Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Broke my own rules...

A tale:

I upgraded the software I use to run my show (Max/MSP), before my most recent show on Saturday in Ohio. I tech some of the pieces, but not Ten Children (why? I don't know). Of course, it's THAT piece that totally, miserably and irrecoverably crashes in the show.

Now I pride myself on being able to nail the tech part of my show -- the computer is there, but I almost never look at it or touch it, preferring to focus entirely on the audience between pieces, with no "dead air" while I'm fiddling. Well, that was not to be on Saturday. So, I broke my rule of 1) tech your whole show when upgrading, even if it's an incremental upgrade, 2) don't touch your computer during performance, and 3) don't talk about technical issues with the audience. So I beat myself up pretty bad about that the next day, but I spend Monday going over everything with a fine-tooth comb and rewriting some of the code. Now it should all work again.

We'll see on Friday when I play at LEMURplex! Oh, an for info on that show, go to www.tranzducer.com

Mike

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

sounds like a terrible experience. I had a similar one at the third performance of my wind ensemble piece over in England a couple of years ago. After it happened, I made a list of things that I absolutely must do prior to every concert, and that includes playing through every piece in its entirety. it's a painful process, but one that reduces avoidable mistakes

Michael Drapkin said...

Next time call Best Buy and have them send over the Geek Squad to fix it