christian renz // bassist

(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)

Shopping in Shanghai with a baby is a singular experience: I have seldom experienced so much attention. We quickly got used to people being very curious and supermarket workers calling their colleagues to take a look at the baby. But sometimes, there are still situations that leave us speechless: Seven, eight supposedly grown-up women swarming around the pram, shouting and cheering… well, that's China :-).

My personal theory is that zebra crossings in China are mostly meant to let pedestrians disturb cars only in certain areas. Because in China, in practice, cars very clearly have the right of way (but not by law, I think). In addition to that, cars are allowed to turn right even when facing a red traffic light. That makes crossing a road much more interesting experience than in Germany.

There is a online shopping heaven, and it has a Chinese name: Taobao.com (淘宝网). You can buy almost everything there: Kitchen appliances, clothing, nespresso capsules. I think Taobao offers at least as much as Amazon and eBay together.

But what makes shopping at Taobao really unique is the fact that in Shanghai it is cheap to deliver anything. Much cheaper than parcel fees in German, much faster (many things are delivered on the next day), and it also saves going down to the post office.

But compared to online shopping in Germany, you have to be even more careful who you buy from. There are the usual tricks (photo shows the complete package, the offer refers only to one piece), and then there's the basic rule: Basically everything you can buy on Taobao can be fake. If you want to be careful, better only buy from traders with many, many good ratings. Which still won't keep you from seeing comments such as: “No idea whether that thing is fake or real, but it works nicely.”

In the last few weeks, a few spam comments made it through the filter. I am not yet quite sure why: Either I created a security hole myself when implementing the spam protection, or Recaptcha has a general problem. If anybody has a clue, please let me know!