Faith and the Muse with Soriah

Cool concert, I was there!


(In fact I took the show pics in the link).
http://musicartery.com/showreviews/FATM.php
Go forth and read about it.

^ Soriah (in the pic) is awesomeness.

Massive update of updateyness

Soo I have been kinda slacking off on putting stuff in this thing lately..
A couple weeks ago as part of a work thing I had the opportunity to participate in the regional FIRST robotics competition. I was a volunteer in their "machine shop" area tending to the needs of the ~61 participating highschool robotics teams. It was pretty straight forward.

Something broken: fix it.
Something that doesn't work right: figure it out.

For the most part it was pretty fast paced. Every kind of job from cutting off pieces of wood, plastic, aluminum to figuring out how to make shaft A fit into bearing B with very limited equipment. Fab work, machining, and a very small amount of welding. Our "shop" was basically a few tables with some fab equipment and a motorcycle trailer with a Grizzly mill/drill and a lathe along with a MIG/TIG welder.


It was pretty cool seeing all this happen. People running around everywhere, lots of enthusiasm for the science and technology end of things and just an all around fun (and tiring) time. Wish they had this program when I was in school.

I am working on a video of my footage from this event. I *plan* to get it done soon. But we'll see.


This last weekend was a ton of fun. I visited my friend Randi up in Seattle. During our travels we ended up at the Experience Music Project / Sci-Fi museum. Two things for me to nerd out about. Music and Star Trek.. The sci-fi end of it was pretty cool but I ended up doing most of my nerding at the EMP end of things. Upstairs they had soundproof studios where you could play instruments for 10 minutes at a time (as to not hold up lines forever) and I tried my hand at some real drums. I love my electronic drums to pieces but there is something just downright cool about a real acoustic kit. My friend Randi (who I did my best not to blow her eardrums out with the drum noise) has the nifty talent of being able to play just about any musical instrument she picks up and we spent 10 minutes goofing around. She flip flopped between guitar and bass and I did my best not to mess her up too bad and played the drums. It was pretty awesome. She worked around my in-experience and for a short period of time we sounded not half bad. I wish I had been able to record our goofing around.

If you have never been the the EMP I *highly* recommend it. It is a blast no matter how much (or little) musical ability you have. I have more to post but that's it for now!

Practice, practice, practice...

Well it has been a little less than a month since I decided to try the insanity that is learning the drums. It is a ton of fun. I'm not real good and I usually look pretty dorky but whatever, at least I seem to be improving. With the continued help of my friend Dave I have been learning some of the basics and practicing them daily. One of my biggest challenges seems to be getting my left leg to not effect what my other limbs are doing. Things go much smoother before I try adding all 4 limbs together. :)



BTW: Ask the dog what she thinks of all this...
















I thought I was my worst critic... :D

Roland Drums

I got my new drum stuff today *happy dance*
*runs off to play*

Real drums!

Ok.. so.. it was only a matter of time right?! Rockband addiction -> drum addiction?
Sounds good to me.

So I have decided to give drumming a shot. With the aid of my friend Dave and his ultra shinny drums (sorry.. drooling...) he has been attempting to teach me the basics of drumming. I have only had about a single days worth of real training on these crazy things so I have a loooooong way to go but here is a video of my first shot at it. I am looking away because I would mess up every time I looked at the camera. (although I did manage to mess up plenty of times when I didn't have an excuse ) :)


edit: I know the video has issues playing... Appearently it is a known issue and Blogger is "working on the problem" so when the link isn't being stupid I will take this note down. It works sometimes.

UPDATE: As of 2/24 the videos seem to be working again. Give it a shot.

I have no musical background whatsoever besides about a month and a half of playing drums on Guitar Hero so there is a lot for me to learn. I am pretty good at blindingly following directions on a tv screen with little colored dots floating by but have never tried just playing along with something. Plus, my left foot has always just been allowed to be lazy while my right foot does all the work in GH, now there is this funny thing called a hi-hat pedal for my foot to deal with. Just some of the fun things of starting to learn something new.

I am having a lot of fun though so I am looking forward to learning more and improving as time goes on.

New Trick

Teaching the dog all my bad habits...

If she starts forgetting her chores and leaving things around the house we're in trouble.


oh.. wait..

nevermind. (btw.. 50th post! woo!)

How to fix a Guitar Hero Drum Controller

So, much to my surprise the problem was as expected. A bad wire. Last night I noticed I was missing a ton of red notes (I don't suck *THAT* bad :P) and thought it would either be one of two things: a loose/broken wire or a broken transducer.

I pulled the thing off the stand and disconnected the cymbal pads, Wiimote, and anything else that would come off. Fortunately, the screws that hold this thing together are simple Phillips head and besides there being a zillion of them there was nothing else holding the case together (don't forget the screws under the little adhesive no-skid pads on the feet )(the feet you would use if you wanted to play it on a table instead of a stand). The pic above shows the rather sparse interior of the drum controller.

This is where I found the answer to my questions... As soon as I started inspecting the wiring to the red pad the wire just fell apart. Easy enough to fix. Kind of a pain to get to. To remove the pad from the rest of the assembly, take the 4 screws holding the red (or whatever color pad your trying to fix) housing onto the frame out. Now you have the pad free (or dangling by the wire if it is still attached at all) but now you have to get the silicon pad off the hard plastic case. There are three "one way" grommets (I guess you could call them) holding the two pieces together. I used a small screwdriver to gently shove the edges of the wedge shaped plug/grommet/thingies through the hard plastic holes. Patience is important here. After you have the pad free it is a pretty simple setup. Two wires. From the factory there is some goop covering the solder contacts and the wires to try and keep them secure. I used a pair of pliers to pull up (do it gently!) the old wire from the goop. I then de-soldered the little remaining wire-stub.

All you need to do now is solder some new wire to the sensor. take note of the original wire positions to maintain polarity (I didn't check to see if polarity was an issue but I try to put things back the way I found them). I made my wire pigtail fairly long compared to the old one. It gave me more room to work with when putting it back together. Fish the new wire pigtail back through the hole in the red pad case and then back through the hole in the drum stand. Then solder the new wires to the ones left inside the case (alternatively, you could replace the whole length of wire and put the connector on the other end and plug it back into the board but that is kind of overkill.)

I waited to push the rubber grommets in the drum pad back in until after I tested it to make sure my fix worked. (I didn't want to have to pry them out again). I carefully flipped the whole thing over (notice in the pic the pad still isn't attached to the red hard plastic case), I plugged the cymbals and wiimote back in, and did a quick functional test to make sure everything is working.

Once I was happy with the results I unplugged everything again and flipped it back over and started putting the pad and case back together. I used a little bit of heat shrink tubing to pretty up my splices. It goes together the same way it comes apart so I won't discuss that process.

Fix seems to work great! No more missed notes due to bad wires. (Just missed notes due to bad playing ;) )