Somewhat quiet on this particular front

Things have been very quiet on here of late, for a number of reasons. We were away on holiday for a week, and the weekend before that, my daughter and her son moved out of our house - after eight years occupancy of the first floor. Sad to see them go, since my grandson has pretty much grown up here, but they're not far away, and we'll see them fairly regularly, I guess.

In the weeks before that, and again this week, I've been repetiteuring for Opera Otago's production of The Christmas Carol, an operatic version by New Zealand composer, Philip Norman. This has been full-on, with rehearsals every day of the week. I'm also going to be one of four keyboard players during the performances (the original orchestral score has been rearranged for the four of us), so that's another thing that's had to be worked on. Good for my brain and for the fingers, which need to keep working otherwise they stiffen up, but tiring nevertheless.

Just today the Production Manager was looking for a person to work on the sound for the show. I suggested the guy who did the sound for Grimhilda! back in 2012. He was very good, and very helpful. I'd like to say he'd be able to use a Behringer x32 to do the work, but I doubt if that's going to be likely. It'll be some old machine that's been around the theatre scene for a few years, I suspect. The Behringer is a super-modern digital affair and has all the bells and whistles. The photograph below probably doesn't do it justice:

So who was Behringer, you ask? (As I did myself.) His full name was Uli Behringer and he founded his audio equipment company in 1989. Not that long ago in historic terms, but probably centuries in audio terms. His original company has now become of the leaders in the field, marketing in a wide variety of countries. Here's another interesting bit of information (since I know you're keen to learn everything you can from this post). Behringer has perfect pitch; hence the 'ear' on his company's logo. 

There you go!

Making a sow's ear out of a silk purse

Though visually-impaired I am,
I'm not a Bushnell Trophy Cam.

It takes its photos in the dark,
of moose and deer and brush and bark,

but this is not it's bestest feature;
it's not a true nocturnal creature.

Its up-close photos blurry are -
with this it's almost on a par

with me, whose focus right up close
is poor and makes me quite morose

when reading crossword clues
or trying to re-wire a fuse,

or threading a needle, removing a splinter,
or reading some tiny print cursing the printer!

The Bushnell's small, compact and neat -
it won't get caught beneath your feet;

combines its audio and video
in one impregnable presidio

where, though there is great battery life,
the batteries (unless you use a knife)

are virtually impossible to change
and this is something rather strange,

a kind of ill-disposed ludology
with true time lapse technology.

Stray turkeys and nomadic deer
are caught on Bushnell's camera clear;

it's pensive tree-appended stare
will catch the odd meandering bear.

Though if the bear should see it there,
then Bushnell's Trophy Cam, beware!

Fantasy animals

It's a night for randomness, since I'm not feeling 100% well. 

If I say to you, Presonus Firepod, you'll know what I'm talking about, I'm sure.  For those who don't, Presonus is a brand name.  Firepod is...well, Firepod is...let me get someone else to explain it: It's a Firewire interface with eight analog inputs. There, that helped now, didn't it?

Okay, this is like a puzzle within a puzzle.  We've solved what a Firepod is, but now we have to find out what a Firewire is. Well, apparently it's similar to the cord you might use to plug into your computer, with a USB on one end, and a different kind of connection at the other.  I use one such beast to connect the Kindle to the computer, at times. Firewire, simply put, is a way to connect different pieces of equipment so they can easily and quickly share information, and there's a photo of a typical example included here for your benefit.

So a Firepod is a Firewire with, you may remember, eight analog inputs.  Somebody on Facebook tonight claimed that when he sees Input used as a verb, he sees a German golfer. That's not only irrelevant to our discussion, since we're talking about input as a noun, but somewhat obscure to me, so we'll move on.  Note that the Firepod has analog inputs.  I was trying to visualize this, and decided that in the end it was easier to show you than explain it.  Here's a picture - count the inputs: 

I assume that the analog aspect (I'm talking as one who knows nothing about audio equipment, so correct me if you wish) means that it isn't digital signals that are being transmitted.  That would seem obvious to me, but I've been wrong before when I've said something was obvious (frequently, in fact, especially domestically).

However, this little excursion has introduced me to a couple of animals I didn't know before, the Firepod, and the Firewire.  They sound like creatures who could quite easily inhabit the world of Ursula le Guin, but I don't know, since, as I said in my last post, I've only read one of her books...

Accompanying and pianos

Due to a fellow-accompanist having a serious problem with one of his eyes, and needing to rest for a few weeks, I've inherited a bunch of accompaniments for the upcoming Cleveland Awards on Sunday week, and the junior singing competitions a couple of weeks later.  On top of that I'm going to be rehearsing with a clarinettist (not the same one as last year) whose usual accompanist is away for several weeks.

Suddenly having to learn a bunch of pieces, some of which are actually making me work.  It's very good for me, but it's a serious intrusion into my otherwise quiet and moderately-paced life as a retired person.

One thing about accompanying singers in these situations is that it's all acoustic: we don't have any of the difficulties of dealing with amplifiers (one of our major bugbears at church) or M-Audio microphones or the like.  Acoustic is good.  You come to appreciate it more and more when you have to deal with a battery of techno gear, much of which refuses to work as it should because it's been plugged in where it doesn't want to be.  And so on.

On the other hand, in favour of something technical: during the winter I tend to practice on the electronic piano we bought for the musical last year.  I can do that in a warmer part of the house: the baby grand is on the cold side of the house, in a room that only gets sun in the later part of the afternoon (which means, in winter, not a long patch of sun at all).  The only tricky thing about this is that I've felt for some time that there was perhaps a slight difference in width of the keys on the electronic piano as compared to the baby grand.  It turns out to be fractional, but I'm sure it makes a difference!  As a pianist I should be used to pianos in all shapes and sizes, and I've certainly played some doozies in my time: ones with missing notes, or notes that stick, or ivory broken or gone completely; ones that are plainly out of tune, or haven't been tuned in many moons, ones that have no 'give', or no depth, or no volume, or no guts.

And then of course there have been some beauties.  While in New Plymouth for the Brass Band solo competitions last week, I played on three very nice pianos.  One was the grand in the hall where the Slow Melody contest was held.  It was a delight. and unfortunately I didn't get another opportunity to use it.  The other two pianos, both uprights, one that we practised on and one that was the performance piano, were both good quality with no flaws.  It makes a huge difference when you're playing for a competition; nothing is more off-putting than having to deal with a piano's 'issues' while trying to do your best for a soloist!

The Naming of the Dead

I had a cold last week and it was one of those annoying ones where every time you try to do something your nose starts to drip.  So you clear it, and it drips again.  In the end I decided to spend most of one day in bed, and we found one of the Ian Rankin stories I hadn't read as an audio book on the laptop.  It was The Naming of the Dead, which came out in 2006, and is set in 2005, in the tumultuous week in Edinburgh and the surrounding area when the Gleneagles G8 Conference was taking place.  Add to that, at a later point in the story, the London Underground bombings, and you have a canvas broad enough on which to spread marches with people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, activist attacks, insurrections and a city full of policemen from all over the country keeping order and containing people who want to do damage to somebody. With this as his background, Rankin then proceeds to offer up a man falling from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle - is it a suicide, an accident, or a murder? - as well as three murders that are seemingly related to each other: they may indicate a serial killer is on the loose, someone who appears to be working through a list of known rapists or sexual attackers.  Or they may not!

Rebus is the star of the show, as you'd expect, though not in the eyes of several of the other characters, and his accomplice in detective discovery is again Siobhan Clarke, who more than once frets that she'd becoming too much like her mentor, for better or worse.  Like Rebus, she finds it hard to leave well alone, or to work anything like the normal 9-5 hours.  Her parents have a big part to play in the story too, being hippies from way back, people who want to protest at what the G8 are doing.  Big Ger Cafferty returns as well, adding to the mix, stirring up trouble wherever he can, and there is a wide range of other characters, good, bad and devious.  This is a classic Rankin, in which he uses his skill to paint a detailed picture of a city in siege while at the same time giving us a superb detective story.  And better still, the murderer is someone who appears throughout the story but doesn't seem to be in the least likely to be a suspect until late in the book.  This is in marked contrast to the most recent Rebus story, where the murderer seemed to be invisible for most of the time.

I listened to what I thought was almost all of the book, got up the next day intending to listen to the rest - about an hour and half's worth - came to the end of that and found that the book wasn't even half finished.  We had a copy on the shelves that I'd never got round to reading - we also had the rest of the audio book on the laptop as it turned out, but it was in another different folder.  So I was swamped for choice.

Scottish actor, Tom Cotcher

The narrator on the audio book version is Tom Cotcher (as far as I can tell; I haven't got the cover of the CD to hand).  He's narrated a number of the Rebus books and does a superb job with the characterizations of a large cast.  I probably should have allowed myself the time to listen to the rest of the book instead of reading it, but it would have taken me at least another full day to do so, whereas I could fit the reading of it in much more productively around other things.  This is the only problem for me with audio books: I find it hard to just sit and listen to one - I want to be doing something else at the same time.  They're great when you're on a long journey (we listened to a non-Rebus Rankin book - Watchmen - earlier in the year in this way), or when your body just doesn't want to do, or can't manage to do, anything else at all; when you've got a heavy cold, in other words.  And there's always the issue, when you're in bed listening, that you might fall asleep and miss something - this doesn't tend to happen when I'm listening in the car!

Watchmen is one of Rankin's one-off stories.  As far as I know the characters don't appear in any other book.  It's a curious piece about a kind of behind-the-scenes department that's dealing with espionage and such, but the characters in the story seem as much intent on double-crossing their colleagues as attending to their proper business.  It's set in both London and Ireland, and the main character is as unlike Rebus as you can imagine.  A desk-job man, essentially, but forced out into the field, and forced to find courage and initiative he wasn't always aware he had.  He does share with Rebus a certain amount of lack of respect for authority, and a difficulty with his marriage and his student son (though he fares better than Rebus in both these areas), but otherwise he's his own man.

Audio on the blog

Out of the blue a person named Mike from Dunedin in Florida emailed and asked if I knew how to put an audio file on a blog. I didn't, but after looking around a bit I'm now trying out a way to play audio through this blog...

Suite for Cor Anglais and Strings third movement by mike-crowl

I've just tested this out and it works. Takes a bit of time to download, but it gets there. I'd remembered that SoundCloud has a 'share' section on each music/audio file you upload to them, and guessed there might be a way of embedding a file. There is. And here it is...

I'll have to do some more...!