Pat Metheny's sick MIDI rig

Got to work for Pat Metheny this weekend.  His stage setup is pretty complex.  He has all of these percussion instruments set up, with sticks being held by motors which are triggered via MIDI.

On top of that, we loaded in these massive cabinets, that had jugs filled with water and laundry detergent. Why would someone do this?

Turns out this was another MIDI instrument, an air organ that blew air across the bottles, creating the required pitches.  Here it is in action:

-brian

Pushing the envelope with video and backing tracks

As usual, Talking to Walls did our annual Black Hearts Parade tour for the month of March to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.  Was another success.  This year, instead of playing a set with bagpipers and dancers, we just played as the three of us, with a regular show that also happened to have a video wall.

For the past year or so, we have been playing with backing tracks as a way to fly in samples, keyboards, and percussion that we a) don't use enough of to add another person to our payroll, and b) are boring parts that we don't want to ask someone to play! We use an iOS app designed for the purpose of playing backing tracks.

So we stepped it up a notch, and went from having backing tracks to synced video playing behind us. No video engineer - just running off of our stage laptop via Qlab.  It was a LOT of work, and left no room for error.  But luckily we are used to playing tight shows, so we just came roaring out the gate and barely stopped until the end!

The Irish portion was the second half of our set, played in the middle of the crowd, completely unplugged and singing at the top of our lungs surrounded by our fans.  Great memories.

-brian

Rosco video editing project

I've been working in theatre for 20 years, so I am very familiar with Rosco Labs' products.  This month I was privileged to work on a marketing video of theirs, which made its debut at a big trade show in Germany last week.  Here is the booth, with the video looping on a screen on the back wall:

And here is the video! I did all of the editing in Final Cut, while Mary did all of the motion graphics in After Effects. We just kept swapping video files back and forth, working on our own dedicated bits, until it was done.

Because of some delays and changes, we had to do one final overnight push to render all the parts and upload it. If you work in video, you know that rendering involves a lot of waiting. So I wrote some Applescripts that would trigger and send me a text message to my phone when the render was done, thereby letting us catch some sleep in that time.

-brian