The new TranSan Live Replay is up on YouTube now, featuring all eight camera angles. Well, until two of those angles decided to take a hike. One camera was connected to a laptop via firewire, and the laptop decided to take a nap after a while. We checked, and indeed the power settings were set to sleep the OS after a time, but usually an active application will prevent that from happening. Since I was streaming directly to the hard drive via VLC, without monitoring the display, it would seem that VLC’s keep-awake setting didn’t apply.
The other camera that took a dive long before the end of the show was suffering from a slight disconnection of the power cable. I had taken the camera off the tripod to insert the SD card, and I guess I nudged the power cable. It didn’t pop out, just pulled out a very little bit, enough to break the connection. As far as I could tell visually, the cable was connected just fine. When I checked it after the show, it did give a slight pop as it slid back into place those few millimetres. Comedy of errors.
Despite the technical glitches, I had a blast experimenting with Ross’ Boom Whackers, a colourful set of tuned percussion instruments. I clipped my lapel mic directly onto the rim and got some nice, clean and powerful samples. I must say, Garage Band does make sampling quick and painless.
For the second week in a row, Julie and I went through my special conversion chart to convert a TranSan fan’s name to musical notes. In this case, the name converted to just several B’s and E’s, some flat, some not. It quickly turned into a calypso-inspired pattern that gradually grew into a lovely tune I call Whackin’ and Samplin’.