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So I built a little clamp to attach my iPhone to a tripod a shot a video of myself running Mainstage 2 and Soyuz.

This is totally improvised, and I play by ear, so there are some bad notes while I fish around for the good stuff. Enjoy!

I'm working on a new site called PatchDump.

The concept is simple. Upload your patches and share with friends and strangers.

It is possible to find patches on the net, but you have to go around to random newsgroups and user groups. So I thought, "Why not create a site where you could find patches for all your software and hardware?"

You can upload a patch file of any type as well as an MP3 file showing the patch off. Then you tag it with relevant tags.

Since the diversity of patch types has a potential to be enormous, I went with tagging, instead of trying to categorize.

I'll be working on promoting it some more when I use it a bit more and iron out any problems. So far I've been uploading my ES2 patches and channel strips as well as some other random stuff.

Feel free to create an account and upload. Let me know how it could be improved.

Mainstage is a live performance host for logic and other Audio Unit plugins. Mainstage 2 brings a few new features, a looper and a backing track unit. All the pieces are there for a wonderful live tool, and I'll show you ONE WAY to assemble them.

Looping with mainstage is simple to get started with - and you can build more complicated setups as you progress. I'll show you how to set up a looper unit and then add playback for triggering a backing track. You can then duplicate the looper so you can record multiple loops - which will stay in time with your backing track.

You should create your backing track with Logic using markers for the sections. You can easily navigate your backing track in Mainstage 2 - making practicing a section a breeze, or letting you freestyle over a section until you are ready to move on.

If you are into looping, all of these things should make you pretty happy.

Here is an adlib performance on the brand new MainStage 2 software from Apple.

I made this little animation to explain the monome. It was posted on the monome home page and a bunch of blogs. It has 18k views so far which is very, very cool.

Playing the drums is easy, playing them well takes years. The same might be said for recording them. They are the most difficult instrument to record. I don't claim to be a master, but I've come a long way from my first days of recording. I was doing a bit of work on it yesterday and thought I would document it.

I ended up on the tapeop forums this past week and ran across a micing technique I'd probably heard of before - the Glynn Johns drum mic setup.

You place a mic above the snare, about forty inches up, pointed toward the kick or snare. You then place another mic opposite the hihat, behind your floortom, at the same distance you placed your other mic: about forty inches. I have a pair of rode nt5's that I used for this. I also tried with my two audiotechnica large diaphrams. They are two different models, but sounded better than the small diaphram rodes. I opted for the rodes up high so I could use the large diaphram's for other duties, I will talk about.

You will then place at least a kick mic. It can be inside or outside the kick, you just need to get that kick. I used my sennheiser e609 right up against the beater.

I also put a Shure 57 two inches from the snare, angled at about thirty degrees and one point five inches from the rim.

Showing the kit from the hihat side.

Mixing - you pan the overhead snare mic a bit to the left and the 'tom' mic hard right. Adjust levels until the snare is balanced in the middle. I send these to a bus and smash the heck out of them with a 1176 compressor. Doing this brings out the very little room sound that I have.

Then I take that bus all the way down and bring up the kick to get it hitting around -8. Then I bring the overheads back up until there is a nice balance. For the nt5's I take some high end off or they burn the ears. Bringing up the snare and adding a touch of low-mid subtractive eq is next. I then bus the kick and snare to a compressor - I'm using the logic compressor on 'Hard Class A'. I route that to another bus along with the overhead bus which controls the total volume of the drums. I usually route the overheads back with the kick and snare and compress that, but it didn't sound as nice so I didn't do it. Again, see the mp3s below for my sound to this point.

The other tidbit I picked up was the heart mic, also known as a crotch mic, since that's what you point it at. The term was being thrown about a bit on the forums so I did some hunting and found out that it is a microphone placed right above the beater side of the kick drum, pointing at the drummers crotch. I threw my AudioTechnica 3035 up there and compressed the heck out of it again and got this trashy, bumping, focused sound - it was great! I routed that in with the kick and snare and mixed in just a little bit.

Here we have a picture of the heart mic over the kick and the skinny rode nt5 next to the floor tom. The large mic clamped to the tom is not being used.

I also put my AudioTechnica 4047 up about three feet from the kick and three feet high, pointed at the kick drum. I have a tiny little room so I think this would work better elsewhere, but it did get a bit more of the real kick sound. One tip on placing that mic: have someone stomp on the kick pedal while you listen where you plan on putting the mic. I was getting a pretty bad sound until I did this. I had the mic too low and it was get a bit of bass build up from the corner of the room. Now I'm looking at my kit to see if I can angle it to get a bit more room in the front of it.

That mic, the kick outside mic, is also routed in with the kick and snare. I can also go with the overheads and be mixed in higher if you are getting a really nice sound. So much of the kick sound is the room and the snares all vibrating together. Your overheads should capture this, but the this front mic can help get a bit more of the low end. See the mp3 below for this version of the mix, with the two additional mics.

So that's my take on the Glynn Johns method of recording drums. Remember, even pros take hours to get drum mics set up, so don't be afraid to spend a whole day swapping mics in and out and trying different techniques. This is only one.

Codeword Zefferina is a band from Las Cruces, NM - and we played a show with them last weekend. Richard said it would be their last show as they had hit 'the wall'. They nevertheless, put on a kick ass show. I taped a bit of it and you can view beyond the break...

They rock an oldie.

Richard says goodbye.

In this video, I show a few creative uses of sidechaining in Logic 8.

Sidechaing effects in Logic 8 from sam_square on Vimeo.

Sam at Art One from sam_square on Vimeo.

I've been trying to get a performance setup going with a laptop on OS X leopard, some max/msp apps, sooperlooper and some midi/osc hand and foot controllers.

I'm trying to get sooperlooper to act as a master, slaving max/msp and the sequencer. Max triggers instruments in the sequencer as well.

Mainstage: Likes to lock up and complain about drivers not being up to date. It's fine when I turn the keyboards off during startup and then back on afterwards. But then I lose all my mappings. Not good in a live setting - I have other things to do besides map 5-10 controllers. No tempo timed effects due to the lack of a sequencer - but that's not a big a deal as the former issue.

So on to....

Logic: I use the environment to route my keyboard to some synths, route those into sooperlooper and all is well. max/msp is syncing to sooperlooper like a dandy. Let's sync Logic to sooperlooper's midi beat clock. Oh, whoops, Logic CANNOT DO THIS!

So on to...

Ableton(14 day trial)
Setup working nicely (except for some max/msp problems now resolved). Buuuut, routing midi from my pedal to SL is not working inside Ableton. No big whoop, I fire up midi router and get it going. Sooo, how to I switch patches in the middle of a song. It seems I cannot, without making my midi controller change midi channels on patch changes. It cannot.

Ableton day 2...
Looking foward to a little jam. SooperLooper is no longer responding to my footboard. Well...it responds to the first record, or overdub it receives, but nothing after that. I mess with it for 1.5 hours. It starts working. Then stops. I cannot get it to work again. I go to the forums. I cannot remember my old username. There is no way to retrieve it. I register a new account. An admin must approve it.

It's been a bit of a struggle, althought I managed to get the Logic setup working the best and make some pretty sounds.