The Video Boy Troubles and Upcoming Shenanigans

And.......when we left our boy last week......wait, that was two weeks ago.....yes, well.....

I was writing about a crash my Mac had, just as I was about to finish a promotional video for the Hickoids. Said video project had to be reconstituted on a PC laptop (the one I'm typing on now), using the editor in Movie Studio Platinum (an offshoot of Vegas). The editor turned out to be okay, although it's missing one crucial feature for anyone editing anything over a minute in length - the ability to set up individual sequences. Since the total time of the video ended up being 1:42, it wasn't super necessary, but still a bit painful to navigate around. The previous one built in Premiere was several sequences of a few seconds in length each.

Within a week, I had it done, and it came out.....okay.

Got a bluish tinge going on in some of the shots which comes from the residue of removing green screen, but I'm not sure why blue. If anyone asks me, I'll just say there was a blue light in the dungeon. That makes sense, dunnit?

Continuing along with computer woes, or more accurately, fixes.....

In the last entry, I stated I was done with Macs, and I'm sticking to that. I ran into my friend Larry Stern a couple of weeks ago (he got me the Mac system several years ago), and he thought it was fixable, although perhaps at some cost. I politely declined. I'm still done with Macs. There's just something I don't like about the Apple company in general, and hey, if I'm going to get political about it....Bill and Melinda Gates have my vote. So, back to a Microsoft operating system.

I chose a Lenovo tower that is set up for gaming, which means it'll be fine for my non-gaming, yet sometimes video-involved self. I decided on this one after much shopping around, and so far, so good. The OS is on a separate SSD drive and boots up really quickly. I haven't done a lot with it so far - still deciding on what video editor I should use - and as I'm about to leave town for awhile, it'll be some time before I really get down to serious usage. But that'll also give me time to decide on software I want to put on it. And, since this laptop I'm using has Windows 10, I'm fairly familiar with it as an OS.

This recent purchase inspired me to get a hard drive enclosure and do some "house cleaning." I pulled all the hard drives from towers I'm declaring dead (two from the Mac, and two from previous PCs), and I've been able to read the data from the two Mac drives - with the help of cross-platform software - and one of the PC drives. The oldest PC drive is an IDE drive, and my enclosure is only suited for SATA drives. Frankly, I'm sure I didn't need anything off a drive inactive for ten years, so I'll just destroy that one. I was able to donate the PC towers to Goodwill, and I'll figure out a home for the Mac tower. It might go back to Larry! Cleaning house!

I mentioned leaving town for awhile...and the video gives that away....yes, the Hickoids are about to embark on an 18-day tour, going west. At the halfway point, we'll be in Vancouver and Victoria, BC, which will be my first foray into Canada. We're not going far into Canada, but still, it's Canada. It's a bit like going to Reynosa and saying you've "been to Mexico." Still, I'm looking forward to a bit cooler weather. Hopefully, we won't run into any of the awful blazes going on in California right now. Jeeziz, those poor folks dealing with that.

On this tour, I'll have responsibilities exceeding drumming and occasional yodeling; the sampler's coming with, and the tour will be documented on digital video. We have folks lined up to shoot the video, so thankfully, I won't have to do that. A really nice fella named Carl is coming with up to Canada. He's a native San Antonian who now lives in Victoria, BC. He was down for a couple of months visiting family, and so he's riding back home with us. He'll be shooting our misadventures, etc. I'll give him a quick tutorial on the camera, and hopefully he'll get some good stuff. We're so photogenic.

We'll leave Carl in Victoria, and Patrick (Harvey McLaughlin) is joining us in Seatlle for the trip back. He'll, of course, be playing his piano on stage with us, but in the van, he'll be cinematographer. There might be more interesting stuff in the second half, I'm thinking. Sleep deprivation is a big cause of tour hijinks, let's say. Although, our significant others are meeting us at different points on the west coast....so that might cause us to behave, if only for a bit.

The sampler is coming as a sort of "audio enhancement" for the stage show. There's an intro, recorded by Jeff, for the show. There's a version of "O Canada" to preface our wonderfully awful "Canadian Medley." And, there's Plastic Patrick's "Hickoid Massacre," to play as an outro. Easy stuff, but I think I'll add a few more things to keep it lively. The sampler's a pain in the ass to set up but worth it, if you have a soundman willing to play ball. I'll elaborate more later.

We had a couple of warm-up shows this weekend, one in Austin, one in San Antonio. The Austin one was a fun, but hot, affair. We played after the Beaumonts, which might not have been the right call. The Beaumonts had a huge crowd that diminished somewhat by the time we took the stage. Still, we put on a pretty good show, although it felt like it was petering out toward the end - probably the heat. The best thing about it was we had Wade Driver in attendance, and he jumped up and played guitar on a couple of songs. He's recovering from a stroke currently, but the energy was there, for sure. It was great to have him on stage. I tried to get him to come up and drum with me on "Back in the Truck," but he didn't seem to want to. No matter. He was a major drum inspiration to me back in the bad ol' days, so I was just honored to share the stage with him. We also stumbled through the Canadian Medley, although it needs work. We're not far off, though.

Last night's show was, as some of my friends like to say, "tits." Fred Greene told me he thought it was one of the best shows he'd ever seen us play, and he's certainly seen enough. The stage at Bang Bang Bar in San Antonio is pretty tiny, but somehow we all got up there. I thought for sure Patrick would have to set up on the floor, but no, he didn't - although he was hidden by a speaker main. Cody was somewhat hidden by the other one, as well. Basically, if you like looking at Jeff, Tom, and Rice only, this show was for you. Jeff didn't want to do the Canadian Medley, so we didn't. It does need a little tightening, still. The only issue I had was getting the soundman to actually put the sampler into the speakers. He seemed a little, shall we say, slow on the draw. He didn't understand that we were using it as a pre- and post-show entertainment, as well as occasionally through the show. After finally getting him to turn it on before we started, he just turned off the channel for the rest of the show. When I quizzed him about it later, he seemed....not really uncaring, but not really cognizant of it, either....I think chemicals were involved. But really, all this is my fault. I realize I'm going to have to have a chat with every soundman on this tour to explain what I need for the sampler to be worth bringing out. It's not much, but it'll need to be said.

I'll try to chronicle along what happens on the tour, although I may just do it in one big chunk after getting back...sort of like I did with the 2013 Euro Tour. We'll see. Until then......stay cool, friends. Your working drummer boy loves ya.

Hot Corn and Epic Failure

The Dog Days of Summer. A Don Henley favorite. Or something like that.

Damn, it's been hot lately. The Austin area has hit the over-100-degree days, and they don't show a sign of letting up. Not much breeze these days, either, making being outdoors pretty unbearable. Fair amount of humidity, too. It all adds up to staying indoors when at all possible.

On Thursday night, I finished installing the corn kernel wraps (received on Tuesday) on my Sonor kit. I had had a question concerning the depth of my bass drum when ordering the wraps, and the company never answered said question, not even after repeated emails and a Facebook message. The wrap turned out to be pretty close to the right size....I think if I would have ordered an inch more, I might've had to trim the wrap. There's a small gap between the edge of the wrap and the back head of the bass drum but not enough to be seen at any distance; you'd have to really be looking for it. It's about 3/8". If it really starts to bother me (the existing cover for the drums is a light tan color), I'll just pull the back head off and slap a little golden rod paint on that strip. For now, I'm leaving it.

The rest of the wraps fit perfectly, and the process was pretty simple but one of the most tedious things I've ever done. On the Friday before receiving the wraps (once I knew they were shipped), I removed all the hardware from the drums and placed it all in individual marked bags. The shells and bags sat in the living room a few days awaiting their dressing up. The wraps were received on the same day, a Tuesday, that the Hickoids had a video shoot planned (something I have to do most of the work for), so I couldn't really do much that day. The following day, in between video editing chunks, I began wrapping the drums. I started with the 12" tom, the drum I use least (I favor a four-piece kit, normally), figuring if I goofed the first wrapping job, it wouldn't be a huge deal. Turned out I wrapped it pretty well, following a really informative video on the wrap company's website. So, I did the snare drum Wednesday night as well. Thursday night, I wrapped the 13" and 16" toms and the bass drum.

Now, these wraps are designed as "no-glue." There is an adhesive strip at the end of each wrap. So what you do is wrap the drum as snugly to the shell as possible, using clamps to hold the wrap and then massaging the wrap upward around the shell to get any play out of the wrap. Once you've done that a few times, and you have the seam positioned where you want it on the drum, you pull back the end, strip off the protective paper, and press the adhesive side down. Then comes the fun. Leaving the clamps on in strategic places, you take a small X-acto knife and cut the holes where the hardware goes, matching the holes in the shells. You start by poking outward from the inside of the shell, and then looking at the cuts from the outside, you can start reaming the holes out (that didn't sound nice). The aforementioned video suggested doing the hardware a piece at a time, so as I would create the holes for a piece, I'd subsequently affix that piece. After a couple of nights of this process, I had plastic shavings all over the living room and a callous on my right forefinger in a place I've never had one from 40-odd years of drumming. Still, it was worth it. The drums look great.

So I debuted the "corn kit" last night at the Empire Control Room in Austin. I used the full kit, due to wanting to show off the work a bit. Of course, that meant switching the position of a couple of my cymbals, causing a couple of probably-unnoticeable-to-anyone-but-me gaffes in my performance. Fun show, too. Jeff introduced us as "Lance Farley's Drum Kit and The Hickoids." Mustn't upstage the singer!

It can't all be good news, right?

So, I mentioned a video shoot earlier. The video shoot itself went great. Jeff got Ruby (from the "Cool Arrow" video) to dress up in her dominatrix stuff and beat us a bit while we wore corn-on-the-cob gags. It's hilarious stuff, and I cannot wait to finish the video. Unfortunately....

I began editing the video on Wednesday, and a large portion of the video was shot using a green screen (actually, all of it, now that I think of it). My Mac has Adobe CS5 Creative Suite on it, and there was a special bug CS5 has concerning the eyedropper tool when running the software on OS X Lion. The eyedropper just doesn't work. In the past, I've reverted my machine to its other hard drive which has Snow Leopard on it, in order to do this work. Trying to remove a green screen without the eyedropper tool is like, well, it's just very difficult. Anyway, everything was going smoothly, and by late Friday night, I had maybe an hour and a half of work left. I went to bed intending to finish Saturday. When I woke up Saturday morning, my Mac monitor was heavily pixellated, and I couldn't select anything on the screen. Thinking everything froze for some reason (the Snow Leopard hard drive was not online), I rebooted but could immediately tell there was something else wrong. After some Googling and repeated reboots, I believe the logic board has an issue. Much work lost.

So, for now, I've moved the files to my Windows 10 PC, which I'd purchased the Vegas suite for last year but haven't really used yet. And I'm starting over. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully, when I write in this here blog next week, I'll have a finished version of the video to post. That's my intention, anyway. Since I had done one version, recreating the video won't be bad from a concept standpoint, it's just that I don't know this software very well. Hopefully ,everything will fall into place quickly.

And for now, I'm not sure what I'm going to do hardware-wise, but I believe I'm done with Macs. That was my only foray into the Mac world, hooked up by a friend in 2011. And it served fine...and to be honest, the reason I purchased the Vegas suite for my laptop PC had to do with knowing this day was coming, although I thought it would be because of obsolescence, rather than failure....but I'm headed back to Microsoft. I may buy a nice desktop, I may not. Maybe a souped-up laptop, I don't know. I do know I want a better external monitor. Ah...the joys of technology ownership. I also hold out a slight bit of hope that the machine will just boot up correctly eventually. I've seen more than one machine do that. Sometimes just a time-out will fix things. Very weird, but it does happen. Not that that fixes the "need the video done" situation.

Guess I'll go home and start work again....if you're in the South, friends, stay cool.