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You Load Sixteen Tons
Oct. 11th, 2020 10:51 pmTomorrow, if everything goes according to plan, we'll do the tech check for the Pegasus Concert, where Gretchen and I will be delighted to have a chance to sing "Apology". Getting *ready* for this endeavor required a lot of heavy lifting.
We're planning on using the recording laptop as the centerpiece of our strategy. The recording laptop is *old*. It weighs a ton. It's also been sitting in its bag since Capricon, which meant that the first thing to do was to power it up yesterday and make sure that it had downloaded all of the Windows Updates and such that it needs, because you surely don't want that to happen at random. That took a few hours. Then I decided this would be a fine time to back up the Capricon recordings to the NAS. The recording laptop is old and has slow Wi-fi, but eventually everything made its way to the server.
The recording laptop is old with a not-so-great webcam, but I have a new cheap Chinese webcam that I bought recently that is already starting to exhibit tiny failures, like one of the two strips not lighting up when the camera goes on. Happily, the webcam is not heavy, so I retrieve it from my desk on the second floor and haul it back down and plug it into the laptop, where it initializes itself correctly. I also download the Zoom software onto the laptop, because we'll be needing that for the tech check.
Sane people have a small, lightweight audio interface. Or maybe they have a small, lightweight mixer with a USB output that handles enough ins and outs for two vocalists and one or two instruments. *I* have a 16-channel Yamaha mixer that -- what's that phrase again? -- weighs a ton. Up from the basement and to the dining room table it goes, along with two mic stands, two mics, and assorted cables.
Ok, let's wire this up, adjust the digital patching, plug it into the computer. Eventually, there was sound.
So I think everything is ready for the tech check tomorrow.
We'll see how this goes. :)
We're planning on using the recording laptop as the centerpiece of our strategy. The recording laptop is *old*. It weighs a ton. It's also been sitting in its bag since Capricon, which meant that the first thing to do was to power it up yesterday and make sure that it had downloaded all of the Windows Updates and such that it needs, because you surely don't want that to happen at random. That took a few hours. Then I decided this would be a fine time to back up the Capricon recordings to the NAS. The recording laptop is old and has slow Wi-fi, but eventually everything made its way to the server.
The recording laptop is old with a not-so-great webcam, but I have a new cheap Chinese webcam that I bought recently that is already starting to exhibit tiny failures, like one of the two strips not lighting up when the camera goes on. Happily, the webcam is not heavy, so I retrieve it from my desk on the second floor and haul it back down and plug it into the laptop, where it initializes itself correctly. I also download the Zoom software onto the laptop, because we'll be needing that for the tech check.
Sane people have a small, lightweight audio interface. Or maybe they have a small, lightweight mixer with a USB output that handles enough ins and outs for two vocalists and one or two instruments. *I* have a 16-channel Yamaha mixer that -- what's that phrase again? -- weighs a ton. Up from the basement and to the dining room table it goes, along with two mic stands, two mics, and assorted cables.
Ok, let's wire this up, adjust the digital patching, plug it into the computer. Eventually, there was sound.
So I think everything is ready for the tech check tomorrow.
We'll see how this goes. :)