I did an earlier solution for bringing hundreds of lyrics on-stage using an iPhone hooked to a mic stand. Well, it had its problems, mostly getting the GorillaMobile properly attached to mic stands, especially the non-boom ones (straight up mic stands.)
So back to the drawing board. Here is version number two! This time the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is hooked to a RadTech SLAM clip case that I got online for $7. This has a clip in the back that could be hooked to various possible support structures.
What I figured out concerning the boom stand mics and the single straight ones is that there has to be one single place where to attach the support structure. Well there is one — the XRL connector for the mic cable! What I tested out was using a document clip, those you use to clip together lots of paper, the big size. I attach that to the XRL connector, bend the clip pins over and hook the SLAM clip case to the top one. I use the bottom clip pin to support the case so it’s nicely aligned. I think the second picture shows how it all works.
So the end result is a system that is cheap, quick to set up (sometimes, as with jams, important), robust enough and also as invisible as you could have it concerning lyrics in front of your eyes.
Which leads to eye sight. Most of us that are somewhat, eh, older, we lose the short sight over time. My son could easily read the text in the iPhone from the distance close to the mic. I could barely read it. What’s the solution? Well, it’s cool to have sunglasses on-stage when performing and now I have a real need for them. In other words, from CVS and similar drug-stores you could get sunglasses that are bi-focal, the lower part has reading-glass strength lenses. The upper part is transparent.
The last thing I’m still working on is the lyrics delivery system. I set up a special email address on my ISP so I could send lyrics to an IMAP server — rich text emails. These I could then arrange in folders online and then sync these over to the iPhone. This means I have backups out there and could download them to any iPhone or iPod Touch in case I need to do it. As well as constantly sending over and updating my lyrics setup.
I’m sure I will be working on version 3 based on the experiences I have with this setup, but as the Japanese know, kaitzen (constant improvements.)
Short un-mastered snippet of the work I did tonight for the third
song. Post-psy punk. Album should be ready end-February, that’s the
plan, get it done, out through the door.
Cleaning up a lot of old projects for licensing purposes later this
week, here’s one, I didn’t have a title so I called each one WZ, from
1 up to 16 the weekend I did those. This is section 11.
Download now or listen on posterous
Choral Music From the 31th Century.mp3 (3005 KB)
Had to test my Apogee One with an external cardoid mic….
To some degree I’m a child of the eighties as most of my earlier music production and stage presence happened in this time period.
It is of course natural to reflect that things were much better at that time. We had the first MIDI-controller synthesizers and the field was wide-open for any kind of experimentation. The New Wave movement in England produced Simple Minds, Ultravox and similar bands with a new style. And yes, we had plenty of hair.
Well, to be frank things were neither that utopian. Synths cost a fortune. Today by getting Logic Pro (or Logic Express) you get thousand-times more synthesizer options than long time ago. Not to speak of really having the chance to do the whole production in your home studio rather than using a Fostex-4 track as the scratch pad and moving it to an expensive 16-track analog studio for final production.
To release music you had to press singles or maybe an album; that itself was an investment. And 7″ 45RPM singles don’t exactly sound that nice.
To get any kind of decent media attention you had to work via a label that had the connections and money for decent PR. No Internet and web sites, exactly.
If you wanted to play a cover and learn the chord structures you were sitting by a tape player and moving the song back and forth to sort things out, rather than typing a string into Google and get the full tablature from N different sites. Not to speak of all the YouTube videos showing any kind of technique, or AudioTuts.com and similar sites that have tons of tutorials, rather than sitting long nights in the studio trying to figure out how to do things. And no forums, you had friends you might ask for advice, provided they knew something.
Sometimes I feel that this age makes it too easy to do music — one reason why fewer professional musicians and producers bubble up as it it no longer an arcane art known by the few. Then again we live in the age of empowering all consumers with media production.
