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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.emusic-l
Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 15:37:50 EDT
From:         metlay <metlay@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>
Subject:      Team Metlay 1992: Screaming Into The Aether (part 1 of 2)
Comments: To: EMUSIC-L <emusic-l@auvm.american.edu>

Hi gang. We did it again....

The dust is settling and the victims are slowly recovering, so I figured I'd
dash off a summary posting about the 1992 Team Metlay Barbeque and Jam
Session, which went on from 31 July to 17 August and was the reason people
didn't hear from a lot of the usual loudmouths on this group for the past few
weeks....

I'd like to thank everyone who made it this time out for their patience and
determination. We had some rough spots, but you made it all worth it. For
the "main weekend," we had brief visits from Joe McMahon, Dean Swan, and
for a slightly longer period Adam Schabtach; John 3 Rossi and his son John 4
were here for the week before that, and William Sequeira was here for the
week after that. Nick Rothwell and Eirikur Hallgrimsson were here for the
entire session, which they barely survived, as was I. Special thanks go to
Kurt Geisel, who was very helpful in setup and got in when he could over
the time span, but who was prevented from much participation by his worries
over his fiancee, who was in the hospital at the time. We're glad to hear
that Marie is on the mend! And a quick hello to Carl Brenner, Dan Barrett,
and Brett Maraldo, who couldn't make it this time around. The lousy bums. |->

This year's get-together was different in intent and results than the
Bandwidth sessions of December 1990: there were more people here than
last time, and the event was intended to be more social than musically
productive, so while there *was* some music recorded, it was not the
slam-bam-get-it-on-tape kind of atmosphere we had for Bandwidth. Mainly
we learned several valuable things that I'd like to pass on to you while
they're still fresh:

--

1. Most importantly of all, I wish to re-emphasize the basic message
behind the Team sessions: there is *nothing* special about this particular
group of people that made it possible for us and only us to do this. You
all can and should give it a try if you're tired of playing Emusic alone
and you don't have a local band to work with. It's a blast.

2. If a group of Emusicians gets together for a session like this, it is VITAL
that every member has his or her OWN means of working with musical material
without having to rely on a central computer or sequencer. We went a little
bit too far over to the networked side of things this time, and some people
got frustrated when they couldn't use the network effectively.  A separate
submixer with a headphone jack is extremely handy, as is a selfcontained MIDI
network that is easily configurable by the user. Time is too pressing to get
everything intimately accessible by everyone: there is merit to each person
providing the main computer and mixer with two MIDI cables and a stereo pair
of outputs.  This is a BIG statement in favor of travelling with a laptop that
runs a sequencer/librarian/whatever that you know backwards and forwards....

3. And while we are on the subject of laptops, we had a PowerBook 100 and a
PowerBook 140 side by side in the rig, and we threw everything at them from
Galaxy to UpBeat to Performer to MAX. We also had a PB 170 on hand that we
worked with a little bit. The results were simple: the PowerBook 140 and 170
were almost unusable, and the PowerBook 100 ran everything and I mean
EVERYTHING flawlessly. (Except the MTP DA and MTP Fast mode. 1MHz was fine.)
Details in a future post from either me or Nick, if there's interest, but
there really isn't much more to say than what I've said already....

3a. Apple has no qualms about lying to its customers in cold hard print. See
the Letter column of this month's KEYBOARD for a lovely mixture of doubletalk
and outright lies from two Apple reps about the PowerBook and MIDI.

4. We discovered all sorts of interesting things about the various gear that
people brought, which I plan to save for another post (clearly labelled
"gearhead blather, hit 'n' now", I promise).

5. Never try to hand a 14-year-old kid a MIDI guitar and expect him to fall in
love with it on the spot, no matter how cool the synth you're hooked to might
be. Tracking glitches are just NOT vanHalenesque, doodz. (On the other hand, a
Zoom 9002 does wonders-- guitar in, entire Megadeth album (minus drums) out.)

6. Always be ready to roll tape, sequencer or NO sequencer. Most of what we
got this time was obtained by rolling DAT and playing live.

7. PCM works well and gives great fidelity, but the convenience of DAT is
a big point in its favor. But I'm still not convinced; the Tascam DA-30
will still prohibit copies of SCMS encoded tapes, even with its SCMS jumper
cut, and some of our backups had pops and clicks....I think I need to try a
pro deck that handles copy code properly.

8. Never try to get customer service from Opcode or MOTU during MacWorld week.

9. Dr. Pepper is formulated differently in the USA and in the UK. Nick
couldn't drink the stuff he found back home, but here he was swigging it
down....

10. When people are having more fun with a Yamaha SHS-10 than the main rig,
you're doing something wrong.

11. The underpass under I-279 at Point Park is the best echo/reverb chamber
in the Eastern USA, but forget recording there without a Faraday cage for your
mic because it's also a phenomenal FM waveguide.

12. If a young lady advertising herself as redhaired, MIDIwise and available
posts a singles message on r.m.s, meet her first before dragging all of your
out-of-town friends to a concert where she's playing. JUST to avoid surprises.
(Seriously, though, Lisa, we hope you had fun visiting the studio last Friday;
but we didn't use your flute solo, alas....)

13. If anyone asks you what the dividing line between the profound and the
absurd is, tell him, "About a perfect fifth." That's how much transposition
it takes to turn the Gyuto Monks into the Gyuto Smurfs. (Yowza!)

14. Never spend your summer vacation trying to teach an Englishman to say
"Yo!" It's an exercise in futility. (Sorry, Nick.)

--

The results of this get-together were about 25 minutes worth of fairly
weird music, that I don't feel is all that professional-sounding but
everyone else seems to like. We're going to combine it with material
from the January/February 1992 sessions (the "Beta Test" sessions, as
they were called) and a couple of other weekends we have planned for
later this year. Overall title for the project: "Screaming into the
Aether," a phrase coined by Nick to describe the behavior of non-RF-
shielded gear in the studio. It'll be about an hour's worth of program,
but nothing is going to be done with it until after we get Bandwidth out
on CD, and even then we need to discuss what can be done; the recording
conditions this time were less than ideal, and I'm not sure how much
of the tape is salvageable. But we'll see. Aside from answering questions
and doing a quick post on the gearhead's view of things, this is all I
plan to say about it until we actually have something to show or not show.
(That was the mistake made with Bandwidth: promising too much too soon.)

Thanks for listening,

--
dr. michael metlay          \ Metlay's Law: "A newly-announced, spiffy new
atomic city                  \ piece of gear may look *great* on paper
                              \ -- but you can't play paper."
metlay@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu \
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