This image shows the stage of the Brauntex PAC in New Braunfels. They have a great screen behind the stage. I remember the location of nearly all of my photos. This one was taken in Berlin + shows where The Wall used to divide the city.
I discovered that there is a way to create a public iCloud photo album with a web address right on my phone. Created one for Backstage. Super easy to add photos as I take them while touring or traveling.
A green salad with dukkah. Dukkah is on my list of perfect food compliments. I use the word compliments because they aren’t condiments. My short list contains pesto (Italian), hummus (Arabian), gomashio (Japanese), guacamole (Mexican), and dukkah. My dukkah recipe is Egyptian. Last week I made an Indian-Californian pesto, w peanuts instead of pine nuts and cilantro and toasted coriander seeds. So funny when European or Asian friends find out that Americans use two different names for the same herb, depending on whether it is fresh or dried!!
Due to circumstances I found myself in a van going from Avon to Denver at 0430. It was raining most of the way. The wet asphalt looked like a mirror.
I created my first binaural surround sound mix today. It took a few hours to set up and to create automation for the three objects (instruments) that I wanted to move in space. It’s a learning process I enjoyed.
It was great playing duets with Jon last week. Three cities, six shows. Can’t get much simpler than a guitar and an upright bass. We can do a lot with that… Well, we had a good time.
I saw this in the window of a bookstore in Kent:
I returned yesterday evening and today I threw myself into binaural surround sound mixing, using SPAT Revolution. I watched a video and then pulled up a piece from Rain Poems to experiment. It was very frustrating at first. All I got was distorted sound. I’m still not sure what I did wrong. I messed with some faders and clicked some software buttons and suddenly it was working. It’s a whole different game, isn’t it!? I think this surround sound mixing will require making drawings and diagrams and using automation and and and.
The excitement over Dolby Atmos at Apple Music always seemed over the top to me. I find it’s a lot like pushing Blu-ray over DVD. The story of a film captivates me more than sheer technological brilliance and pixel count. In addition, DVD was old technology and therefore accessible to more movie productions worldwide and I don’t often watch Hollywood films anyway. So I never bothered buying a Blu-ray player. Similarly, melodies and the musical performance are more important to me than hearing something in spectacular quality. It’s a trade off, isn’t it. I mean if you can dedicate a room to listening, and outfit it with 50-100k of great equipment and loudspeakers, I am sure it would be glorious. I might come for a visit but it’s not really for me. (wouldn’t it be cool if one could rent a room with an amazing sound system by the hour?)
My first impression is that the SPAT Revolution software is really impressive and that I should keep working with it, to see where it can take the music, but stereo is pretty damn good and compatible with more ways to listen. What’s your favorite way to listen to music? Loudspeakers? A surround sound speaker array? Headphones? The car? A mono bluetooth speaker?
I’ll end this post with a photo from Indianapolis: 
The first image is from 07:02 and the second from 07:13. High ridges around the cave prevent the sunlight from reaching into the bowl in the early morning. An hour after sunrise the trees are painted with light from top to bottom.
