The temperature has actually gotten above freezing the last few days. Saturday it was up near fifty. But there’s still plenty of snow on the ground, and trying to break up the snow piles is mostly futile since it’s all fused into a solid mass of ice. On the plus side, Jeannie and took a day off from work Friday to go skiing. We figured it was the last day before President’s Day weekend, and the last cold day before things start melting. And, as I’d hoped, the mountain was not at all crowded and the conditions were great. Not at all icy until the very end. We left the house around 8:30 and were on the slopes by eleven. We did eighteen runs in total, all over the mountain. Stayed until after four. It was the best day of skiing I’ve had in a long time, especially for a day trip.
Did some shopping over the weekend. Got a backup hard drive for my new computer, as well as a mouse and some cables to connect various audio interfaces, and even a new desk chair. Things are moving ahead.
Last Thursday instead of normal band rehearsal for Spacecats, Ken and Rick came over to my studio to begin work on our new album (Josh being out of town). This was basically a tech session to see what it will take to use my studio for recording. It’s going to be a learning curve as I retire my old system which I know so well and move into the new one. So far I got my 8-channel audio interface hooked up to my computer and some of the software installed, including multiple DAWs and drivers for the outboard box. Rick played my drum kit, which I had mic’d up previously. Ken brought his bass amp and a very nice AKG condenser mic so we could record both direct and the output of his amp. I played sax into my trust Rode mic. It took an hour or so to get everything set up. We managed to get a great-sounding 8-track recording of the trio doing a handful of standards.
A few things we need to improve for next time. First is that I only had one audio interface plugged in, so the meant just five channels of drums to make room for two bass channels (mic and direct) and one for sax. Actually the kit sound pretty good that way. The mics are on the kick, snare, hi-hat and two overheads which are meant for the cymbals but also capture alot of the toms. The three mics are had to unplug were for close-mic’ing the toms.
For next time I’m going to add another audio input box. I have a space MBox, the same kind I use for my old studio, that has four inputs, including two XLR with nice peak limiters. This will get us up to twelve channels, which will do for next week. But the week after Josh is coming back and we’ll want another stereo pair for the keyboards and eventually mic’ing the piano. Ken has an eight-channel audio box he’s going to bring next week, so we’ll see how that goes, and Rick has a 16-channel digital mixer too. So we’re we’re trying it all to see what works best.
The other thing we need to work out is the arrangement of the musicians in the room for minimizing the bleedthru on the mics from the other instruments. This is going to be a live jazz album with no overdubs, but better isolation will make it easier to mix. For this session, Rick and I were fairly close together, but put Ken’s amp far away, and that worked out. We might have to invest in some longer cables and acoustic baffles too.
Meanwhile, I’ve been continuing to work on my home studio project Spellbound. I’ve been laying down a couple takes of the twelve-string guitar part every day, and I’ve finally gotten solid enough that I can cut together a take from tracks I laid down. Woo-hoo! This means I should be wrapping up this song soon. I also went back and did new mixes of the first five songs. All that remains is the big prog epic that fills up most of side two.
And lastly, there’s a bunch of origami events coming up. I’ve been asked to be a special guest for the upcoming Origami USA convention in July. I’m very flattered and honored, and now I have to level up my exhibit and teaching, plus submit a model the annual collection. There’s also CFC (Conference for Creators) in Ann Arbor, Michigan in May, hosted by my friend Beth. For that one I plan to give a talk on folding pentagonal symmetry, with examples from my own work including single-sheet polyhedra, and tessellations including fractals and Penrose quasicrystal tilings.
But the nearest one is CoCon in Chicago, just three weeks away. For this one I’m mostly prepared, but it’s always nice to have something new to exhibit. The most important one for me is to complete my single-sheet dodecahedron folded from a decagon. I have it all worked out except that the lock doesn’t hold tight. I’m thinking of folding it from a slightly larger sheet to have more paper left at the end for the lock. I’m also thinking of making a “Star Man” a simple human figure folded from a pentagon.