sonicviz

Harmonica players usually have a tough time getting both the right volume and tone without carting around a heavy custom amp rig. The Harp Commander III specialist Harmonica preamp from jfet magician Ron Holmes (http://www.holmeseng.com/) is a great solution, allowing harp players to DI into a PA (or amp) and have full control over their feedback free sound level and tone.

I was coming back from a jam session in a few weeks ago and my backpack split at a pedestrian crossing, dropping my Harp Commander III onto the hard bitumen. Initially I thought it was ok, but it the next morning I had an online gig and it was dead. On further closer inspection it appeared one of the xlr output volume controls had taken a hit, and it was off axis. I sent Ron Holmes a quick note, explaining what happened and that I was willing to take a shot at repairing it myself – something I would never have done pre-hackerspace soldering skills days.

Ron sent me back some detailed tear down/repair instructions, and part replacements specs which I ordered from mouser online. It was my first big desolder/repair/resolder and went pretty smoothly thanks to the detailed instructions from Ron, and over the shoulder checking from fellow TokyoHackerSpace members.
All back together…and ready to Boogie the Bitstream. Thanks Ron!
(fyi detailed info on Ron’s design approach -> http://www.holmeseng.com/index_files/Page937.htm )

After a rough start due to some new client issues, we finally got rolling at the Alphaville Herald launch party in metaplace. Metaplace needs a few more things to assist live musicians, but it’s still in beta so it will evolve. The metaplace crew were rolling out updates to fix client bugs a couple of times during the gig, and it eventually settled down. Mucho Fun had by all!

Thanks to Hathead and Noma for the Interwebz jam , Pixleen and the alphacrew, and the Metaplace team.

After the metaplace gig I hopped over to videoranch , Mike Nesmith’s live music virtual world, for the launch of the memorial day musicrise festival. It used Activeworlds as the platform, and their live video streaming is very nicely integrated into the environment.

Sounded great to me. I love the scaling of the RL video to avatar size, another subtle cue that adds some more immersion to mixed reality gigs like this.

The First Tokyo barcamp was on last weekend.

I’d never been to a barcamp, so it was interesting to see the self organising presentation system at work.

After lunch I decided to do a little presentation on “The Future of Music”. Check the video out for my take on where I see some of this going, as a result of my prototyping of the Future of Music in Virtual Worlds such as SecondLife and Metaplace.

Music from YIS IT Department on Vimeo.

Here are links talked about in the video:
Bitstream Boogie: youtube.com/watch?v=XVHoNhiowVA
Music Immersion: youtube.com/watch?v=L8lBu22s8mQ
Videoranch (Nesmith): videoranch.com
Indabamusic: indabamusic.com/
Awdio: awdio.com/
Grooveshark: listen.grooveshark.com/
Temple U Japan SL Music study: sonicviz.com/wordpress/2009/04/11/second-life-and-the-future-of-the-music-industry/
Noteflight: noteflight.com/

Temple University Japan have been doing a study on the SL music scene, where a number of people inlcuding myself have been prototyping the future of music in virtual spaces.

The students have looked at various aspects of the music scene and have done some nice posters up illustrating their findings.

I streamed a short SL concert into the Real Life gallery space in Design Festa, Harajuku, Tokyo last night with Noma Falta joining me on Bass.vox from Atlanta via Ninjam. It was a borderline event in technical terms;-) but I think everyone had fun and it illustrated some ideas of what we are doing on the bleeding edge of performing inside virtual spaces to the real world.

The SecondTimes web magazine in Japan has an article on the exhibition (japanese).

I’ll add a link to the Temple University website of the exhibition when it is up.

I’ve been working on other projects the last year so this blog was put on the backburner, but I’m about to start blogging a couple of times a week on the new paradigm music business and the future of the music industry.

Stay Tuned!

I produced my first ticketed event in SecondLife® in December 2006, the first virtual Blues n’Roots festival.

Following on from my recent ninjams with Hathead Rickenbacker and Moshang Zhao I recently collaborated with Von Johin on a ticketed event, also using ninjam, to celebrate the opening of his new sim – the French Quarter.

We sold out in just over a day after going on sale. To keep the sim performance reasonable for the audience (and ourselves!) we limited it to ~55 tickets. It was still laggy, but considering the tech issues we had with rehearsals the final event went very smooth, with only one disconnection and some other minor glitches. The internet gods were with us that evening, and the paying audience were more than satisfied with the three hour show we put on. Setlist was Von Johin solo, Komuso solo (with 1924 martin acoustic, 1934 National Steel, and electric), then Komuso on Harp with Von Johin followed by Von on Bass with Komuso’s electric set.

I recorded it all as well, maybe we’ll release a cut or two soon!

SynaesthAsia, Music Immersion, and other SL Music Machinima!

I’ve been testing a very cool little xplatform open source streaming application.

Basically I have a very high workload with some of the gigs I do, esp more recently doing collaborative ninjams while running visuals as well. So I want a very simple 1 click app to control streaming and recording.

I only need my streaming app to do a couple of things – stream and record.
A bonus is to tell me the stats in realtime so I can track how many logged in and monitor for breaks in the stream, but I now use NetMeter to do the latter and I can have a firefox window open logged into my shoutcast admin to tell me the current logins – and I can also download the stats later anyway.

A small learning curve, and then you can finally dump SAM, Nicecast, Simplecast, and that clunky winamp/shoutcast dsp plugin. Version 1.8 just released with updates to the recording function. Does both shoutcast and icecast, and records your stream at different [ie: higher] bitrate than the outgoing stream – perfect for live recordings.

There are two ways of recording the stream automatically – start recording when you press the record button or to start recording only when you start streaming. I prefer to start recording manually as I like to check the stream is connecting to sl etc. The other way is a little tricker, could possibly use a “record armed” signal just to let you know status visually, but read the help and play with it.

Pros/Cons?
+ simple
+ fairly lightweight
+ flexible enough on streaming and recording formats
+ responsive developer
+ opensource xplatform
- record “on stream connection” setup a little non-intuitive (giving developer feedback now) – manual record aok though.
- no stats graph – can do without but would nice to have a la simplecast

Apart from that is does exactly what I need for this function in my live performance workflow. Other people may need more;-)

Project info site is here , help page is here, and direct download of latest version is here

The developer is very responsive, and feedback helps to keep them interested so let them know if you use it!

Impress R&D had a great celebration party at BarTube last night for the second edition of their SL™® ) Magazine.

I had a lot of fun playing with a prototype of a new interface that a team working on Softbank’s sim had going.

It was using a 3-axis accelerometer hooked up to a modified client to send control data via chat, driving a big robot holding a box full of avatars and physical objects. The objective was pure and simple – get them all out of the box, while they keep trying to get in! Lot of Fun – go here to check it out. Excuse the quality of the images, taken on a mobile!

Update 05 April 2008: Tori Teatime, one of the developers, has just released a demo video:

Then we had a little boogie blues jam – Komuso Tokugawa [me!] on Harp/Slide/Vox, Hayashi-san from Impress on drums, Kanda-san [owner of BarTube and well know IT/Video journalist] on bass, and Yabush Yamdev on guitar along with japanese rock guitar legend Hatake-san . I left Hatake-san, Kanda-san, and Hayashi-san to finish off the night with some wild 70’s rock classic renditions.