The Mandelbear's Musings

Here's the final setlist for the Baycon 2007 Tres Gique concert:

1. The World Inside the Crystal
2. Cicero in the Twenty First Century
3. The Owl and the Pussycat
4. Guilty Pleasures
5. The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of
6. High Barratry
7. The Rambling Silver Rose
8. House Carpenter
9. Demon Lover
10. Bound For Hackers' Heaven
11. Silk and Steel
12. I Wanna Be a Webmaster
13. Ship of Stone
14. Keep the Dream Alive

On the whole it went pretty well. A couple of egregious flubs on my part -- I kept getting distracted -- and cflute reported that the monitors weren't audible and she was just cueing off me. Recording didn't go as well -- I had the mics too close, and as a result probably got more of me than the audience did. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Came out with one minute to spare -- yay for timing during the final rehearsal. Should maybe have had a show-stopper for an encore, but I don't think fast enough on my feet.

Also, I stupidly left the interface box on the floor rather than putting it in the rolly as I had the night before, and turned the levels down too low. The levels were only a minor problem, since I only lost a few bits off the top (I hope!), but there were a sizeable number of noise spikes. More during the Tres Gique concert, when the chaoswolf was baby-sitting the box, than during the ones I did myself, but a few with those as well. Not a good idea. The rig really needs its own rolly-crate or possibly a rolling rack. 4-U rack on a with its own handle/mic stand? Hmm. We could do that.

And either further back in the audience, or three mics up front.

I suspect my Baycon reporting will be a little sketchy this year; I've been a busy bear. Good rehearsal session Friday night, after a long day that included two different hotel-room screwups affecting cflute and the Ugglas; fortunately all resolved.

The hotel is a maze in about 2.5 dimensions -- each floor is a branching tree structure with a fractal dimension of 1.5 or so. The function space is mostly on the second floor, and our room is on the third floor (the party floor, but we're off in a cul-de-sac). You can get from our room to the function space by walking about 1/4 mile and going down a short ramp. Except that some of the function space is on the other second floor, which can only be reached by elevator from the third floor. Right. I got well and truly lost several times on Friday; either the corridors move around, Hogwarts style, when you're not looking, or the hotel knocks you out and moves you around while you're unconscious. Haven't figured out which.

Panels and concerts yesterday; got a good recording of cflute's set. I'll be recording Tres Gique (me, Callie, and Joyce, plus her son Jordan on drum). There's no stage, but plenty of room for me to set up the mics, and the end of the front row is close enough to the nearest wall plug to power the laptop. I just have to remember to make sure it's in "don't go to sleep, darnit" mode. Setting the levels will be a little tricky, but hopefully what I used last night will work.

Stayed in the open filking until 1:30 or 2:00 -- not too many people, and good singing.

Album pre-orders have been, not exactly brisk, but OK; I've also been handing out bonus disks to the folks who have already ordered. I stole an idea from quadrivium and stuffed the preorder bonus disks into correspondingly-numbered jiffy packs -- all I have to do is get the customer to put their address on the pack and swap the disk for a twenty. Easy. There are plenty still available, by the way -- I brought 75 to the con.

I have a cflute, jenkitty, and selkit in my living room, 99 burned copies of About Bleeding Time on my desk, and a setlist in something close to the final order. Some good rehearsal time with cflute last night, though unfortunately Joyce's voice wasn't doing well enough for her to join us. We'll get together Friday late-afternoon at the con.

Still need 20 or so more inserts, and I couldn't find the necessary blanks yesterday. Grump. I'll look today. Still need to print out the number-allocation pages and do the actual signing and numbering. Urk!! I'll have this evening after dinner, and most of Friday morning for that.

Steve Savitzky  5/26/07 13:00  	Why Johnny Can t Code
Steve Savitzky  5/26/07	17:30  	Song Writing
Steve Savitzky 	5/27/07	13:00 	Creating your Sound Track for Films & Videos (M)
Steve Savitzky 	5/27/07	15:00 	Filk for Kids
Steve Savitzky 	5/27/07	20:00 	Concert: Tres Gigue
Steve Savitzky 	5/28/07	11:30 	Recording your own Music

The 5/27 1300 panel could be interesting, considering that I've never done any film or video work. But I'm the moderator -- that means I get to ask leading questions and don't have to actually say anything if I don't want to.