Was’nt quite the ‘straight into the next project’ after the weekend as I’d imagined as combined with the snow we’ve bein getting since last Friday my studio PC went all special with a virus first thing Monday morning and I had to reformat the windows drive and do a fresh install. This took till Tuesday lunch and I’ve been catching up since then. Murphys law-I’ve also run in trouble with the live rig as the new Audio4DJ soundcard keeps crashing Ableton, after much fiddling round with device manager and latency/buffer settings I’m still none the wiser so hopefully Native Instruments support will get things running for me. Unfortunately this means its not looking good for the gig we have, with the electronic stuff, on the 18th unless I can get the rig going within the next week. We’re also playing a gig the day before in Dublin at Block T in Smithfield. Was hoping to play some of the electronics at that too but reckon it’ll just be the acoustic stuff.
I played a gig last Saturday supporting The River Valley Band in Murphys. It was just myself, Dermot had his nipper for the weekend, and I got a chance to test out the the new version of ‘Red Balloon’ which is handy enough to play as a warm-up and I do like where the newer off-beat rhythms I’m startin to feck around are leading me. I also tried to play the set with more varying dynamics than the normal ‘wall of sound’ approach we take and I definitely would like to be making better use of it with future gigs, tis just that it will take more practice for both myself and Dermot to play at the same levels. I did’nt test out the revision of ‘End These Ways’ as its gotten quite technical and I need to fine tune some of the verses but its definitely on the cards for the Block T gig along with a fife and drum tune if I can figure it out in time.
I’ve started back in on the unit 4 woodwind project for college, there’s alot of winds both classical and ethnic in the finished piece and its gonna take a while to set the volume changes for each line but so far I’m happy with the piece and I think it should hopefully be good enough for the 2011 showreel. Below is the finished string piece for unit three. Some of the sample tails are abit obvious and as usual with me (short attention span) the sections change pur’dy quickly but I got good feedback from my tutor who suggested I should record a live version for the showreel. Depending on the budget after christmas I may try to do a version with a few ‘real’ first chairs.
