Introduction

If you're reading this, I've certainly pointed you to it. This is my semi-hidden blog that I created in order to document the LOW points of my music life. I know it seems a big negative to only post about the BAD events which happen, but I figure writing it all once is BETTER than having to tell the same depressing story time and time again to every person who asks.

I'm going to start off this blog with a bit of a doozy; this past week I had the great opportunity of creating the presentation for the gang music awards, held at the Game Developer's conference in San Francisco. Not only that, but I was also given the opportunity to play one of my songs live in front of the entire audience, and towards the end of the show, no less. Setup went without a hitch, and our practice run of the song was phenomenal.

However, things quickly changed after the show started. We never had a solid run-through, so some of the cues were totally on the fly and caught me off guard. The man in the back running the show basically seemed angry at me the entire time(all 3 hours worth), and to make matters worse, my presentation acted glitchier than it had ever acted. For instance, whenever I played a video, it would loop the video(sound and all) even if I specified it NOT to loop, which resulted in:

• Random, LOUD sounds to play during a presenter's speech
• more yelling from the guy in back

It was very stressful. Not only that, but Tommy Tallarico had requested a slight change in the show order that I must not have remembered, and since his show order didn't match with mine, I ended up playing the wrong video at the wrong time. I got around this error easy enoug with some quick mouse clickage, but the problem would come back to haunt me later when the out of order items I copied to the front showed up again later in the show. I had to skip through them quicky, but I still heard taunting murmurs from the audience. No good.

Probably the worst part of the night is when in the middle of the BEST SOUND DESIGN category nominee listing, the entire flash component FROZE UP. Completely dead. People were left hanging, the presenters had no idea what to do, and I felt like my entire world caved in underneath me. Luckily (or unluckily) enough, the presentation glitched out and skipped directly to the nominee listing, so they were able to announce the winner.

Right after that, Planetskill was up! Already nerved out of my skull, I tried to quickly shake off the bad feelings and FOCUS - it was GO time. I had Paul Lipson be the spacebar man and told him to count to 10 and then hit the trigger. I start walking to the stage; Ransom is walking in on the other end... the song STARTS, and I hit the guitar trigger... and...

Success! My complicated midi setup worked flawlessly! However, when I finally met at center stage, I realized that we had a small problem:

Ransom's guitar output no sound!

That's right; we played the entire set without his guitar sound. No lead guitar. We played it off rather decently (as shown in THIS vide0) but it was still a huge heartbreak. Ransom later found out that it was due to him not taking the amp out of tuning mode after he tuned up. Shit happens.

For the rest of the presentation until the last category, there was no sound. Luckily, for the Lifetime Achievement award, the winner gave the world's longest speech, and I was able to go in and trouble shoot the sound really quickly, which resulted in AUDIO OF THE YEAR having all of its sound working. A good ending to a relatively poor-executed show (on my end).

I was planning to network with people after the show, but it was too much of an embarrassment to even consider doing such a thing.

The people at G.A.N.G. don't seem to be furious, so that's a plus. All in all, the biggest issue I have with the night is that I spent so much time on this project and got so little sleep, tried so hard and worked efficiently for a very solid stretch, and it STILL didn't turn out right. I've always been a last minute guy, but I took special care not to do that with this. The last time I tried to plan something out so grandiose I got shafted as well. One of these times, that won't be the case, and I'll be ready.