Guitarchitecture.org

Hey Everyone,

I hope this finds you well!  Just a few quick updates.

Book Orders and Lessons Learned

The page has been a little light on lessons (minus the 12-tone post) lately, but I’ve been busy juggling a few other things and getting the book orders out the door are amongst them.  I had been waiting for a few design consultations to come through and both people flaked on me. 

Lesson 1: People flake on things (even when it involves money and they’re “professional”) so always have a backup plan.

Lesson 2: No one cares about excuses – they only care about results.

Rather than wait longer trying to get another designer to work on the book, I went back to Plan A and used the website design as a template for the book cover layout.  You can actually order all three books on Lulu right now, but I’d recommend holding off on it until I get the proofs next week for review.

For those of you who have ordered books – Final – yes final – revisions of the first three books will be sent out by the end of the week.  I need to send a big shout out of thanks to Doug Kearns who soldiered through the texts and caught a number of embarrassing errors that neither I, the other proofreaders or the spellcheck caught. 

The Bundle deal

I have mixed feelings about the bundle deal leaving.  On one hand, I feel like it was a good way for people to get my books at a rock-bottom price.  On the other hand, I feel like I need to honor the original commitment that I made to those people that they should buy now (because the deal is finite). 

For now, I’ve extended the $30 bundle deal until the print editions are received and proofed and then all sales (Pdf and hard copy) will go through Lulu.  I might bring the bundle back in the future, but it’ll depend on multiple factors (including what the demand for it is).

The Lulu Print Edition.

Here’s a bummer.  In order to have an ISBN number (and thus distribution), I’m limited to a perfect binding for the book, instead of issuing the coil bound book I wanted to release. 

For those of you who want the coil bound book, I will be releasing a separate edition of each book with a coil binding but since it won’t have an ISBN, it will only be available via Lulu.com.  The pricing should be the comparable (if not the same).

Au Lab POD Farm and my lost weekend

Much of this last weekend was lost falling down the tech-hole trying to get POD Farm working with AU Lab.  When I initially posted on AU Lab, I had every MIDI Assignment between my MK II shortboard and POD Farm working perfectly, but I violated the cardinal rule of tech,

“If it works – leave it alone”

and paid for it.  I had updated POD Farm, and Line 6 drivers (several times) over the last ½ year and now between the two of them I can’t get the AU of POD FARM to recognize the midi signal from the shortboard.  I can still control SooperLooper with the shortboard via AU Lab (so I haven’t completely lost my skill set in this area), but not POD Farm. 

I didn’t notice it as I hadn’t been gigging with the laptop but when I went to go test things for an upcoming gig, I realized that it didn’t work and that’s where 4-6 hours a day got sucked into. 

“It’s always one button…”

I remember being in a rehearsal a few years ago when a vocalist was freaking out about a problem with the PA set up.  The drummer had commented that there was no reason to freak out as, “Nothing’s broken.  When something doesn’t work it’s always one button away from working.”

In a previous post, I had mentioned how AU Lab 2.2 wasn’t working with my rig and how I had to go back and re-install 2.1.  With the POD FARM AU and the shortboard not communicating – I decided to download the X CODE 3.2.6 update and give it a whirl.  When it finished downloading (it took about an hour), I loaded up a patch and just like before, I couldn’t get audio from the Duet to the channel strip.  This time however, I decided to choose another input and then choose the Duet again (manually resetting the Duet input) and it worked!  It’s a sloppy work around, but it’s getting audio to the AU. 

So sometime’s it is just one button, but that observation isn’t helping with the POD Farm AU midi assign.  (The stand-alone version works fine – it’s just the AU that’s being goofy).

So my initial idea of running POD Farm as stomp boxes in front of the S-Gear amp has been dashed for now, but after watching Joe Gore’s outrageous Mental 99 set last Thursday, maybe this is the setback I needed to get into Mainstage on a real level and try setting up a rig there.

For those of you into Laptop guitar.  Check back.  More developments will be reported on as they occur.

There’s a big difference between being busy and getting something done – so in the meantime, just remember sometimes it’s more than just one button and if you’re looking over the precipice of what could be a tech time hole – make sure to set an alarm!

Thanks for reading!

-SC