Different Skies: Day 6

Rehearsals again; we have the ordered matrix of performance ready now (okay, okay, who’s playing on what, who’s leading, and the song order. Meaning the spreadsheet’s sorted).

The students from the Orme School came by for the “here’s what we do here at Different Skies” demo, which was a load of fun. We did a jam with Mike conductiong us. The best part was geting to do 8-bar complete chaos and everyone coming back in right on one – twice!

During the students-on-stage portion, I got to demonstrate the SD-1 and Ableton Live to two different sets of students. Favorite quote: “You’re actually going to use that sound in the concert?” They thought it was really cool that the one keyboard could do so many sounds, and Ableton Live was just fascinating.

Aleen and I got to do our piece for the first time tonight; I’m playing a marvelously damaged patch called “Migraine Flash” through “Torture Cell” and “Twinkly Bitz”. Allen plays some nice rhythmic stuff while I alternate between this texture and a computer reading of a section from Bacon’s New Atlantis, in which he seems to quite accurately predict electronic music (or something like it) in 1624.

Live works great for this, and I think I’m going to break down and buy a copy soon. I’ve seen a number of other people using it for similar purposes on other numbers.

We had quite an extensive jam session tonight after the tech rehearsal. Tomorrow will probably be rest in the morning and concert in the evening, with a bit of setup in between.

My machine is just a little too slow to handle running Live, the Java program I’ll be using at one point, and TextEdit to keep Bill Fox’s chord chart up as well, so I’ve resorted to setting up everything but Live during the first part of the show, and then shutting down the Java program before starting Live (and reloading everything – I need to save up a while before I”ll be able to purchase a license, so I can’t save anything; I need to copy it all back in again).

Still, seems to work well. I’ve gotten quite a lot of practice on the dumbek and have improved a lot this week. Hopefully I won’t earn a sandwich during the performance! (The sandwich is a Different Skies tradition: John DuVal almost always has a sandwich left over in his cooler after driving down from Portland; the person who screws up worst during the performance “earns” the sandwich.)

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