Jason Tratta

I found this video on youtube, who ever put it together did a great job. Enjoy.

Without a doubt the new iPhone is pretty sexy. Like everyone else I really want one however, I’m not too excited about having to switch cell carries to get one. So…where is the widescreen iPod? What if I don’t want a cell phone / ipod / navicom thingy and just want the widescreen ipod with some kick butt PDA features. Not to mention I also would like to have more than 8G’s of space to play with. Here’s hoping that Apple is just waiting to announce this upgrade and that it’s on par with the current iPod prices.

UPDATE:
A few hours after making this post I found this on the net.  Perhaps we’ll get a little extra surprise during the Super Bowl? Hmm…can’t wait.

We’ve had some time at The Alley Theatre to get to know in the in’s and out’s of our new Yamaha M7CL Digital Console. First, let me just say that I really enjoy working on this thing. It has some problems, so if it seems like I spend too much time talking about the bad points it’s only because I would love to see these issues fixed.

Inputs/Outputs
I have been working with the 48 input variety since October. That’s a lot of inputs! However, some of the shows we have been running come very close to maxing them out. I can see how working on a musical could become very crowded, all in all, I love all these beautiful inputs. We also have the MY16AT expansion card the gives us and additional 16 channels of digital audio. Our SFX computer connects directly to the console this way. Remember though…there is no gain on most digital inputs…digital 0 is digital 0…fix your sound files if you need more oomf!

The output section is pretty funky. 16 Mix buses, 8 Matrix Channels, and the LCR Buses. Here’s what’s funky, there is no real difference between any of them except the labels. Assigning an input to a output is exactly the same process for each output section. There are no hard assigns, you assign input channels via rotary knobs (virtual of course) to the desired output level. Your basically working with a giant 24 channel matrix if you want…which I think is pretty great.

Here’s a warning if your thinking about buying additional output expansions: You don’t get anymore virtual sends in the console. Which means you will not have the option to treat newly installed outputs as a new Mix. This is something I wish Yamaha would add to the software. For now, you can either assign these outputs to a mix bus, there by losing the original output or, you can use these expansion slots as direct outs. Which would be great if we needed a monitor console.

More on the M7 coming soon…

I just finished reading this book. It was a fun read I have to say. The philosophy behind it wasn’t all that earth shattering but I did enjoy the line, “The sponge doesn’t know he’s having a bad day.” I really need to stop saying this…it’s driving some of my friends nuts.

I went and saw “Children of Men” for the second time tonight. Yes…I am gushing about the sound design like most other audio heads. It also happens to be a pretty darn good flick to. I particularly love the road ambush scene…some really great sound work happening there.

I have to give credit where credit is due though, during the Ark for the Arts scene, Phil Cassidy spotted this little gem during the flick. Turns out the place is housed in a Pink Floyd Album. How sweet is that!?

Someone really needs to invent these soon. I’m talking the sci-fi sort here. Flying is way too expensive and slow.

The last month has been one of the life lesson sort of months. It’s interesting to me how ones perception can change with life events. I use to hate love songs until recently…well not hate but sort of thought there were way too many on the radio. Listening to all these love songs with new ears it’s comforting to hear that I’m not alone. For example, Mike Doughy on his “Haughty Melodic” album sings in the song “Madaline and Nine“:

Slain by the words I lack
My world is bursting sappy music and
With the face so sad I long to make you mine

From an artistic point of view these are the sort of things that happen in life that you cannot just learn in school or books. Standing back from it, it’s easy to say you get it. I thought I got it. I really didn’t, I had to dive in up to my chin in the real thing to “get it.”

As an audio professional I have started thinking again about our collective aural consensus as a culture. What music and sound makes me think of love will most likely mean something else to you. Even simpler, hearing crickets makes us all think of night time (most of us anyway) but, what else? I’m not so sure I need to worry about pulling someone out of a performance because I helped pull a vivid memory tied to a sound. You have to wonder though, maybe that was the point after all.

Madeline and Nine from the album “Haughty Melodic” by Mike Doughty

I took the time to give my site a fresh new look for ’07. Well…I really didn’t like the old look anyway. I’m no web designer that’s for sure! It’s pretty crazy how things have changed in the last 10 years. I’m not going to go into the old guy routine, “I remember when” nonsense. Besides, I’m not that old anyway. We live in a WYSIWYG world. (For those who don’t know WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get”)

I could always be a little dangerous with the ole HTML code when pages were nothing but HTML. Now it’s totally crazy! There are so many options like Flash, PHP, and all sorts of back end database stuff you can do. What’s even more incredible is you don’t even need to know what it means…or does…or how it even works. Someone out there has made it super easy for average Joes like me to make a website. I can’t program a lick of PHP but, here it is…I made a website out of PHP.

This got me thinking. Did I really even make something…can I consider this something that I created? The digital age is definitely changing the way that we view and create art. Back to the “Back in the old days” shtick, it use to be if you wanted to create music you needed a band. The song above was created by me sitting here for about and hour screwing around.

But I have to ask myself…how much credit can I take for it? I use to slave away in a crappy basement for hours during band practices to get every thing just right for the big studio days. What use to take weeks and months can now just maybe take a weekend. This is great but something about the shortened process and use of prefabricated parts seems sort of cheap. My inner artist is yelling “THIS IS NOT ARTISTRY!”

It doesn’t matter though. Did I make something? I sure did and here it is, and chances are you have no idea how I did it either. If you do your in the minority. This is where we are headed; you can see this happening everywhere. I think it’s great! Sure…it’s sort of cheap but if I can get what I want and everyone else is happy then why not? The world wants things fast and wanted it all yesterday, this is no time to be very artistic.

When I first got into the sound biz I was working with a friend of mine. I remember leaning over to him and saying, “Man I really feel like a hack and someone is going to find out any day now.” He laughed and was quick to reply,

“Don’t sweat it man…we’re all hacks.”