk (we have about 20 in the stack). Some are just rusty like this one, some are covered with some kind of weird moldy varnish-like stuff.

And here's a detail shot of one of the side handles.

I think I may peck away at restoring this a little bit. I view this as a connection back to Mom and Gracie which would be nice to bring back at least to operating condition. I'll post progress notes to the blog as things unfold. There are folks who are interested in these music boxes, they call themselves the Music Box Society International. I think I'll hook up with my local chapter and see what kind of resources they have. There's also Nancy Fratti, who is really into restoring music boxes like these and runs classes in how to do it. It would be fun to go out and take her class.

I recorded one of the disks. Click HERE to listen to the recording. It's got lots of whirring noises in it -- that's the gizmo that needs oiling and cleaning. But the sound is really neat nonetheless. A great old thing -- hopefully a little TLC will bring it back.

I came across some whiz-bang writeup about a guitar tuner program you could download to your iPod. Richard and I agreed that a simpler approach would be to record MP3 files of notes that you could put on your player -- just play the file when you need to tune your instrument.

So here is a collection of files you are welcome to download and share. No ding dang rippin frippin copyright -- all I ask is that you put a link to this page from your blog, tell your friends to do the same, etc. That way, maybe these files will work their way high enough in the Google ranking that people will actually find them.

Feel free to offer suggestions by commenting to this post -- I'm not sure I've got the right notes when it comes to the orchestral tuning files (having never played in an orchestra). If they're wrong, let me know and I'll change them.

Here are the files;

Tuning -- A -- Bass Violin Sound
Tuning -- A -- Oboe Sound
Tuning -- A -- Violin Sound

Tuning -- D -- Guitar Sound
Tuning -- D -- Jazz Organ Sound
Tuning -- D -- Piano Sound

Tuning -- E -- Guitar Sound
Tuning -- E -- Jazz Organ Sound
Tuning -- E -- Piano Sound

Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing posted this great voicemail message from a very angry young woman who accidentally left the message on a wrong number. Here's the link to her post. I'm goofing around with some new audio gear this afternoon and decided to do a little fooling around with it. I hope she hears it some day, and uses it to direct her anger -- she's been done wrong!

This is a take off on a great Steve Reich piece called "It's gonna rain" - here's a link to get you started on that one.

And here's a link to my little MP3 -- it's about 3 minutes long, 2.5 mBytes.

Listen...

Ah. Every once in a while I come across a fantastic lecturer who illuminates a huge topic. Carl Sagan did that for me when i was at Cornell -- I used to play hooky from classes and go sit in on his Astronomy 101 lectures (as did several hundred other folks).

A less known example is Hubert Alyea who was a brilliant Princeton chemistry educator upon whom The Absent Minded Professor was modeled. He was a colleague of my Dad and I grew up listening to Professor Alyea's amazing chemistry lectures (from which the notion of Flubber emerged).

Professor Felton (also at Princeton) is in this league in this lecture "Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue". The stream's likely to be one of the best hours you can spend if you're interested in the digital media rights issue.

Here are a few topics;

- How Sandra Day O'Connor saved the fast forward button

- A great explanation of how to digitize media

- Technology convergence

- The most important concept in Computer Science

- The Celestial Jukebox and the Napster case

- The Remix culture – Negativeland, the Grey album, Woody Guthrie

- DVDJohn

- The Fritz (Hollings) Chip

And more. The whole stream is about an hour and a half, but I gave up at the Q&A session -- the questions were long and badly recorded so I got tired of waiting. Same goes for the introductions -- I skipped those as well. The lecture itself is an hour. Well worth every minute.