I don’t often get the Sunday Blues. But, this Labor Day evening? Serious Monday Blues. Something about the cooler weather and a premonition that this week was going to be a shit show on several fronts reminded me of the dread I always felt the evening before the first day of school. Though, as with school, this week wasn’t all that bad.
The highlight of the week (it’s good to have low expectations sometimes): I finally figured out how to run two Jamulus clients on my Mac. Hundreds of others have managed to do this without much effort, but it was a challenge for me. We tested the new setup on a Thursday jam–thumbs up all around. There’s a step-by-step guide here: How To Run Multiple Jamulus Clients on a Mac. I wrote it mostly for one of my fellow jam mates; why not put it out there for others?
Running separate Jamulus clients on a Macintosh is relatively straightforward. In spite of that, I had a hard time getting it all to work, especially the audio routing. The howtos I found were great, but for Windows or included a Digital Audio Workstation in the signal chain. I just needed to send two channels from my audio interface to the Jamulus server separately. After a couple false starts, and one really complicated setup, I landed on a quick and easy setup that works well.
Why would you even want to do this? Great, question! Initially, I want to separate vocals from the instruments while recording. However, it’s great having them separated when just playing. When each instrument is in a separate stream, everyone can better adjust the volume and stereo placement of everything in their personal mix–something you can’t do if vocals and an instrument are combined in one stream.
A step by step guide, complete with screenshots appears below. I hope it saves at least one person some headaches. Enjoy!
I spent some time futzing around with Observable Plot this week. While I didn’t get very far on what I wanted to do, I managed to clean up a (simple) chart I use all the time. Perhaps a tutorial is in order for me.
Months ago, a good friend asked how our jam sessions sound. I sent him a recording from January. Feedback was neither solicited or received. However, when I didn’t even get a “I listened to it…” I just assumed we sucked even worse than I thought and forgot about it.
Fast forward to this week: I don’t remember how it came up, but he said “Hey, I listen to that recording of you guys all the time.” He mentioned a couple songs that he thought “really rocked”. Yes, I think he’s being at least somewhat generous, and no he doesn’t seem to have suffered from any hearing loss recently.
That interaction inspired me to record this week’s jam session to see if there’s been any improvement. We’ve added another guitarist and a couple new songs since the first recording. After listening through everything, I have some notes on what I need to work on. We still sound rough, but we are improving.
This meant I spent some quality time mixing this weekend–something I know almost nothing about. But, I’m learning and getting more comfortable using the Reaper Digital Audio Workstation–totally worth the $60 for a personal license, by the way. I also took some notes on how we might be able to improve our recording via Jamulus next time around. Among other things, separating the vocal and instrument tracks will make for a better mix.
Here’s one sample track from the session. I have a lot of work to do when it comes to singing backup and playing even a simple bass part. Much respect for for those who make it look easy (Mike Mills, Sting just to name two).
Heroes (David Bowie cover) recorded from a Jamulus session on 31 Aug, 2024.
Finally got a sail in this week. Despite the near perfect conditions, we took absolutely no pictures. So, this track on the chart will need to memorialize this one.
We met some friends at Industry City this weekend. Hadn’t been in quite a while. There’s a lot more to do and see now than there used to be. I kind of wish my office was there rather than downtown.
We blew past “mid-August” this week and the “unofficial end of the summer” (here in the US) is just a couple weeks away. I mention this because my sailing season has been almost non-existent this year. I’ve spent more time on powerboats than sailboats–I may be close to losing my sailor cred altogether.
At least I spent a day on the water Saturday shooting photos for the 2024 edition of the Rose Pitonof Swim (instagram link). The photo here shows two of swimmers on the relay team I was with at the finish near Coney Island. I’ve been on few of the Rose swims, including the inaugural one. This was the toughest I’ve witnesses. The swimmers were faced with a fair amount of chop and spent the last couple hours swimming against both the current and wind. They all did an amazing job. Shout out to the kayakers who spent time roughing it in the breakers at the end.
Takeaways from this week: Make it a point to get a few sails in before this season is over, and shoot more often.
Links
The political is separated from the rest of the links this week–easier to skip. Although, all voters should probably watch that Robert Reich video.
How American Fire Departments are Getting People Killed At minimum, NYC should have a squad of motorcycle paramedics. They would improve response times for people in need of advanced life support. They would also be able to reach people faster on our dedicated bike paths (especially the bridges).
