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Merging patch banks for iVCS3

This post expands on some very good advice I got from James Edward Cosby in the iVCS3 users Facebook group. It goes into a little more detail than he did, and tries to simplify the instructions as much as possible. Tools you'll need A text editor, preferably one that has a template for XML (colorizing different stuff helps you keep things in the proper format), can collapse portions of the XML tree, and has regular-expression-based searching. None of these features are essential, but they all save a lot of time, for reasons we'll see later. The Atom text editor i

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A response to Mike Metlay’s resignation

I want to respond to Mike Metlay’s “resignation letter”, not because I disagree with anything he says in it, but because 1) I feel his pain, believe me I do, and 2) a lot of what we’re trying to do with NEEMFest is an attempt to respond to some of the atmospheric conditions he describes in his letter.  Most of those atmospheric conditions are described in his third paragraph. Mike’s “logistical issues” and “sub-optimal management” critiques are joined at the hip.  The fact is, pulling off something like Mountain Skies, or NEEMFest, or any other kind of multi-performance

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Setting up an rtmp streaming relay for use with Bandcamp (or maybe to roll your own restream.io)

This is probably the solution to a problem that exactly three other people in the Universe have, but I thought I’d write it down for their benefit ;).   You might also be able to use it to roll your own restream.io.  I suspect you’d need a pretty powerful machine to do that, but perhaps not. The problem was this:  as documented elsewhere, I use an ATEM mini-Pro as the switcher for doing livestream shows. It has only one H.264 encoder, so whatever bitrate you use for streaming is the bitrate it uses for recording.   When I was using Twitch as the delivery point

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TE-MPO livestreaming workshop on multi-layered video for livestreamed shows.

Last night, I did a workshop on multi-layered video for livestreaming for the gang at TE-MPO. It was basically a tutorial on producing livestreamed audiovisuals that look like this example, which is taken from a recorded livestreamed performance by Charles Shriner and I. https://youtu.be/mV6NdQOH2XE My notes for the presentation are below. They offer a way to create video accompaniments for live improv shows that look like the one above. You can see more work like this in my YouTube channel. Neither the notes nor my presentation went into much detail on what

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Some hacks for using OBS with JamKazam

I need to start with some disclaimers. What I'm about to describe works on a Mac M1 mini with the current release of JamKazam (as of 12 March 2022). It uses about 50% of CPU, so you'll have to judge for yourself whether your Mac has enough oomph to get the job done. It is also impossible to know how or if JamKazam will change its video subsystem in the future. The audio-routing hack also depends on having an audio interface that makes the output of the JamKazam session available on an analog output (I use a Zoom U44). By way of background, I do live electro-music str

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A quick word on Bandcamp streaming

[NB: I've since added a post on using a relay for Bandcamp streaming] Charles Shriner and I did our first show via Bandcamp stream last night, and we were generally quite pleased with it. If you haven't tried it, I'd suggest first taking a look at Jeremy dePrisco's toe-in-the-water blog post about it before reading on here -- I'm going to try to be quite brief. A series of bullet points, really: Generally, the quality of the video is lower than it is on Twitch (but see notes below about recommended streaming rates)Generally, the quality of the audio is much higher

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Mixing (and gain staging) for livestreams

In the Q&A after the Walmort Portrait Studio livestream the other night, we got a lot of questions about how we were mixing things during the show.  Charles Shriner and I use a lot of instruments, both hardware and iPad-based, and I think people were really curious about how we were herding all those animals.   As Charles pointed out to me years ago, live improv performances are ultimately really all about mixing, and the more I thought about it the more I thought that the whole question needed a longer – and no doubt more complex – answer.  This blog po

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How the show was done, 2021-06-14

My live show on Friday was followed by a Q-and-A period where audience members asked me various things about how the music and visuals are done. This post responds to some of those questions, and contains links to pretty much anything you'd want to know about the construction of the show. In fact, probably more than you want to know.... I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I gave to some of the questions that followed my show last night, so I thought I’d say a little more here.  Questions answered in the order received: Mr. KF of Lawrenceville, NJ asks:&nb

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New rig!

So, I made a thing. Completed rig sitting in office/studio Every so often you just have to rip your studio apart and start over.  During the last year, like everyone else, I did a lot of livestreaming.  As a result I added a bunch of video capability, got a better understanding of how to make some parts of my setup better, and generally messed around with both audio and video.   I got some good work out of it, but I also got such an ungodly tangle of cables and power cords that I was scared it’d become self-aware.  And the iConnect MIDI4+ I’d used

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Learning with your ears

During the summers of 1980 and 1981, I was hired by the Monadnock Music Festival to manage production and design lighting for productions of Don Giovanni and Armida (reviews here and here).  They were fantastically innovative productions directed by the then-enfant-terrible Peter Sellars … but it’s not them I want to talk about. The Monadnock Music Festival was primarily a chamber-music festival that made use of a slew of very, very talented classical musicians from Boston (while I was there I worked with 3 future Naumburg Award winners, as well as with John Adams a