so much for my roll of frequent updates, it’s been almost a month since I last posted. A lot has happened – the annual Wadaiko Rindo concert for one. This was my fourth, and previous experience told me they never go as well as you would like, no matter how well rehearsed you are. Unfortunately we were not well rehearsed at all, one of my classes had only played it’s piece the whole way through maybe half a dozen times, so predictably we screwed it up. More specifically, I screwed it up. On the first day at least, got the order mixed up and everyone else who was using me for cues got confused. Luckily my talented girlfriend managed to get us back on track, but even before that it was a pretty incoherent mess. During the matinee performance the following day we did much better, but instead I had an epic fail moment in my other class’s piece, knocking my bachi (drum stick) out of my hand about 2 hits into my long-ish solo. People say I recovered well, but afterwards I thought I could have done better – or perhaps even not dropped the bachi, but hey, maybe my expectations are just too high…
I also finally got around to reinstalling logic last night. I decided to go with version 9 in the end but I will be sticking with the 32 bit mode. I also picked up a brand new Allen and Heath Xone 22 mixer, to replace my years old cheap-piece-of-shit Behringer DJX700. The 700 was a good buy at the time I guess, $350 or so for a mixer which is basically a knock off Pioneer DJM600. I paid about the same for the Xone22, but I managed to get the last unit in the store at DJ City who are having a pretty massive sale right now. I thought about picking up a pair of DB Tech Opera 402s as well, but it was $1500 I couldn’t really justify. Hopefully the new toy will encourage me to practice more, at least when i move into my own place next year and have the space to leave my stuff set up.
