Discounting SCA performances, Saturday night was the Calais Consort's first actual gig in years. The first set lived up to the alternate name we jokingly use amongst ourselves — "School Play" — as the audience comprised friends and family for the most part. It was held in the International Bazaar, a coöp store in Ybor City which also holds arts classes and performances.

We did, however, gain a family of listeners when we began playing Un Amor, a Gipsy Kings song, who actually hung around for quite a while when we went back to playing some of our more historical pieces; and there were a few other people who came and went during the set.

During our final song of the set — Trista Pena, another Gipsy Kings song — a transformer blew and plunged several blocks of Ybor City into darkness. Including our venue, naturally. There were some candles burning, and the emergency lights switched on, but as luck would have it, all of them were in front of the stage, leaving our stands in darkness. We actually managed to keep going (until there was some confusion as to which verse we were on, and half the band kept playing while the other half stopped).

The second set was relatively uneventful — though I utterly screwed up during the Hymni and had to drop out about six bars before the end. It's one of those pieces where it's simply impossible to find your place until the parts come to a cadence, and the only one left was the final one. D'oh. One of the audience members actually came up afterwards and asked if we could autograph one of our posters for him, and when we'd be playing again.

As if in immediate answer to his question, we were asked by one of the owners if we could play again this coming Saturday night... and this time, we'd even be advertised.

So. A couple of hitches, but all in all, not a bad gig for our first time in years.

I just don't get French pronunciation. There are rules, then there are exceptions to the rules, then there are exceptions to the exceptions... and then when you listen to actual French speakers, it seems like they're just making up their own rules as they see fit.

For example, I'm trying to learn the lyrics to Henri Salvador's Mais non, mais non (known to watchers of The Muppet Show as "Muh-nuh muh-nuh"). In the line Je dois fréquenter que les filles de cinquante ans, the word "filles" is pronounced like "fee". But in Lorsque les filles viennent me taquiner, it's pronounced "fee-yuh". The words que les are pronounced like "cleh" in that first line, but immediately afterwards, it's "kah lay".

ARRRRRRRRGH!

One of these days, I'm going to have to incorporate LJ-style cuts into this blog code. Until then, here's my take on the new Battlestar Galactica remake, or at least the first portion of my take on it.

At 9:00 AM (Eastern time) on Friday, December 19th, 2003, the Calais Consort will be the guests on WMNF's Live Music Showcase (88.5 FM, Tampa; out-of-area listeners can hear streaming audio over the Internet). We do mainly historic music, from the Crusades through the 18th century (with a couple of Gipsy Kings tunes to spice things up a bit). Come give us a listen!

Mad props to my friend Maggie Council DiPietra, WMNF's development director (and a damn good musician in her own right), who thought we were good enough to suggest to host Bill Dudley.

In preparation for Friday's radio gig, I've been practicing quite a bit more than usual. I'd like to be able to do the whole thing completely without music, but for some reason I'm not getting Quanto sia lieto il giorno and Souvent Souspire memorized. Normally I don't have a problem learning foreign-language pieces ("Aishiteta to nageku niwa..."); maybe it's the pressure. On the other hand, I did manage to memorize the two of Guillaume Dufay's Hymni that we're playing, despite their totally unintuitive melodies.

Oh well. It's radio, we don't have to make eye contact with the audience.

Working tangentially to the legal field as I do, I occasionally have to enter courthouses and other government buildings. The Federal building here in Tampa has extremely tight security: first, you have to show photo ID before even being permitted to put your possessions onto the X-Ray conveyor. Then, once your items have been cleared, you may step through the metal detector, which is calibrated so high that the zipper on my jacket sets it off. Which means standing on an insulated pad and assuming the position to be wanded. Then, once they're satisfied, you can collect your possessions — but if anything arouses the guards' suspicion, you have to explain it and (if possible) demonstrate that it operates without exploding.

The guards recognize my MP3 player by now, but my flash drive caused some consternation this morning. And of course I didn't have a computer to demonstrate it on, but they let me through with a healthy dose of suspiciously furrowed brows.

Now, if I were a terrorist, and had designed some dangerous item of that size which I wanted to smuggle through security — a remote detonator, say — I certainly wouldn't make it out of eye-catching green transparent plastic which showed electronic circuitry inside. I'd make it look like a common item, such as a car's remote-entry keyfob (which they didn't even look twice at on my keyring).

But that's just me. Perhaps terrorists have a penchant for brightly-colored objects.

I have ordered Sonar 3 Producer Edition. The included plugins alone are more than worth the cost of the upgrade. Now I can't wait until the Consort gets back to recording...

Samuel Johnson said, "Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again."¹ But Samuel Johnson was an idiot. I hate anticipation, because "anticipation" is just another way to say "waiting". If I could always go immediately from the desire for change to achieving that change, I'd be a truly happy guy. Instead, I often have to wait. Usually for FedEx or UPS.

But while I wait this time, I'm dreamily browsing through all the new features of SONAR 3,² planning what I'm going to do with them. I'm wading through the posts on the Cakewalk SONAR forum, and I must say that compared to my experiences with some other software's user forum, it's refreshing to see people allowed to actually compare software to its competitors, grumble about the things they don't like or even propose new features without the forum moderator warning them to "End this thread NOW!!!"

I'm also eagerly reading the manual for the M-Audio Delta 1010LT in anticipation of its arrival. (Insert Homer Simpson's drooling noise here.)

After the holidays, the Consort's getting together to hear rough mixes of the stuff we've already recorded for our second CD, and decide which ones are worth keeping and which need a little more work. And then, back to recording. It'll be interesting to see how different our subsequent recordings will sound, what with new microphones, a new mixer, a new A/D interface (24bit/96KHz!), new software, and — thanks to the gigs and the radio show — a rejuvenated energy all around.³

1. Or, to put it in a form more familiar to a certain subset of science fiction fans, "After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. This is not logical, but it is often true."

2. Note for thrifty consumers: SONAR 3 Producer costs $720 on Cakewalk's Web site, but it can be purchased at Musician's Friend for $500. But if you buy Cakewalk Home Studio 2004 at MusiciansFriend ($90), then upgrade to Sonar 3 Producer at Cakewalk's Web site, it'll end up costing a total of $439. Weird pricing scheme, but I'm certainly not complaining; I saved a wad of cash on SONAR 2 via the buy-entry-level-product-then-immediately-upgrade method.

3. There is a distinct possibility that I suffer from Gear Acquisition Syndrome, a common malady amongst musicians.

One of the things we'll be needing when the Consort goes back to recording is a set of pop filters for the vocal mics, as the condensers are far more sensitive than the dynamic microphones we'd been using. Unfortunately, the cheapest ones I could find locally were about $20 each.

However, using microphone clips, small wooden embroidery hoops, some stiff pieces of wire (I had some bicycle spokes handy) and some stretchy fabric, I put together a set of fairly decent filters for under $6 each. They're not pretty, but Peter Piper can pick his peck of pickled peppers properly protected from pesky plosives.

No, I do not want to check out your Paris Hilton footage. Okay? Seriously, you can stop sending me an email every three minutes. If I didn't respond to your first several thousand messages, what makes you think the next one's going to finally pique my interest?

In conclusion, please get cancer and die. Thank you.