Consonance report: Friday

[mdlbear]

I had a great time at Consonance this year. As Toastmaster I had a perfect excuse not to miss any of the concerts, which were uniformly excellent. I also got the first concert slot, 7:30pm Friday, which meant that the room started out mostly empty and ended up mostly full, but it beats being scheduled opposite the Masquerade at a big con. The concert went pretty well; the usual number of flubs, but the audience didn't seem to notice.

I need to mention that (as I often do) I stupidly starting putting pages back into my notebook before writing down the list, so the order here shouldn't be trusted.

• A little one-verse parody about Frank Hayes' Disease that I haven't had a chance to key in yet.
• Keep the Dream Alive
• Waltzing With Bears (Dr. Seuss) -- I did this one a couple of weeks ago at FurCon and decided it was a keeper.
• Can't Get It Up
• Cicero in the Twenty-First Century
• Bugs
• Paper Wings
• A Note on the Implementation of RFC 1149
• The Rambling Silver Rose
• Guilty Pleasures
• The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
• Millennium's Dawn
• When I Was a Lad
• The World Inside the Crystal
• Ship of Stone (Don Simpson)

I may possibly come back and correct the order when I've seen johno's DVD of the performance.

As usual, I did the set list by hand at the last minute, shuffling paper Thursday night and Friday morning. I definitely have to write a set-list-management program. (And/or print barcodes on my songbook pages.)

I had brought my Linux-based recording set-up, but (wisely, I suspect) decided that I didn't need the extra hassle of testing and tending it, especially since it would have been an untested configuration. Not having an easily-portable monitor, the plan was to use a laptop as an X-terminal. It would almost certainly have worked, but I didn't need the extra mental load.

I crashed out of the filk circle at about 2am.

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

I was wondering why I didn't see your setup.

I was having problems with my setup.

I finally decided that the R channel was gone and the Left channel was not as strong as it should it be on my mic pre-amp.

On Sat we switched to using the headset monitor out and got good signal on my recorder.

Hopefully I can recover your concert's audio without too much hiss from pushing up the signal. The brief test I played for you has not be played through a stereo yet, so I don't know what it really sounds like.

I kept trying to record circle sings, but I'm not holding out much hope.

[mdlbear]

Your rig would probably do really well with a suitable small preamp. Part of the problem is that consumer equipment is designed for 1V signals, while pro gear expects something considerably less than that (in order to leave more headroom and stay in the more linear middle part of the gain curve. I noticed this the time I tried to run my mic preamp into a PC soundcard.

[johno.livejournal.com]

Sorry wasnt' clear.

From the sound board to the record, was fine, if low volume on Friday. Kristoph is aware that his board puts out a very low line level. I decent levels when we started feeding it the headset monitor out.

It was the microphone pre-amp that died, so all my circle recordings are very low level, left channel only and very tinny sounding.

Unfortunately, I'm not getting replys from the guy I bought the pre-amp from. So it may be $70 bucks down the tube.