Back in the music bidness

I went shopping this evening. First I stopped by the Indian grocery and bought the bag of red lentils for $3.50 and the box of curry powder for $1.50, then I stopped by the Korean grocery and got all those Korean veggies for around $12 total (that's several meals worth of veggies), then I stopped by the Mexican grocery and got the bag of corn flour for making corn tortillas. Tomorrow I'll probably cook curry lentils and corn tortillas for lunch, with some Korean veggies on the side. I love living in the SF Bay area where you can do fusion cooking of this sort ;).

The final piece of my music puzzle to replace all the blown-up stuff came in today too, the PreSonus Firebox. I hooked it up to the mixer (the Firebox's pre's don't have enough headroom for dynamic mikes without a boost) and to the guitar, and hooked up the MIDI in/out to the keyboard. Then I made sure I could get both my guitar and my vocals mike intoApple Logic (my Digital Audio Workstation or DAW software, used to record music to hard drive). That worked. Then I created a software instrument track and told it to use the external keyboard as its source, and recorded some piano off the keyboard via MIDI, then played it back to my keyboard via MIDI, then re-routed it back to the software instrument and played it back through my mix headphones. And *that* worked. So all that works, but it does look somewhat like a mad scientist's workshop with all that stuff plugged in... The towel on the chair is to catch any cat puke (sitting in cat puke is *ick*!), the towel underneath the keyboard covers the keyboard when I'm not using it for exactly the same reason. And one reason I still have that ratty old desk is because the keyboard tray slides up under the desk when I'm not using it so that my keyboard doesn't serve as a cat puke receptacle. Cats. Sigh!

I also found out today why I've seemed somewhat clumsy recently. I had an eye exam and found that my left eye, my "strong" eye, no longer is. So I was basically seeing out of one eye rather than in full stereoscopic vision, thereby leading to stumbling into things that I didn't realize were so close to me. And there I was, thinking I was just getting old and clumsy... nope, it's my dadburned glasses ain't right! So I'm going to get that fixed, hopefully tomorrow...

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin