Tom Bruce Music

Live ambient with color added

Tom Bruce Music

Live ambient with color added

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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

by Tom Bruce
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Upping the game on livestreaming

Last night, in the very good company of Karl Fury and Rob Snyder, I did a live-streamed show that was -- from the audience's point of view -- less than successful. There was a fair amount of video-stuttering and re-buffering, and I'm sorry that (at least) some people had a less than satisfactory experience. It's worth taking a minute to consider why, and examine some alternatives. The fact is that no live performer can accurately predict what is going to happen when a live stream goes up. There are too many variables (we'll get to those in a minute). Why? Much

by Tom Bruce
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Making OP-1 samples the easy way

There's a lot of confused (and confusing) information online about making OP-1 samples. They have to be 16-bit mono AIF files with a sample rate of 22050 hz. ffmpeg is a sort of Swiss Army knife for media conversion. Here's how you use it to make an OP-1 sample out of any audio file : ffmpeg -i your-input-file.wav -ss 0 -t 6 -c:a pcm_s16le -ac 1 -ar 22050 your_sample_file.aif This grabs the first 6 seconds of your input file and turns it into an OP-1 sample. If you want a different timespan, specify the start time in seconds with -ss , and the length with -t (s

by Tom Bruce
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