One thing I’ll gladly pay for each month is a good, strong, fast internet connection. It needs to be there, on any number of my devices straight away, and it needs to do anything I want it to do. It’s increasingly becoming where I get TV from (with the exception of bargain priced older shows that are massive downloads but low DVD cost), and I don’t like to wait for it. If I want to watch a movie and I’ve lent out the DVD, I need to be able to download it while I finish dinner and do the dishes. Or faster if I’m leaving the dishes for tomorrow*.

Hurry me back to my castle of endless and penetrating wifi, and let me know that when I hear the satisfying treble click of the ethernet cable into my Mac, that there shall be no waiting.

* Almost always.

** Instead I was the sysop of a Bulletin Board System (BBS). That’s a whole pile of nerd for another day***.

*** Sorry for the recursive footnotes, but did anyone use Geocities back when you had to choose a neighbourhood and a sub-neighbourhood for your site? I actually think I did have an X-Files blog on Geocities.

Mother’s To Blame! (or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Smacked The Kid)
Mommie Dearest
Psycho

Sir, I think there’s a bug in my robot! (Bots Gone Wild)
2001 – A Space Odyssey
Blade Runner
I, Robot
Wargames

Don’t Drop The Soap (Prison Films)
The Rock
Cool Hand Luke
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Escape from Alcatraz

Show Us Those Pearly Whites (Teeth Films)
Moonraker
Jaws

On The Road Again (Road Trips)
Duel
Thelma & Louise
Little Miss Sunshine
TransAmerica

Who, Me? (Mistaken Identity films)
North By Northwest
The Wrong Man

… And No One Will Ever Know (Perfect Murder films)
Dial M for Murder
A Perfect Murder
Rope

When I talk in a meeting or order a meal at a restaurant in Singapore, I feel like a girl from the deep south who just moved to a California school. There’s no doubt our accent is at times broad, harsh and unrefined, but it’s also relaxed and friendly (my own associations, I’m sure). I’ve found that Singapore houses a lot of accents. Aside from several prominent Asian accents, you’re more likely to hear a British accent than an American, and an American more than Australian.

One of the curious things I’ve noticed is that if I order a “Coke” in a restaurant, I’m rarely understood. I think it’s because the Australian “o” sound is quite rounded, and the mouth changes the shape of the sound as it progresses, almost like a truncated “oa” sound. Here, everyone corrects me with an abrupt “oh” sound. If I was to try to estimate the sound, it would be “kok”. Regardless, I’ve now taken to pointing to each menu item as I order it, and when I think it’s going to take some time, I say “soft drink” as well.

It will be nice to not feel like the southern belle in a room of Russian dictators.

On Broadway: Playing ‘in the pit’ for musicals

This article is aimed at musicians who don’t really know how the whole orchestra pit thing works. It’s a nice overview for others with some interesting details such as:

• The AFM contract stipulated a 2008 pit player base wage to be around $1592 USD a week, plus 12.5% for the first double, and 6.25% for each additional double.
• There are a few muso case studies, including 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee drummer Glenn Rhian who was told that he just had to play “the same number of measures” in certain passages of the Spelling Bee score.
• The Tony Awards used to have a Best Conductor and Musical Director category until 1964.

Spotlight on: Randy Cohen, Broadway Keyboardist / Programmer / Music Director

This article, published by the company who makes Receptor, a hardware platform for software synths, touches on some of the configurations that Randy Cohen has come up with for various shows including High Fidelity, High School Musical (tour) and In The Heights. Specifically the article indicates a preference for Ivory and Native Instrument’s Elektrik Piano and B4II, driven by a Yamaha S90 or Motif. That site also includes the most ridiculous collection of social media buttons at the bottom of the page.

Starobin talks about Sunday, Assassins

Finally, Michael Starobin offers a bit of history on his career and talks more conceptually than technically on the process of orchestration, and why he doesn’t like using Finale or a digital piano while orchestrating. Starobin has worked with some pretty big names (I would argue he’s a big name in his own right), and his articles are always interesting.

Please send stuff of this nature my way if you come across any. I tend to absorb article after article and never find it boring. I’ll continue to share my finds here if anyone’s interested.

I always enjoy going for a stroll, be it in Wollongong, Sydney or somewhere else in Australia and seeing people out on the sides of the street having a long brunch, looking at the sky. Before all this travel, Nico and I had taken to walking down to the harbour to sit by the beach and eat hamburgers (true Australian kiosk style hamburgers). There’s something infinitely relaxing about the ocean and being somewhere that’s purely about leisure, but that seems to be missing here. Even Sentosa Island has a atmosphere of manic tourism. The ocean is littered with large, rust-coloured ships which seem entirely too close for comfort. Even when you’re looking for the infinite horizon, you can always see industry, production and work.

One of the things I will do when I get home is go grab some lunch and sit somewhere where everyone else is sitting, also eating their lunch, content to be outside and not doing anything else.

I miss my piano. Well, it’s not exclusively *my* piano that I miss, but I do miss playing. I realise that the time I spend playing each day is a great stress reliever for me. Just a few minutes at the keyboard forces me to forget any issues going on and focus on the notes, rhythm and dynamics. It’s both physical and intellectual, meaning it consumes most of my body leaving little room for anything else (though at times I can sustain a conversation while playing the piano, that’s more of a muscle memory thing). In really stressful or anxious times music is a great emotional shortcut, able to invoke a more relaxed feeling very quickly.

If I had the room (and could be confident I could continue to find the room), I would happily plonk down the cash to buy an acoustic grand piano to replace my Roland RG-3, but that seems to financially conflict with my desire to live in a city.

I’ve tried a few different setups over a number of shows running on my various Mac laptops over the time (starting with an iBook G4 – I can’t even remember what I ran on that thing, followed by a MacBook and now MacBook Pro). I’ve used Native Instrument’s Kontakt 2 a number of times with various software libraries. I believe I played You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and Tick, tick… BOOM! on this setup. For Charlie Brown, I (rather non-ideally) covered the reeds on keyboard while conducting. I recall the flute patch I was using was very successful, but the clarinet and sax less so (in that order). Still, it meant I wasn’t leaving anything out of the already compact arrangement. For piano we just used the on-board sound of a Yamaha Clavinova, a sound I’ve never been particularly fond of. Tick, tick… BOOM! was easier as I was relying mostly on piano – Native Instrument’s Akoustik in this case – as well as some rock organ and a piano+bells combo. Driven by the same Yamaha Clavinova, I was able to program the piano+EP with pulsing delay exactly how I wanted it for “Real Life”1. This worked well, and the sound of the Akoustik was greatly appreciated, particularly for the all the exposed and solo piano parts that call for a bit more realism than the “rock piano” sound on the cast album.

On a note of technical functionality, I always tend to use the “voice select” buttons on given keyboard, such as the Clavinova to send Program Change messages to the sampler to select the correct patch. I’m more practiced in this method than using a foot pedal, and it’s also dark in the pit and your view is naturally obstructed. Interestingly, the Clav throws some wild Program Change numbers, not just 1,2,3,4 etc across the panel as you’d expect, and as my Roland did. This made programming and running the patches at home rather difficult. To avoid having to reprogram the sampler at the theatre, or maintain two versions, I wrote a script in PureData (also known as PD) which grabbed the midi input, took out the program change messages and depending on a toggle I could easily switch, it would map them to the program numbers that Kontakt was expecting. PD would then output the MIDI back to Kontakt. It worked perfectly and didn’t really introduce any latency issues at all. I believe I also wrote one which converted the program change messages into channel changes.

I played the Keys 1 book for a production of Blood Brothers using Apple’s Main Stage (version 1). Again, it’s a piano heavy show but called for some rhodes, rock organ, bell combos and all those ghostly (or rather, ghastly) synth pads. I was determined to avoid the tacky sound of the Blood Brothers cast recordings, so went for more acoustic, earthy sounding pads (and combinations of two pads in some cases, or a pad and an EP). I stayed well clear of anything that sounded FM-generated. The piano was an interesting one for this show; I tried many different patches and ended up with Garage Band’s default piano patch. It was bright enough (overly bright) to cut through the mix when needed. It sounded awkward by itself, but with the rest of the band it seemed completely appropriate. At times I’d doubt myself thinking “Surely not, there must be something a bit more ‘real’”, but I ended up playing all performances with it. Main Stage itself is a chunky beast. It looks perfect for what I want it to do, but it’s very heavy and I did have some stability issues (overall it was fine).

The only other setup of note was when I used Logic because I had drum tracks for 70% of the songs that I wanted to punch in. The show was Nuncrackers and I had neither room on the stage for a drummer, nor a physical person who was particularly interested so I sequenced all of the more necessary drum parts. I played them on a keyboard to improve the ‘human’ feel, and copied and pasted to reduce the work. It’s not a musically complex show, and most of the songs run straight through without any vamps allowing me to start the click track (the 4 musos were on headphones). Logic is not built for this sort of stuff, so when I did have vamps, I had a few keys I would hit on my laptop to turn on and off loops. It was extremely stressful as I sometimes only had a single bar to activate a repeat or the drum part would have carried on without us, but it worked 95% of the time. As an added bonus, this setup mitigated any sound control issues that would have been extremely problematic with a live kit on stage.

Overall, these weren’t particularly demanding synth shows, mostly relying on acoustic piano, EPs and bells. I’d love to find a great brass ensemble patch that I could incorporate in the same way, because I’ve heard some great ones in shows I’ve seen but have never been able to replicate it. Also, in the future I’d like to give Main Stage 2 a whirl and see how it handles playing a live show, perhaps one with more demanding requirements.

1: The director told me she saw another amateur production where the pianist, on an acoustic piano, mimicking the delay by playing each repetition.

I’m rather excited to be going home, so I thought I’d document one thing that I miss about home each day, and today is “Tea”.

I don’t drink coffee of any description, and I find the whole wankery around coffee of late quite dull1. However, I do love my tea. Everything from Bushell’s Australian Breakfast (my favourite standard black) to T2 and herbals. Just not anything that tastes flowery, or worse, has flowers still in it.

I have quite the collection of teas at my apartment, and some fairly glorious mugs that hold half a litre. Perfect for winter when you want to fill your belly with that lovely scruffy warmth.

While I’ve been abroad I’ve been struggling with Yellow Label and some of the dinkiest teacups you’ve ever seen, and for that, I’m looking forward to getting home.

1. Larry David gets it right here.