Liberation

[ateolf]

I started getting the rest of things set up for Friday's show. Getting the stand I'm going to be using set up with the stuff I'm going to be using on top of it and breaking out the Moog Liberation! Now I remember why it's been shut away in its case for the better part of two decades. It does have issues. The one I most remembered is how the A and A-flat keys (in every octave except the highest) don't send gates when you press down on them. You can get around this a little bit by pressing down a lower key (because of monophonic higher note priority) and the cv signal works and you'll get the gate from the other key, but just press down one of those notes and it doesn't do anything. Then some of the slides are a bit wonky and noisy. Especially for mixing in oscillator 1. Sometimes that one cuts out completely and you have the jiggle the slider to get the sound back in. And I don't remember this one, but the noise generator isn't working at all. And as a consequence the sample and hold isn't working either (s/h uses the noise generator for its random notes, for those of you non-synth-nerds out there). But definitely enough of it works to rock out with. I also set up a little photoshoot. I thought it'd be fun to have a picture of myself holding the Liberation. Then I thought it'd be a good "album cover" for after the show, but I didn't want myself in the picture, just the Moog. So I thought of having multiple pictures, including the same scene without me in it so I could superimpose and cut myself out and just leave the synth hanging in the air. I almost had it set up alright with the phone camera on a tripod and using the timer. But every time I took a test photo, I was crouching down in a really stupid way. So I had Mary Beth help me and let me know that I wasn't looking stupid before she took the photo. We still used the tripod setup so the photos would have the same exact angles for the overlays. Okay! I practiced a bit with everything. At first the synth playing was a bit lacking on my part, but I think I finally started getting the hang of it. Definitely need more practice on it all though. I also went ahead and made the artwork because I just couldn't get it out of my head. Well, I think that's about it. Also, Maggie's photos from the show last week came in and they're pretty awesome. There's one with a long exposure and the layers of my hands over the synth make it look like smoke is coming out of it.