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 have lots to say.. including the fact that I signed a NDA agreement.. sorry no photos or details.
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.
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Lisaun and I had our interview with US Immigration yesterday in order to prove that we are really married and that they can give me my green card… and they did!
It was a pretty simple interview, we mostly just had to show that we really lived together, and had joint finances, showed some photos from the last 4 years and that was it! So now I just have to wait to actually receive the card in the mail. This card is a 2 year ‘temporary’ permanent residence card, and before our 2 years is up we will have to submit more paperwork and do another interview.
Either way it is very exciting considering we did all the paperwork ourselves and ended up saving a heap of money on ‘legal’ fees.
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..
Step 5!! It’s slowly creeping along. Today I got the email saying that the USCIC has approved and ordered production of my Worth Authorization Card. That kicks some ass because that means I can apply for a Social Security Number, and then get a job, and pay taxes. booooo.
But its pretty seriously cool because, well.. I can start to get on this job thing!
Anyways. We’re off to Tempe, Arizona and then to San Antonio, Texas! Hopefully more to write soon!
Christoph sent me this website today. I thought it was funny. So check out Matt Stuart’s Website He’s got some great photos on there and I do recommend checking it out.
Step 4 of many more.. Today I got an email from the USCIS Immigration people saying that my request for travel documents has been approved. This means I am now allowed to leave the US. I’m no longer a prisoner!
Now, the next step is my work permit.. and then some interviews. But this feels pretty good!
For some reason, not too sure why I’ve started to play around with some of my photos in photoshop. So any ways, here are a couple of them. The Original photograph is on the left, and the one I messed with on the right. I think they look cool.. but thats just me.
Except this one, It is just by itself…
Well, I got an Apple TV for Christmas, and out of the box, its a pretty dull unit. I mean Yay, I can pay for compressed movies from the itunes music store, watch You Tube and stream music and videos from my mac. Not that I couldn’t already play music through my airport express.
BUT, the potential in this thing lies with what people have made it do. Inside it is running a small version of OS X, it has a 1Ghz Intel chip, 256 MB of ram, a 160 gig HD and a decent video card, and with the right ‘treatment’ it can play divx, xvid, mpegs, dvd folders and more. Too Cool.
Alright so all I had to do was make a USB patchstick to enable SSH, downgrade the OS to an older version by replacing the existing OS’s restore disk image with an older one, install some plugins to allow it to play other video formats, installed FTP, AFP and even Remote Desktop (that one was for fun) re-upgrade the OS and safe patching it so that it won’t automatically update when Apple puts out a new one.
But now, its a fully cool box! I can drop files from my mac, via the Apple TV being AFP mounted on my desktop. Darn cool I say. If I get close to filing up the 160 gig HD, I can buy an external USB drive and mount it on the Apple TV, and store even more on there. Pretty sweet!
Well.. the immigration stuff seems to be moving along slowly. Today I had to go for fingerprints, but the funny thing is they don’t call it fingerprints.. they call it Biometrics. I think maybe it has something to do with the bad things ‘fingerprinting’ is usually associated with. When you think of it that way, I guess it I should appreciate the spin in the title. Actually, it’s really considerate of the Government to be so concerned with how I might feel, and I should appreciate their efforts to make me more at ease with giving over far far too much personal information. I suppose that it is all peachy when you call it biometrics.
Ah well, either way.. It is done, I can move on I hope and get this stupid period of time over with.
Yesterday I sent in all my immigration paperwork to the USCIS (US immigration) in Chicago. It took Lisaun and I almost 16 hours of straight form reading/ filling out to do finish them, not including all the pre-paperwork research I’d done, note taking, list making, medical exam getting and the dozen or so passport photos.. zoinks! What an ordeal. Not that I am saying it isn’t warranted, this is my petition to become a resident of a different country and as such should not be taken with a grain of salt, it just as you might know from other government paperwork (taxes.. passport forms) is tedious and challenging in the wordings. In some cases, I was asked the same question on different forms.. but with different wordings. Prudent and thorough reading is the name of the game!
Either way it sure felt like sending off a part of your life. By that I mean that once we send it, its just a waiting game with almost no guarantee. Let us just hope that it all goes off without a hitch.
I’m sure that who ever opens our package will at least be impressed with the leg work that went into preparing it. We had every form in order.. with little sticky tags on them for quick identification in a pile, the corresponding paperwork labeled and paper-clipped, all the passport photos clipped to the forms that needed them. All nice and pretty. I’m sure that has to count for something.
I’ll hopefully have some good news to post on here as the months come!