Ready for 17hrs on a plane

Tomorrow I leave for S Africa and Zambia. Ill try and post updates for this trip but today I'm packing and prepping for 17 hours of plane time.

Midi Designer for IPhone.

I got Midi Designer for the IPhone and imported my scene from the iPad. I had to rearrange it a bunch but I've made a screen for the iPhone. Fun driving something as big as the PM1D surface with something as small as the iPhone.

Favorite Dance move of the Creative Program

Best Rock Documentary Ever

When I was in high school i remember checking out a vhs from the library of Journey's Frontiers and Beyond documentary of their 1983 tour. Somewhere i still have a vhs copy of that tape but i still have yet to see a documentary as good as this one. The doc was done by NFL films and what makes it so special is that it tells the story of not just the band but the whole crew. Over the years i've checked online to see if it was available but never could find a copy. Now it's been posted in it's entirety on youtube. Enjoy!

Leadership Summit PIcs

Here's some pics from this years #wcagls

We had a Harmonium in the house with Gungor.  Very cool little instrument.

Mixing monitors for Gungor was a blast.  Really great people and incredible musicians.  This was during the lunchtime set.  It made our 7200 seat room feel like a small club.  Having cello, glock, and harmonium mics right on the edge of the stage made the iems sound like you were in a small club.

View backstage during the last session.  We had to turn for the weekend services right after the conference was over so i got a little head start by striking the band set from session 6.

Maybe hard to see but you know it's summit time when patch cables are tied off to the ceiling.

Dr. Rice is in the House

PM1D + Ipad

For some time now i've been bouncing around in my head the idea of trying to figure out how to control the Yamaha PM1D with my ipad.  Now i know there's the PM1d Manager software and that you can control the console via a laptop and vnc but my experience is that you end up spending more time waiting for your computer or console to reboot because of a crash.  I wanted to be able to control a few faders (DCA's) just so i could walk the room and make a few mix adjustments or mute the band if they were done rehearsing while i was up in the balcony.

The way that made sense to me was thru a midi control app like Midi Designer.  You can custom make your own interface with faders, buttons, etc and assign them to whatever you like.  I googled pm1d and ipad and found the Yamaha Faders and XY app.  This is primarily for controlling yamaha synths but for some reason they have a PM1D skin.  It provides 8 faders and an xy pad.

To connect your ipad to the PM1D you need a host computer.  For the computer settings i followed the directions on the Midi Designer website.  After that was completed the host computer appears in the Wireless MIDI Port window in the Yamaha app.

Now the Yamaha app has a midi learn feature.  The idea is that you select the channel assign window in the app, turn on midi learn, then move the fader on the PM1d that you want assigned and the app will learn.  While the app did receive midi data it seemed to be for a different function then volume level so i had to go in and manually setup of the Control Change numbers in both the app and on the PM1D.  Here's a couple screen shots of the PM1D MIDI CTRL CHANGE screen.

My next step is to setup a control surface in Midi Designer.  You can setup a lot more faders, buttons, etc with that app then with the yamaha app.