SQ-RO GO!

Sound Design and Music Composition for Theater, and all that that entails...

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I should have known better than to try to update my Hackintosh to the latest Yosemite OS. I was about 3 updates behind until today.

If I’ve shown any sense at all, it was in my decision to at least wait until I had no projects in the works. I’m glad I did because I had to replace my OS solid state hard drive, which means reinstalling ProTools and probably everything else. So now Yosemite is current, and those irritating update message will stop for a while.

I did sucessfully download and install the latest version of Yosemite-compatible ProTools 11. Then I had to drop $300.00 to extend my Waves coverage for version 9.2 plugins.

So far that’s as far as I’ve gotten. We’ll see if Reason works, and Audio Finder, and Office (though there’s not much chance of that).

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I’m mainly posting this hear so I know where to look for it later. They claim to be an old-school electronics reapir shop, specializing in mics and amps. I like both of those things. An “actor” recently broke one of my Shure ear-clip lave mics. He broke it by repeatedly doing exactly what he was asked NOT to do, but that topic is another blog entry in itself. Anyway, if this place can fix it, I’ll use them forever! Stuff breaks, whether I want it to or not.

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In about three weeks I’ll be performing classical guitar live at a staged reading of The Good Person of Szechwan. There are 6 songs called out in the script, but the actors will be treating them as spoken word rather than as melodic. So it’s up to me to keep things musical! I’ve written music for 3 of the 6 so far, and recorded temp versions for the actors so they know what’s coming. I’m also seeing lots of opportunities for underscoring during scenes. I think it’s going to be fun!

I was approached to do a different reading a few weeks ago. But that was during the chaos of trying to get Julius Caesar open, so my good friend Martin Blasick took the musical reins for that one.

The reading happens May 19th 2015 at East West Players in Downtown Los Angeles. Stephen Rockwell directs. There are almost 20 actors involved in this reading, some from the three plays I recently worked on; Threepenny Opera, Figaro, and Julius Caesar. So it will be nice to see old friends and make some new ones.

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A reconstruction by Robert Oriol of a theme by Rossini, for Figaro at A Noise Within.,

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One of the transition cues I composed (such a pretentious word) for The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, now playing at A Noise Within.  

I think this show is where I really start to figure how the East West Orchestral suite works.

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I am not used to being conducted. It took me a while to figure out where I am supposed to actually start playing.

Our current show has a small orchestra, made up of “professional” pit musicians, plus one (me, evidently “unprofessional”). As the person who helped spec out the sound system for this show, I was part of the orchestra by default. To quote the director, I “came with the show”.

I am a capable enough player, and arrived at the first rehearsal thoroughly prepared on all instruments I would be playing for the show. But I am not a professional pit musician. I am a composer with a day job who plays a particular set of instruments as tools with which to compose music.

Gross generalizations notwithstanding, I’ve recently learned that pit musicians don’t make a ton of money, and are constantly either playing a gig, to scrambling to line up the next one. I suppose that’s why so many of them end up with church gigs. They can read ANYTHING cold, whereas I need to spend quite a bit of time with the music to sort out what makes it tick. I think that’s the composer in me, I want to hear how all the parts work together to make the whole.

While the other players can, and sometimes do have substitutes come in and play the show for them, I can sub for nobody, and nobody can sub for me because of the wide range of instruments I’m playing for each performance. Well, they could but it would take at least two people to cover my parts. This is not boasting on my part. If anything it’s regret. My setup time before each show is a minimum of 90 minutes.

All gripes aside, I am having a good time playing this show. It’s definitely a unique experience for me, and I’ve learned a lot about what to do as a conductor when my time comes at the podium.

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I received a 6-string BT-14 “Banjitar“ from Gold Tone to use for the run of Threepenny Opera.

During this show I’m switching between banjo, classical guitar, lap slide and upright bass. I found the 6-string spacing to be problematic. Too many strings, too close together, and I’m never using the 6th string for the banjo parts. 

So, luthier Doub Pearce turned my 6 string into a 5-string. It now has exactly the same spacing as the first 5 strings on my nylon-string guitars, so switching between the two is much easier.

The pic above shows a “before” and “after” image with 6 and 5 strings, respectively. The “after” pic shows 5 nylon strings, which sounded good and felt great, but I’ve since switched beck to steel strings for a more authentic banjo sound.

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Three Penny Opera is the next big production for me, and it features a live band. Discussions with the director as distant as a year ago led to the mutual agreement that I would NOT be the Musical Director for this play. I am 100% fine with that, because it frees me up to be a pit musician, which is something I love to do from time to time.

Somehow however, offering to play double bass for this show has resulted in me faking banjo parts on a guitar. Lots and lots of banjo parts, played on a Godin SA nylon string guitar through a Roland GR-55 so that it sounds banjo-esque.

Life is strange...

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Dance of Death opening theme. Opened November 11 at A Noise Within in Pasadena. Simple - a piano, a cello, a bass clarinet, and a brief cameo by solo french horn and double bass.

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Audio Finder, where have you been all my life? Or at least since I installed OS Mavericks. I think that's about the time my Mac stopped recognizing SDII files as valid.

Over the years I have accumulated several very large sound effects libraries, including THOUSANDS of SDII (Sound Designer II) files, which at one time were the standard file format for ProTools. Since Mavericks, my Mac won't recognize them as anything but text/gibberish. Same thing with Mp4 files. It sees those as movies that it can't open. And it looks like things have not improved with Yosemite.

Audio Finder converts the SDII files to WAV files, putting me back in business. It will do them individually or in a large a batch as you like. It does a lot of other things too, I'm sure, but right now the SDII conversion is more than enough to cover the cost of the application.

I also recently learned that Mac OS will convert Mp4 files to audio-only, making those also once again useable files, with the "Encode Selected Audio Files" command.

I've met more than a few sound designers who freely share their entire libraries. This seems to be more true of TV sound designers than theater. Theater sound designers are a much more exclusive and protective sort. My SFX library has a huge amount of redundancy, since many of these TV designer copied the same libraries into their own.

I have always planned on going through and clearing out the duplicates. I have now started doing that, and Spotlight Search helps a lot. I now think back on all the SDII Mp4 files I deleted because I thought they were bad, and take comfort in the fact that there are probably still at least 4 copies of each one still in my library. Procrastination sometimes pays!

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Odd Man Out

A play I recently worked on got 9 Ovation nominations. That's A LOT of nominations for a single production. The show was the best-attended show in the theater's history.

Here are the nominations:

BEST PRODUCTION OF A PLAY (INTIMATE THEATRE)

ACTING ENSEMBLE FOR A PLAY

PLAYWRIGHTING FOR AN ORIGINAL PLAY

DIRECTOR OF A PLAY

FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY (2 actors nominated)

LIGHTING DESIGN (INTIMATE THEATRE)

SCENIC DESIGN (INTIMATE THEATRE)

VIDEO/PROJECTION DESIGN

I was not nominated for SOUND DESIGN, or ORIGINAL MUSIC, both of which this production had plenty of. As artists, we often claim we don't do theater for the awards. But when you're the only person NOT nominated for something, you suddenly start to pay attention.

This took more wind out of my sails than I care to admit. But now onward and upward. Next up is Beckett.

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My 2nd Hackintosh is an Unmitigated Disaster. 

I thought it would be cool to build a Hack for my office, to take some of the workload off of my aging laptop. My studio build from about this time last year went so well, I thought building a smaller, simpler machine would be a piece of cake.

So I ordered all the parts, sticking very closely to the Deluxe Mini model from the tonymacx86 site. Day by day, the parts slowly arrived. When I had all of them in hand, I assembled the basics (PSU, MS. CPU, RAM, and one SSD) and held my breath as I always do on first power up.

The CPU and systems fans started spinning. So far, so good. Then, they stopped spinning about 8 seconds later. Then they started again after about 3 seconds. No LEDS on this motherboard, so I have no idea if something is faulting. Nothing is appearing in the monitor either. No GigaByte splash screen, nothing.

So I turn it all off, unplug it to let the caps drain, check all the connections, and try again with the same result.

Something is wrong, and It can only be one of four things - the power supply (unlikely) the MB, the CPU, or the RAM. We didn't get far enough in the power up for the SSD to be an issue. The easy answer would have been the power supply, but I actually did swap it out and the situation remains unchanged.

So that leaves three other components, any one of which could be faulty. I ordered a new MB and shipped the old one back this morning, but now the word on tonymacx86 is that the MB might be okay, it just needs a BIOS update before it can work with a Haswell CPU. Ugh.

So if the new MB does not give me a successful boot-up, here are my follow-up steps:

First, test the RAM in my studio build (Hackintosh #1) to make sure it is not faulty. I haven't tried this yet, so don't know if this is a realistic idea, or even possible. Then, take the Ivy Bridge CPU out of the studio build (terrifying), and mount it on the new MB in Hack 2 so that it will boot to the point where I can update the BIOS from a flash drive, Then put the Ivy Bridge CPU back into the studio machine and put the Haswell CPU onto the new MB, which should theoretically now be able to handle it.

Nobody said building a Hackintosh would be a breeze.Nobody but me, anyway. I'm not saying that anymore.

7/9/14 9:00PM - It was the motherboard. The new one arrived yesterday afternoon, and the machine booted right up.

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Listen to: But He Does Bother Me… by Robert Oriol

Music from Stupid Fucking Bird, which just opened at Theatre @ Boston Court.

This play was a tough one, for no other reason than that I started to hear what this play was supposed to sound like VERY LATE in the game. By then, of course, it was scramble scramble to get it done on time. I think what tripped me up were the 3 ukulele songs that came with the play, and the suggestion that there be Russian influences in the music. It took me a while to wrap my head around that one. As it turns out, ukuleles can pass for balalaikas. So that helped.

The music above is a choreographed transition built around an existing balalaika track, edited severely to stick to the click. Scenery is moving amidst some story telling, and the whole cast comes together for a Russian dance during the modulation. This was actually the first piece of music completed for the play, and it set the tone and palette for the remaining, shorter transition pieces.

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The official trailer for A Noise Within's production of Tartuffe. Music by me!

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My theme for Tartuffe, opening February 2014 at A Noise Within. I'm trying to keep it simple, and FRENCH.

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TUMBLR's Audio player no longer works.

I'm starting to link from BandCamp instead. Easy to do, and it works, Tumblr's audio player works on Safari, but not on IE or Firefox. So screw that...

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Listen to: CRAWL, FADE TO WHITE by Robert Oriol

The opening track for a play I did at Theatre of Note a few years back. I'm really just trying out BandCamp's link capabilities here. Seems to work well. Tumblr's built in audio player no longer works at all. Not sure why :(