Modern Roadie

UK Arena Tour

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

After a frantic few days in pre-production, the Snow Patrol entourage headed to the south coast for the first night of the UK Arena tour.
A 3000 audience in Bournemouth seemed tiny compared to last nights 14,000 at the Birmingham NIA Arena.
The crew has expanded dramatically, not sure what everyone does yet!

Now running 3 Apple laptops with Logic Pro and OnStage. Two for playback and keyboards, while a third runs Quicktime movies inside Logic.

Manchester MEN Arena tonight with an audience close to 16,000!

Isle of Man

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

After a quick dash around Australia and the Far East, we headed back to some of the far flung corners of the UK. The Isle of Man has a newly renovated theatre in the beautiful sea-side town of Douglas.

Back to it...

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Here we go again kids! Gary has ben given the all clear to continue touring.

Folks in the Uk may have seen the Snow Patrol logo projected onto the night sky to call band and crew back into rehearsals.

Spent a couple of days configuring a second playback/keys rig. This is for when we haven't enough time to freight the backline to the next show. Playback 2 can be left behind while we fly to the next city where the other backline is waiting.

I used another of the G4 partitions to install an identical OS with the newer MOTU audio and MIDI drivers. Didn't want multiple drivers installed on the same bootable OS.

Of course i'm using Logic and OnStage on the second Playback rig enabling us to run a main and backup system side by side. The new MOTU ultra interfaces are half the size allowing two interfaces in one 19" space.

OnStage Setup 2

Thursday, June 15, 2006

In the last post I wrote about the initial ideas of automating the opening and closing of Logic Pro Projects during a bands set-list.

After a few months of head scratching, we finally got our basic Cocoa code to respond to Midi messages correctly.

So we gave it a fancy icon, added a retro looking GUI and came up with this.

We've been using OnStage since the start of the year, and we're now looking for a few more Logic savvy folk to give it test.

Zap us a message if you fancy giving OnStage a try...

OnStage Setup

So with a bit of time on our hands, I'd like to recap on the Logic Pro setups we've been using on stage.
Last year with Doves we used two duplicate G4 laptops, with a unique set of EXS samplers and other virtual instruments for each number in the bands set-list.

This was done by closing and opening a new Logic Pro Project for each song, utilising the shared RAM to speed the loading of large multi-sample instruments.

Closing and opening each Project on both the main and backup G4 would take valuable seconds between songs, so we had a look at trying to automate the process.

After a bit of Cocoa reading, we discovered that a simple Apple script could be triggered via a Midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) Program Change message sent from any standard Midi hardware....

US Tour put on hold!

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

After a week of sitting tight in New Jersey waiting for news of our next show, we finally got the message that, due to Gary's throat illness, the US tour had been cancelled and we were all being sent home.
Once again we see an artist suffering from the relentless, but essential promotion and touring associated with a newly released record.
I'd like to repeat last year's message - With all our technology, digital recall and backups, you can't dodge the human body taking a knock and needing time to heal.

Wishing Gary a speedy recovery.....