christian renz // bassist

Here are some thoughts I posted in reply to a Coursera Songwriting course forum post that asked whether it is possible to write songs for a living. Any comments?

If you want to be a full-time musician (lyricist, singer, recording engineer, ...), consider these:

• You need to be not just a good musician, but also a very good self-marketer and business developer
• A major part of your job will be to reliably solve other people's problems. E.g. most of my gigs were as bassist, and I got hired on being reliable, showing up on time, being dependable, providing a solid foundation to the band - thus solving the organiser's problem of needing a solid band, thus solving the keyboardist's problem to have a stable rhythm section to depend on, etc.
• You need to have a set of skills in your portfolio. E.g. a drummer who doesn't particularly love teaching probably earns most of his money travelling up and down the country for gigs, plus the odd recording gig - a very stressful life. Keyboardists typically have more options: play gigs, arrange music for productions, write scores for publishing companies, accompany rehearsals, ...
  
• Teaching is an essential skill, and a very good way to earn money as a musician - if you like it and are a good teacher. If not, better think of some good other options.
• You typically earn more money playing music the general public likes ("Top 40"), than the music you are in love with.
• It is generally more difficult to earn money with your own music than with covers - moving from a "working musician" position to successfully promoting your own music (successful meaning it earns you a living) is a huge step that requires lots of time and effort.

Last year, I wrote a short Christmas play for the third anniversary dinner of International Church of Shanghai. The story revolves around a very typical, busy expat family in Shanghai that is challenged to question their assumptions about Christmas, and about their faith. The play features a cast of four main actors and a narrator as well as a group of silent actors. In addition, we also used a live band to perform a song at the closing of each scene.

I have finally managed to polish up things a bit more, and am now offering the script as well as guide track MP3s for download here - maybe somebody finds it useful for their own Christmas drama performance.

The songs used are:
Mary did you know – we followed the original arrangement by Kenny Rogers quite closely, and the song is not included for copyright reasons.
On The Way To Jerusalem – an original song I wrote a few years back that I translated to English for this occasion.
I Know That My Redeemer Liveth – A rearrangement of the famous song from Händel's messiah.
Joy To The World – Another rearrangement of another famous song.

Download Trapped! – Drama script

Download Trapped! – Guide MP3s

I've decided to start to use Soundcloud to share tracks I am working on. I'll start with a piece called "Who I Am".

Soundcloud - renzwertig

(German only, sorry.) Ich habe mich schon vor einiger Zeit entschlossen, Spiegel Online nicht mehr zu lesen, da ich die Berichterstattung teilweise als sehr tendenziös empfinde, Aufgrund meines Hintergrundwissens fiel mir das vor allem bei technischen Artikeln auf, aber das gilt natürlich auch für die anderen Ressorts. Seither schaue ich dort nur noch sporadisch vorbei und nutze als Informationsquelle für deutsche Nachrichten hauptsächlich ZEIT Online.

Die Berichterstattung über den Start einer chinesischen Trägerrakete gestern hat mich wieder an diesen Entschluss erinnert. Es ist erstaunlich, wie verschieden man über das gleiche Ereignis schreiben kann. Egal, wie man das Ereignis an sich bewertet, die Artikel sprechen für sich:

Peking feiert seine All-Machts-Phantasien, Spiegel Online

China schießt Raummodul ins All, ZEIT Online

Since I've been playing for electric guitar recently, I took a closer look at Guitar Rig again. To use Guitar Rig in a live setup, it's essential to be able to remote control it using a foot pedal. For that purpose, Native Instruments offers the Rig Kontrol pedal that additionally contains a USB audio interface. But I stil have a Boss FC-50 pedal lying around that I've used in the past to control Reaktor patches on the stage – so why not try to reuse the same pedal for Guitar Rig instead of buying a new one…?

The problem with the FC-50 is that it only sends so-called Program Change messages. Guitar Rig doesn't allow mapping these messages to effect controls. Instead, it uses them to directly change presets, which makes the pedal much less useful. My first idea therefore was to build a Reaktor patch that converts Program Change-messages to MIDI controllers or notes (Note On/Note Off). Unfortunately, Reaktor ignores consecutive Program Change messages with the same value! That would result in multiple pedal presses (on the same pedal) not being recognized.

But there's a much easier option: Nico Wald has created a wonderful (and free) piece of software called MidiPipe that allows to manipulate and filter MIDI messages almost without limits. The basic idea for my filter is to find out which pedal was pressed by comparing the current Program Change message with the previous one. That actually works well, with one exception: If the pedal is set to an invalid value, e.g. by first selecting bank 0, patch 8, and then pressing Bank Down, this cannot be detected from outside. (Program Change messages only allow values between 0 and 127). But it's easy to change that by pressing another pedal twice (and in a live situation it's too cumbersome to use the Bank Up/Bank Down buttons anyway).

The following MidiPipe configuration allows using all 6 pedals of the Boss FC-50 (including the A/B pedal), and - with the limitation mentioned above - also the Bank Up/Bank Down buttons as pedal 7 and 8. External MIDI controllers are just passed through. I've connected a volume pedal that I'm using as volume pedal or wah wah in Guitar Rig. The filter basically consists of two steps:

• Using AppleScript, the Program Change messages are mapped from von 0..127 to 1..8 gemappt.
• Each Program Change message is then turned into one Note On and one Note Off message. Interestingly enough I had to swap the order of messages in MidiPipe to get MidiPipe to output them in the right order.

During development and testing, Kurt Revis' wonderful and free MIDI Monitor was of great help.

Download the MidiPipe configuration

Download of the AppleScript file (for testing directly in the AppleScript editor)

By the way, one more hint: In Guitar Rig, I mapped the pedals of the Boss FC-50 directly to the Rig Kontrol pedals. This configuration normally is lost each time a preset is changed. Therefore, for each pedal, the "Lock" option has to be set to make the setting global in Guitar Rig, independent of the selected preset.

Even though it is a promotional video - the idea is very nice and well executed:

Depone inspired me to look at my top 10 songs in 2010. The following list is based on my Last.FM charts of the last twelve months. Per artist I chose the song I most listened to, which resulted in an interesting mixture of gospel music, jazz and pop.

David Tao ended up in this list more by accident - I like to listen to him, but the track ended up in this list because I sang it live recently and listened to it many times during practicing.

01. Kosho – On Green Dolphin Street
02. Alvin Slaughter – Mighty Praise
03. Stevie Wonder – Spain
04. Israel & New Breed – Again I Say Rejoice
05. Manu Katché – Lo
06. Trijntje Oosterhuis – Human Nature
07. Avishai Cohen Trio – Seattle
08. Keith Jarrett – I Loves You Porgy
09. 陶喆 – 普通朋友 (David Tao - Regular Friends)
10. Kirk Franklin – Hosanna

I've mentioned Kiva before, the fantastic micro-finance organisation that makes it as easy to lend US$25 to someone in the third world to support their small business as buying a book on Amazon.

If you check out my lender's page on Kiva, you'll find that as of today, I've made fourty loans so far. Because each loan is at least US$25, that means I have lent in total US$1000 to fourty different people (or group of people) all over the world! However, since the money is repaid after a certain term, it means I had to invest much less than those US$1000 to lend to these people – I just kept on re-lending the same money to different people all over.

By the way, loan 39 and 40 went to Kuña Rory Group in Paraguay and Delfina in Peru and will be used to buy merchandise and a freezer, and a cow and fertilizer.

Why am I mentioning this here? I'm hoping that you'll be motivated to join Kiva as well – maybe you can even one-up me...?

The new Shanghai Apple Store is located very close to my office. Therefore, I spontaneously decided to watch the opening of the Store. I came just after it opened and therefore still heard the countdown at 10:am.

In addition to all those people queuing, a lot of bystanders watched the spectacle. The luxury shopping centre directly next to the Apple store is still under construction, but a few shops are already open. I wonder how many people bought a matching LV bag for their new iPad?

Because there were so many people queuing, visitors were only admitted in groups. Each group was frenetically welcomed by the Apple Store employees.

There were a few observers in neutral clothes with “Apple Corp” tags, and a number of photographers taking pictures for apple. Hence the following signboard in front of the store.

Many people took a quick break from their Saturday shopping to snap a few pictures. It seems the Apple Crew shouting “Apple! Apple! Apple!“ caught quite a bit of attention. Almost a bit too much for me…

I decided to take advantage of my local knowledge. The office tower where I work also has a (not very well-known) restaurant witha good view. You can only take pictures through the window there, but at least it gives a good overview of the crowd.

For this Apple Store, Apple chose an interesting location: The store is not located in one of the famous shopping roads in Shanghai, but in the financial district Lujiazui in Pudong. Pudong is the area east of the Huangpu river. Development in this area only started 15-20 years ago. The famous Oriental Pearl Tower is very close to the Apple store, as well as other famous highrises such as Jinmao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Centre. After the opening of Shanghai Expo, it seems a lot of (mostly Chinese) tourists come here. I guess that should provide a solid turnover for Apple.

Three hours after the opening, the queue was still very long. Compared to the queues at the Expo it would have been much less waiting time, but I still decided to look at the store later when there's less of a crowd… At that point in time, the 5000 t-shirts handed out to visitors were gone anyway.

More picture can be found at Shanghaiist and at IFO Applestore.

If you love tinkering with bass electronics (or just want to make some modifications to your bass yourself), check out the website of Markus Hoppe (alias „Cadfael“). He created a free thirty-something page PDF file with all kinds of different bass circuits. The diagrams also can be understood by people that – like me – were not born with a soldering iron. You only need to know some German… Thanks, Markus!

Free download of Cadfael's bass circuit diagram collection (PDF)