I'm taking live sound classes at my community college right now and we talked about this yesterday. The biggest issue with a large venue packed with people is the noise floor is very high. For instance if the crowd is 90db, then you've only got 10-20db of headroom to work with. 90db is already enough to cause hearing damage after 8 hours, and it gets exponentially worse with just a few db more, by 100 you can only safely be in that for 2 hours and that is generally the ideal loudness for that kind of venue. Of course since the engineers probably have hearing loss, they tend to raise it even higher to 110 which is loud enough to still cause damage over time even with regular earbuds unfortunately. So unless you can have a quiet crowd there is nothing you can do about needing ear protection, I recommend hanging by the engineer booth because they tend to be just far enough away to comfortably hear everything around 90db because they generally can't use earbuds while actively mixing.

My cat Lola in the best picture I took of her as a kitten

My dog Joanie who has her ear protection on for band practice

Them together as babies (they play together and are best friends)

Playtime

Daily outdoor adventures

Now draw her riding her giant cat familiar into battle

E

An amazing use for it in audio engineering is for feedback suppression. The old way to give yourself more headroom required you to sit there and turn up the gain until feedback happens and cut that frequency. Now you just turn on the feedback suppression and it does all that for you on the fly. It's game changing for live sound, every major venue has it now.

Loving art because your character will bend down and physically pick up all the little things with so many context related actions like taking a little bottle off a shelf and drinking it in both first and third person

A Kora! It's an African instrument that is considered a guitar harp, with 21 strings ranging from the size of bass guitar string to fishing wire. The way it is played allows you to play the bass, lead, and rhythm at the same time. Here is a short example of a master kora player Toumani Diabate showcasing the instrument: https://youtu.be/8luhdxS2KuM?si=llpa2YVyIOf77_Nd

As a guitarist I found this guy who transcribed Toumani's work onto a classical guitar, very interesting listen https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=55QnOlXckOk

My other thing would be trippy out there instruments that seem to put you in a different state of mind like the Yaybahar or "The Beam" that the grateful dead likes to break out sometimes

Yaybahar example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_aY6TxC1ojA&pp=ygUWeWVoYWJhciBhdCBpbnN0cnVtZW50IA%3D%3D

The Beam example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0h8o-1IQ5G0&pp=ygUSZ3JhdGVmdWwgZGVhZCBiZWFt

Don't forget Red Dead Redemption 2!

Blood Sweat & Tears had like 200 members, my dad knew one of the founding members and went to one of their concerts a couple years back. Got to talk to them after the show and not one of them had even heard of the guy. Feels like the ultimate example of this

You can actually train yourself to lucid dream the entire time, it takes a lot of work though. I worked on it for a while and could consciously fall into rem sleep, great resources for it online. Buddhist monks developed most of the modern technique, you basically meditate into a dream state. You get so much more control that way, it's like having a holodeck when it works.

I use the mpk mini play and it's super handy all the time with those onboard effects! Bring it all the time in my backpack for noodling when I know I have hours to kill. Had it for 7 years and no issues at all. Although I will say the new mpk minis went through a massive upgrade, worth splurging for.

You're right, I need this room in my life

The biggest thing that helped me was art. I've played music most of my life, and made the decision to move out to a city with a great music scene 4 years ago where I knew nobody. It took me 3 years of exploring open mic communities and such for me to finally find the one for me. Built up an amazing friend group from there and I feel so emotionally and artistically fulfilled now! I was so lonely those first 3 years, but the second I found my people it was night and day. I think the best thing everyone can do is hone in on a hobby you love and connect with the community surrounding it if you can, sometimes the hobby can be enough too though!

Oh! Actually I've seen something similar done before with a modular synth! There's this awesome Instagram profile called Ellingson.tv with a guy that uses modular synths to manipulate CRTs and combines that idea with a "Pepper's Ghost" hologram effect. Highly recommend checking it out

Well now I kind of want to mic up a kick drum with my gaming mouse for fun lol

The only way you'll blow your CRT is if you tried to plug that dongle monstrosity into the speaker output of a power amp haha, guitars have a high impedance signal. Direct boxes actually lower the impedance, so that definitely won't help make your output safer. (Still safe) So I say go for it directly from the guitar, the worst that can happen is nothing, (which is likely) which probably means you actually do need to lower the impedance with a direct box. (Which I still doubt would work but who knows) An amp with a line out or a digital pedal board would be the most likely options for actually getting sound through.

I also think this won't hurt the CRT at all

I would happily contribute to this, lmk if we decide on a specific community to all join in on, I think it would be cool if it was musician's interests in general. Like I'm an audio engineer as well as a guitarist so it would fun to have a space to have deep conversations about both, as well as other musical niches people have an interest in.

I wonder if it would sound better taped on, in the drum itself, or on the floor in front. Seems like there would be minimal bleed too haha, might be a cool lo-fi thing

Oh yeah you're right! It's the same for all unwanted noise. Rustling, wind, buzz, ac noise. All of it can be filtered out now! You can even take away the reverb from an untreated room and add in your own reverb. Convolution reverb is amazing, you can actually capture the reverb of any space you want and add it into your recording in post. I honestly don't know how much an expensive treated room matters over some investment in the plugins that let you do those things.

An example for movies: instead of trying to capture the actors talking inside their helmets for Interstellar, they actually made an IR inside of the helmet itself and added that to the overdubs!

The way you create an IR (impulse response) to capture the reverb of a space is you take a speaker and play a sine wave (or a gunshot/balloon pop,) then record it with a good mic. Then just take that WAV file and put it into a convolution reverb plugin. It sounds identical, the technology is amazing! You can use this to capture all kinds of analog circuitry like guitar amps also, that's how they make those guitar amp plugins.