Actual Screaming Teenage Girls.

Actual screaming teenage girls.

This is…new.

This was the first non 21+ show we’ve played since the Burnsville Debacle, so it was a chance to play to an audience that hasn’t already seen us play 600 times.  This resulted in a knot of people in the audience who were very enthusiastic about our performance.  VERY enthusiastic.  Given that the “act” we were opening for was the return of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, there may have been a bit of a predilection in the audience toward enthusiasm.  Hey, we’ll take what we can get.

I can’t cast any aspersions – they bought CDs!  About 5 of them raided my merch bin and bought a whole mess of stuff, so I’m exceptionally pleased with that. 

Everything ran well from the laptop.  We had our dry vocals pumped through the monitors, wet vox front of house, submixed synths/backing (which the FOH guy still had a bit too low – the standard peril of an electronic band), all our monitor levels seemed pretty good (and now that I’ve got a dedicated mix bus for that, I can do funky in-ear things someday).  We did have one Audio/MIDI sync error popup during the last track but there were no ill effects to that.  I should probably set my buffer up from its current 128 samples to something a little less…dangerous.  The latency at 512samples is likely well outside the range of human detection.

Only major technical glitch was that sometime during the show, the set screw on my 58Beta fell out, leaving the xlr assembly dangling dangerously.  I’ve got some replacement screws on order.
In other news, I finally finished my Xuberx remix this weekend – I’ve been promising it to those guys since December.  It’s…different.  For one thing, it’s an effective 59bpm, and it’s all dubsteppish.  With violins.  It gave me a chance to mess around with running the fiddle into the ULN-2’s high-z inputs, and oh my god does that sound nice, especially with the character plugins giving it a bit of extra warmth.  Some effects-chain tweaking with  an ampsim and some reverb gave me the L. Shankar-ish tone I was looking for.  Now that I can get good electric violin tone again, I can record more violin parts.  All I need to do is, uh, write some non-crappy violin parts!