Tag: music

northern voice 2011 jam session

the after-conference gatherings at northern voice have always tended to be rather musical, so this year [Grant](http://web.unbc.ca/~gpotter/) went out and booked a rehearsal studio for us to jam without annoying neighbours. [The Sanctuary](http://www.sanctuaryrehearsal.com), in East Van, is an incredible rehearsal space. I only recorded a small clip from the 11 hours (!) spent in The Sanctuary over 2 days. It was awesome, in every sense of the word. Seeing people I know share music together, with skill and talent I didn’t know they had? Inspiring. It was my first time ever playing music with anyone else. I’ll definitely be trying to do that some more…

Mikhail, Bryan and Alan on guitar. Brian on drums.

Here’s a small clip, from the Saturday session. Brian Lamb on drums. Grant Potter on bass. Bryan Jackson and Mikhail Gershovich on guitar. GNA Davis on vocals. Killer.

7nationarmy.mp3

More recordings are being pulled from the archive. Giggidy.

oh, right. there was also a conference. with a panel discussion about ds106 radio that I participated in. or something. #4life

NV2011 DS106 Panel

**Update:**

archive from the Thursday night session
=====
(warning: nearly 4 hours of audio, 130MB .mp3 file. but worth it.)

Thursday Night

Guitarcasting with Radio DS106

I had a bit of a duh/ahah! moment this evening. We’ve been messing around with Nicecast to broadcast audio from Skype and iTunes, and it hit me that it would be able to pick up sound from GarageBand just fine, too. Broadcasting live guitar jams over Radio DS106.

I plugged my guitar into my amp, and connected the headphone jack from the amp to the line-in on my MacBook Pro. I plugged my headphones into the headphone jack on the computer, so I could hear as I “played.”

Then, I fired up GarageBand and set up a new Acoustic Instrument project. Turned on “Monitor Input (no feedback protection)” for the track. Fired up Nicecast and set it to broadcast to Radio DS106. Selected GarageBand as the source app. [Jammed away](http://twitter.com/#!/ds106radio/status/40608863136780288). Easy. (aside from the lack of skill or talent – the technical part of the setup worked well at least).

I picked a time when there was nobody tuned into the station (how often does THAT happen) but it seemed to work just fine.

Insane

I bet it’d be possible to do modify this to feed audio from a bunch of guitars (or other sources) through Skype or iChat on a conference call (assuming the latency isn’t too high) and from there out to Radio DS106, for a live performance or jam session…

**Update:** Of course, I could have done this more simply by just selecting the line-in as audio source in Nicecast, rather than routing through GarageBand. But I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear if I did that directly. I’ll have to try that. Another duh/ahah! moment…

**Update 2:** yup. works just fine selecting Line In as audio source in Nicecast. The audio from the guitar gets pumped out to the headphones just fine, without having to go through GarageBand. Nice. I think I just scared off the 3 listeners that were on the station just now, to test this out… (sorry!)

four chords

I mentioned on Twitter that I still suck pretty badly at playing my guitar. Scott suggested that I only need to know 2 chords. 2? hah! I know 4! So, Alan pointed out that all you **NEED** is 4 chords.

If the 4 chords I know are the *right* 4 chords, I may be ready to start touring. Except for the rest of the whole I-still-suck-at-playing thing. But at least I’m having fun 🙂