Monday, January 23, 2006

Band Rehearsal and OneNote

As you might know, I play in a band. Since I’m running on a tight schedule (who isn’t?), I don’t have too much time to rehearse. This means that when I rehearse with the band, I need to be able to quickly remember a lot of songs and text to both play and sing backup-vocal. On yesterday’s rehearsal, I decided to try to use OneNote to help me jot down chords and text.

This was an instant success! In addition to writing down chords, I was also able to record small parts that I play (and tend to forget between rehearsals). Using the built-in sound recording tool in OneNote really impressed the other members in the band. They kept on coming over to have a look at my Tablet and what I was doing.

To top it all up, I connected the Tablet PC via USB to my guitar effects processor, the Line 6 POD XT Live. Using their editor, I could program the effects needed in the new songs we were rehearsing directly on the screen. This made the task of setting up new patches, copying the base sounds that I could start to tweak etc. very easy. The only problem was that connecting the USB created a lot of interference sounds in my amplifier. I had to disconnect the USB cable when not editing, something that made this part of the success a bit tiresome. I’ll take a look at this problem soon and see what I can do.

No comments: