Friday, March 14, 2008

A New Day

Hello. I see it is Friday morning already. Had a lovely dinner out last night. Although always fun to come back home, the ride jostled me into illness. As a child I got car sick all the time, and in my late 20's it simply went away. But when I turned 54 it came back.

In any case, no sleep there. I was feeling pretty nauseous once arriving home so distracting myself with some graphical ideas and sitting in one place was my best resolution. Of course, inside of an hour my stomach felt fine, and then I was left with just a headache and my mind was on fire with ideas so I fired up my web tools.

Made some modifications, minor edits, a few new graphics, trying some different rollover colors, and integrated my blog into my websites more efficiently. Changing some internal elements of Blogger's HTML is a pain because of how they have their CSS setup. So I find it's simply much easier to pull most animated graphics from my server. But I would prefer to have Blogger hosting them for faster operation.

As usual Xara was king of the hill last nite. It is such a fun and productive application to use. Most other applications truly require you to have each of your projects or documents open in their own document. But using XaraXtremePro, "most of the time" I will have only ONE document open, with a black background (because that is the color I render my graphics to) and then I may have 2, 3 or like tonite 5 graphic projects going on at the same time on the same screen within the same project. And I will save that .xar file as it is. I use a productive labeling scheme and I can now open that particular file to accomplish FIVE different graphical achievements. Very convenient to say the least.





Between now and Monday I will be ordering materials and parts for the NASAV studio. First, finally getting the table going. Next to order the 1GB RAM (2-512MB DIMM) for the MOTIF XS (picture shown above). Installing this, "pre-tested" memory enables the use of the built-in sampler as well as being able to jack a microphone directly into the XS and utilize its built-in VOCODER. My Audio Technica ATM75 phantom head-mic can also be switched over to 9 volt changing its status to a DYNAMIC mic which works well with the vocoder. And even though the MOTIF XS in itself has a tremendous volume of onboard DSP effects and the ability to create vocal harmony tracks via its 16 track sampler/sequencer/mixer, I'm very excited to jack the mic into the TC-Helicon vocal processor which in turn outputs stereo into the MOTIF's sampler. Now besides the MOTIF's DSP abilities, the TC-Helicon just added 5 harmony tracks including thicken, along with over 100 presets and effects. Yes! I am very much looking forward to things getting exciting here in the month of March. With a little luck I will be up and running just post April Fools.



The most challenging aspect to this project will be to construct the mixer stand extended riser that will come up through the table. First, I am going to try heavy duty ABS PVC which will mount into the existing 5-spoked and wheeled floor stand which resides beneath the table. The boom mic stand has plenty of extension so there won't be any fudging needed to install and set that up. But, the mixer stand post doesn't rise high enough to mount the mixing board high enough ABOVE my other studio gear on the table. Including monitors which are 15" inches high. So a custom length post must be made. The post will be male at one end and female at the other. I don't exactly have a machine shop here in RV-in-the-forest-land, so I will keep this as simple as possible. With a little luck I can PVC my way through this and it will be strong enough to support the mixer's weight, which although is not light duty, it isn't too heavy for the industrial thicker PVC. The picture shown above is to scale and as you can see, its purpose was merely to provide me with a yes or no whether or not I could fit my gear into this given space. Once that became a, "Yes" then the next step is to create the mixer stand extension riser pole, and to drill holes in the table for the 2 poles, another for cords and cable routing and four holes not shown in the diagram which will be used to mount the aluminum channel which will hide the AC power cables which drop from the ceiling. This is purely asthetics as the cords pose no issues hanging from their sockets.

Well, that's all I had on my mind for this blog. Later today we're going to finish mounting more velcro for additional black toweling mounts (again asthetics) and to finally create the custom clothing hamper closet which will be a blessing. Other than 10 minutes dusting and vacuuming it's back to, "play time".

;;cheers;;