Tuesday night 11:54 PM. Sun night was Smokeshack Sunday, played 10-11, it was a practice run for the show this weekend with my new midi controller (more on this later). Needless to say, there were some serious fucking up with the controller and software, and the music came to a screeching halt a couple of times.

Turns out I was trying to do things a bit too complicated. I was hitting wrong buttons because I hadn't learned the right patch to hit after the 2nd track, just too confusing. So the past few days I have been working on simplifying the PA to balance stability of the system and the ability to improvise. I think I have come up with a good system and am going to hit up the Smokeshack tomorrow to test it on their kickass sound system.

Now a little bit about the new MIDI controller that caused all of this, M-Audio Trigger FInger. Read about it in FutureMusic a while back and finally went and tested it out. Thing works like a champ with Ableton Live and Cubase. 16 velocity sensitive pads, four faders and 8 knobs, all assignable, with 16 presets. This thing was made to work with Live, its easy to program and the trcks you can pull off with it are great, like using the velocity to trigger the gain on a filter. This would mean that while you push the pad, the harder you push on it the higher the gain. You can assign it to volume, to delay times, quantize rates. All sorts of cool tricks. And that is where I got caught up, trying to do so many dumb little tracks just because I could, not because they did anything for the set. So, the set is now simplified, PA ready to be tested at the shack tomorrow, time to get excited for Alaska!

I leave Thurs night at 9:45pm, meeting up with Jimini Crickit at Sea-Tac, then up to Anchorage. Spend the day there, then play that night at Bringin' the Boom! MC'ing for Jimini then playing a live PA, should be a good time. I'll be sure to make updates while I am up there, probably use the audioblog. Also expect a bunch of photos when I get back. Should be a good time.