Matt’s Weblog

Let’s say you’re living in a country where a large atomic energy company that has been, up until that point, run by the government is being sold. Sold to a private company and they know that instantly! roughly 800 jobs would be cut. Now you are a tax payer in that country so you feel as if you have a say in how that money is spent. You’d like to think it’s used responsibly and efficiently. Now this ‘buyer’ has obviously done some looking into their perspective acquisition. They’re somewhat aware of what it is capable of doing without ‘extras’ On the other hand they could be a bunch of total morons convinced they’ll be able to actually run the thing! Any ways. My point here is how would you feel about those 800 people loosing their jobs. They pay taxes too. Do you say.. Hrm. If they really didn’t need them.. then I possibly don’t feel so bad considering it’s my tax dollar that’s paying for some useless stuff. Think of the phone company guys in the vans and hard hats. Or the security guards, or parking guys or whatever. They, just like you, pay tax too! Do you feel bad that they’re loosing their jobs or not. Are they a drain on your money or do they just have a ‘place’ I’m sure every body knows of that guys brother or your roommates friend who has this strange… longer term – short term job. Which is it?

Had an interesting walk home tonight in Madrid… in about 4 seconds I walked past a group of about 50 cab drivers and garbage men hanging out having a major conversation, a guy drunk as fuck pissing on the wall and and massive political protest almost a week after they started camping outside in a huge square in Madrid. Too cool.

Here’s a article on the protest.

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/ Dupin is a pretty cool program for itunes that will check for duplicates and allow you to clean them. There are also several free Apple scrips for iTunes that allow you to clean up your library, add artwork etc.

Here’s an interesting read.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation

The WIkipedia article is really the tip of the ice burg when it comes to digital preservation. There are many people specializing in Audio, Video, photography and other forms of information that are working hard in order to ensure the long-term preservation of digital content.

Digital… it’s perfect forever right.. well as it turns out there is a growing problem with archival and long term storage of digital information. The digital mediums themselves deteriorate, and on top of that, they are made obsolete so quickly that reading the information may be difficult in the near future.

Just think of the past few years and the many types of media storage formats you may have used… some analog, some digital.. VHS, Beta, floppy disk, Laserdisc, Minidisk and even CD’s. Some are already gone.. some on the way out.
But all of these formats have a shelf life, not to mention maintaining the machines required to read them. There are other sustainability factors that apply across all digital formats for all categories of information.

So there is constant work involved in storing mass quantities of information in some form of digital archive. Work to ensure that the rate at which technologies to store this information are grandfathered isn’t faster than they can get stored to the medium itself.. and that in the future these formats will still be readable. zoinks.

As an aside, if you’re interested.
http://www.iasa-web.org/ is the The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives.

This article is about Digitizing the past and present at the Library of Congress. Pretty cool read for sure.

I figured I’d start to write here again. I’ve neglected any of this type of record keeping for a while. The tour is in Spain now.

Here are a few photos from tear down in Moscow..

This is a cigarette add in Japan. Nice.

Well, it has been a while since I’ve written. I’m working for a tour in a big blue and yellow tent, run by some famous french canadians. It’s pretty exciting.

I’m in my hotel in Ottawa, just about to head to work. We’re here for another couple of weeks then move to Miami. Once Miami is finished, pack it all up and head for Japan! Yes. This will be an experience.

This show had to be one of the most rewarding I’ve done in a while. Wil Campa Y Gran Union, a 14 piece cuban salsa band rolled through the Kelowna Community Theatre and we did the audio. It was 12 monitor mixes and lots of Cowbell.
We brought the A&H ML5000 for monitors, the Verona for FOH with the Martin 5 way PA.. which I have to say sounds fantastic. It is such a smooth, musical PA. It really is a pleasure to mix a show on such a nice sounding rig.

Anyways. This band was incredible. Salsa music is so energetic and fun, it was hard not to dance a little.. which is exactly what most of the audience did. They set up a dance floor in front of the stage and it was used! Wil and his band were super happy with everything!

Good times.

I got to head down to Vancouver for a Canada day show on Robson St. and Bute. Had a small stage and a Generator set up with the W8c’s and WSX subs. On the way into town I picked up our Verona from being repaired and was able to use it for the show. This was a good thing considering I was doing 7 mixes for monitors. The first band was Ache Brazil and this was almost a total cluster mess… 15 instrument mics, plus another 7 vocal mics..all in random order and with every banging on crazy drums, jammed up into the back quarter of the stage with pretty much no sound check to speak off.. plus it was a little loud, needless to say it went.

Once the super quick and crazy change over (for just one guy) was done Soulstream came to rock the stage. This band is awesome! They are a 10 piece band, with a horn section and percussion on top of the regular rhythm section. A great bunch of guys/gals to work with!!

In view of all the stage mixes I had to deal with, I decided to put the desk beside the stage and mix monitors first, then dial up a the house mix. In the end I was glad I did this because it helped save space out front which in turn looked better and made it much easier to communicate with the bands.

The weather was great. Band sounded awesome and I was happy!….. Aside from having to drive a pos 5 ton Rider truck it was a really good couple of days.

Here are a couple photos of Soulstream from my little home beside the stage.

Got to mix for Sean Kingston at Kelowna’s Level Night Club. We brought in the Martin 5 way PA (W8′s with W8S subs) The band he brought was awesome and after quite a hectic setup and sound check the show went off really well. The club was packed and the rig sounded really good I thought. We also had opening DJ’s. This presented a bit of a problem but Paul came up with a super cool ‘portable’ DJ stand.. that really was a road case with everything on it.. 2 XLR leads and one power plug.. Just roll it in to place, plug in 3 cords and they where good to go. Once Sean and his band finished I think we had the fastest change over ever.. about 45 seconds!

In the end, after al the work I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It was a bit of a challenge mixing in such a small room with really reflective walls, especially considering how loud everything got with all the fold-back and stage volume.

We got the chance to do a repeat show at the Beaverdell Hotel with Livewire this year. We improved quite a lot of things over last years show including; bringing some stage to build a stage thrust, the lighting and of course the PA. It was still 4 Martin W8LC and 4 WSX boxes per side, but we got the PA higher this time . I think over all the show sounded and looked much better! Here, again are a few more photos from the show.

I had the trusty Venice at FOH, and Christoph mixed monitors on the A&H ML5000. Both nights went really well and the opening band XLR8R was awesome! A few photos of us, and our gear ended up on their site.

Alright.. so one of the larger shows I did recently was the UBC-O Graduation ceremony. We had quite a bit of rigging for this show, as well as video support and a 14 piece orchestra. The PA consisted of 6 W8LC boxes per side with 4 JBL SRX-712′s for front fill. The Venice was my desk at FOH. It sounded really good and I was really happy with how the show turned out.

Here are a few photos of the Gym before and during the show.

I’ve been in BC working for SPL again this summer. It has been crazy! So many shows. I’ve taken the week off to visit Lisaun in LA and have some time to write here. We have done so many shows I think it is time to post about a few of them.

So I guess I will write about them here in a few posts and try to cover some of the shows.

Posts to follow…..

So after witnessing my parents losing all the data on their computer due to a hard drive failure. I decided it was finally time to set up a backup system for Lisaun’s and my computers.

Both of us are on Mac laptops, and there is a built in backup utility in the new version of OS X called Time Machine. Now this isn’t the most sophisticated backup utility there is, but it is at least one.. and really easy to use. So I bought a 1 TB RAID drive, set it up as RAID 1 (mirrored 500GB array), and plugged it into our Airport Express base station. This will allow us to have both our laptops backup to the same drive over the wireless network. Now because Time machine will continue to create incremental backups until the backup drive is full, I set the max file size on each of the sparse bundles (each of our backup files) using hdiutil:
“hdiutil resize -size 200g -shrinkonly /Volumes/RAID\ Backup\ Main/Matt\ Steuart’s\ MacBook\ Pro_xxxxxxxxx.sparsebundle” … (xxxxx being the MAC address of my laptop’s wireless card)
to 200 gigs each.. I also added as separate partition on the drive for me to store things I have on my external drive such as my library of equipment manuals, some important downloads etc… so that’s where the other space went if you’re wondering.

Sweet, then using Time Machine Editer I set it so Time Machine only backs up once a day, at 6:00 AM, seeing as we don’t really need backups every hour. So now, for not all that much money. ($250 for the hard drive, and $150 for the Airport Extreme) I now have a pretty nice, wireless, automatic, redundant backup system!

This is what I wake up to every morning.

I just spent a couple weeks onboard the Queen Mary 2. Doing arse trans-atlantics. Back and forth… back and forth. yawn.

But, there are some plus sides. The PM1D for starters. I really enjoyed working on that desk, although I’ve always found Yamaha boards nice to use. The Meyer sound rig was also very nice. PA-UPA-1Ps, UPA-2Ps, UPM-1Ps, UPM-2Ps and USW-1Ps. Quite a nice sound for sure. As another bonus.. the entire band monitors with Aviom A-16′s. This drops the stage volume considerably, not to mention frees me from dealing with “can I have a little more guitar…” Funny that this ship has more mixes just for the band than most others do for the entire theatre!

Here are a few photos from the ship, I’m testing out a new feature that WordPress has now.

We went to the Flying Saucer today in Nashville. This place is sweet. Why? because they have Lots and lots of beer. More than 70 taps pull drafts from some of the best breweries around the globe, and 160-plus bottled varieties to finish off the selection. Not to mention the excellent food.

The coolest part about this place is they have a UFO card, its like a safeway shoppers club card, but instead of keeping track of what brand of pasta sauce you bought, it keeps track of all the different kinds of beer you’ve had. And they have milestones. If you make it to 200 different kinds of beer, you get a saucer, with your name on it hung up on the wall.

What a great accomplishment that would be!

So far I am really enjoying Nashville, more on that to come in the next day or two.

Oh, and I bought a new Macbook Pro, its sweet.

Lisaun and I just spent a week in Columbus, and I couldn’t help take photos of these two.. first off…

Mo Money Taxes! I’m pretty sure I don’t want someone who can’t even spell doing my taxes.

And I wonder who goes to get their website from a winnebago..