Congressman Davy News from Richard Byrne

[Editor's note: I'm just stealing other people's content for my own. Check out my new podcast. Yes, I call it "mine."]

Greetings, all ...                      

 

Hope your location is neither dry nor dusty as August arrives!

 

Our gratitude that you were such an essential part of making Congressman Davy happen is immense. We have been out on the trail and we’re busy getting the word out. So we would like to give you a quick update ... and ask for a tiny bit of help.

 

A few days ago, we released the entire record to Americana and NPR/non-commercial stations. We also have a nifty tracking map for radio play:

 

In conjunction with our radio push, we are also going to do a day of broad promotion across social media tomorrow (Friday July 31).

 

If you see us drift by downriver on your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Bluesky in the next day or so, we’d be obliged if you “liked” or reposted us. Or even let people know that you are part of Team Davy. The more is not only the merrier when it comes to these things. The harsh algorithms that rule our discourse make it a must!

 

The goal here is not so much to sell records or downloads or get more ears on the free online radio play version. That’s great, sure, but ... The real goal is to attract a bit more attention to the terrific work we have done.

 

Sadly, this is especially true in the DMV, where we have not gotten much of a hearing yet for a musical set in the city in the 1830s – nor for the terrific online radio play that you played such an extraordinary part in making happen.

 

Thank you so much! Those of us who’ve lent us some time and attention think what we accomplished together is special. And we could not have done it without you  

 

Links to everything follow! Richard and Deano 

Bandcamp for CD and Digital

 

The FREE radio play online

 

Where we are streaming

 

Congressman Davy website

Collective Genius

Hey, check it out. Estrogenius is now expanded into Collective Genius. 

Estrogenius was started by Fiona Jones at Manhattan Theatresource and it's very cool that it is the legacy of Theatresource more than a quarter century ago (!).

Computationals

 I'm on a journey to make my computing life simpler. 

First up, trying Krokiet, which is an update of Czkawka, to find duplicate files. It's open-source. I have a lot of terabytes. So it'll take a while.

KDE Connect is a bunch of programs that let phones connect with computers. Very multi-platform. Open-source. 

Rufus is a bootable-drive maker thingy. I had some success and some trouble with Etcher. 

John Philip Sousa and “The Menace of Mechanical Music”

More on how the US is Communist (and that's a good thing, actually)

Here (pasted below) is a right-wing take on how the United States has adopted the basics of "communism" by now-banned Reddit account transcendReality:

The Congressman Davy podcast is live. It's a 90-minute podcast of the Congressman Davy musical. I think I might be credited as the "director" of the podcast. 

Congressman Davy:

Listen now!

 

The story of Davy Crockett's political rise and fall performed as a radio play in two acts.

Book & Lyrics by Richard Byrne. Music by Dean Schlabowske.

A Who’s Who of prominent Americana and rock luminaries sing the songs from the musical. And a bevy of DC performers and storytellers bring the text of Congressman Davy to life.

Speechifying, hijinks, chicanery and bamboozlement! (Whiskey not included.)

LEQ

I would love to move to Linux. Right now the only thing stopping me is the fact I'm a Samplitude user and I want VST's to work. I've abandoned Adobe, so that isn't a problem. I don't need Microsoft Office anymore (unless I get a job in academia which requires it and... I might.) Video stuff is all DaVinci Resolve, Blender, and suchwise. So I'm very, very close. It's just VST and Samplitude keeping me in.

VST3 is now open-source, so there are plugins which Linux is supporting. But as far as I know, Samplitude needs Wine. 

Oh, and drivers for interfaces. That's a problem with/for Linux. 

Your mom.

ZL Equalizer is a free and open-source EQ plugin. It's sort of a Fabfilter Pro-Q-type thing. I haven't played with it yet.

Hoppr

I made a very smol videogame in Godot. It's called Hoppr. 

I wanted to hand-code a game. So I did. 

How'd you make it?

A whole lot of tutorials. 

Is this programmed in C#?

No. It's Godot's own scripting language. My understanding is that it's similar to C#. But I did have to learn (and then immediately forget) the difference between classes, functions, and variables. 

Does this mean you can program a game?

LOL. No. I am a dope. 

But you made this game.

Yes, but it's an incredibly perishable skill.

Did you use AI?

I'd like to just say "no." But it's more complicated than that. I mean, "AI" doesn't exist. It's basically advanced auto-correct. And Godot will make predictive text which really works well. Speling is vital in code, and the scripting tool in Godot works really well as far as I can tell by giving you the exact spelling and syntax and things you put into quotes and such. 

So wait. You clearly have no idea what you're doing.

That's correct.

Tell me about Summer Engine.

So I read a thing about how Summer Engine is sposed to be really great and you can vibe-code your way to success. 

Can you?

No, of course not.

Does it work at all? 

At all? Yes. I managed to get it to do one and a half things.

I'll bite. What's the one thing?

I was irked at how the impact sound was only happening on the floor. I wanted it to happen on all collision objects. So I asked it to do that, and WOO! It did that. It made them all work. 

And the half thing?

Well, I felt the sound was coming a bit late, so Summer Engine suggested making the collision shapes a bit bigger such that the sound is triggered a tad early. That was a pretty good idea actually and I ended up replicating it by hand.

Why not let Summer Engine do it?

Well. I tried to do a couple different things with the engine. I managed to crash and destroy the entire project such that the Godot project simply didn't work anymore.

So just undo.

I tried that. Summer basically said "Hmm... let me think about how to do that." And proceeded to trash everything.

This is why we use Git, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely. I managed to go backward a version and then I abandoned using Summer Engine. 

How did the art come about?

The extreme high-quality of the illustration is due to my art skills which are amongst the greatest of Academy artists and... oh, I mean I drew them in Krita. 

What's up with the sound?

I was amused by the idea of making all custom sound effects. So I did. 

Will you make more levels?

Does anyone want that?

Red Flag of the Future Trailer

 There's a new trailer for the opera Red Flag of the Future.

Mid-June Arbitrary Things

Theatremix seems kinda cool for building playlists for cues for shows. Except. Do we really need to do VCA/DCA mixing now with fancypants digital consoles? Having the actual channel in your hands rather than a DCA seems better to me just because I want to be able to grab EQ's and such. It doesn't seem to let you swap channels around but it does pretty much every other thing you'd likely want for live, repeatable work with multiple actors. 

VioletAudio makes a couple things including the dMiX 128. It's a sort of stagebox/cloud-mixing box. 

Filmbox is a film emulation software. Chance seems to like it. It does look cool.

Alpine Email is a Pine alternative. 

The Glass Bees is a science-fiction book.

ProRes422HQ preserves visual quality at the same high level as Apple ProRes 4444 but for 4:2:2 image sources.

The Drowned Girl

Watch The Drowned Girl.

 

Memorial Day

 I've been editing the podcast of Congressman Davy. 

The remote recording lifestyle.

The mixes of the music from Kingsize Studios (Michael Hagler) sound real good. The use of the Allen & Heath automatic mic mixer worked well for the podcast. Sure, we also recorded (and have used) isolated tracks of each microphone, but the 2-mix of AMM worked well. More on that later.

The microphone cluster for recording the podcast of Congressman Davy. It's basically a cluster of film mics. There's a big ol' ribbon mic in there but it's not used in the mix at all.

Recording "on location" which, in our case, means recording in a lovely little DC theater. 

The Zoom F8 was used as a backup recorder. The primary recorder was a multitrack recording in Reaper. I'm liking Reaper more and more. It really has one of the most high-performing audio engines. Although amusingly enough the engineers at Samplitude made their own engine vastly more efficient. 

Legs and feet.

A View From the Bridge.

For me, the most fun part is that I got to work with Blair Johnson. He and Maduka and I shared an office for many years. 

Blair Johnson, Andrew Bellware

Recording Congressman Davy

 Setting up the recording for the dialog of Congressman Davy.

The setup.

The actual recording. 

Out of order events of last few weeks

Went to a protest.

Pope Marc delivering a beatitude. 

So first up we had a reading for Richard Byrne's Beauty Doesn't Reach Me. Yeah, some real long-hair stuff about Ernst Toller. That was two weeks ago on the Lower East Side.

Richard Byrne layin' out the good word.

It was good and educational. Buy the book! And check out this podcast that Richard is on. 

Then we had a screening of The Red Flag of the Future at the 14th Street Y.

The house at the 14th Street Y. Small number of seats but huge ceiling and enormous tech row at top.

We want to do another slightly different mix and a couple very minor tweaks to picture on the opera. 

Clear signage.

I was amused by this subway sign.

Realizations, decisions, and actions.

Saw the Yale Symphony. They have two orchestras at Yale, the Symphony and the Philharmonic. The symphony, although it is the "lower" orchestra, is really quite good. The wind section really played like a section. That's not what you get for most student orchestras. I was impressed.

The hall the Yale Symphony plays in is very reverberant and live. I like it. 

Then I saw a rehearsal of the Berkshire Symphony. They're basically the Williams College orchestra.

Berkshire Symphony.

Then it was time for some rock and roll. I mixed The Beaks as they were doing an all-day 100-song marathon of The Beatles. I'm using Multiplay to do playback of sound cues. The program is basically a Q-lab but for PC and it's free. So far it works extraordinarily well. Does it do everything Q-Lab can? No. But for most shows it's more than perfect.

I need more computers. That's Marc Schmied on the Hofner bass. 

I had a router so my iPad could talk to the mixer. The leftmost computer is running Reaper just so I can experiment with playback. 

My very hostile Allen&Heath SQ5 amuses me immensely. 

Now we're going to DC to record the actors for the Congressman Davy podcast. 

Top down, U47 clones and power supplies.

So I'm trying to figure out how we're recording.

There's a bunch of large-diaphragm mics. Actually the middle one is a Blue ribbon microphone.

At first I thought we'd do LDC's. But four outboard power supplies? Also, I don't really know it'll sound like dialog on a stage. We're going for a theater-like sound. So small-diaphragm is the way we're going. 

Instead of large-diaphragm mics, a bunch of small-diaphragm mics.

Anyway, that's what's going on.

Unload of images