This is the SF Productions podcast network This episode has crossover appeal from the pop culture bunker. I'm Mindy. I'm Mark You can check out our audio podcast how I got my wife three comics and iTunes or on our website SF podcast network comm The TV industry loves their stunts And one of the most popular is the crossover Yes, we're cast of two or more shows meet. Yeah, this kind of came up because we were talking about Charlie's Angels on love boat on the love boat. Yeah That was weird. I want to see that. Yeah Well, there's a wealth of info about this on online because nerds love lists. Yeah, true. So there's spreadsheets and Huge charts. They're all available. I can see all these flow charts where you know the interconnectedness of shows Absolutely now because there's so much out there I'm only covering American broadcast networks live-action and Existing shows so not not where it's like they're putting people on a show to spin them off Yeah, yeah, and no type of backdoor pilot here Spin-offs as you mentioned are one of the easiest ways to create a crossover Once they're already set up you have the same producers the same studio generally the same network We start with the CSI franchise. Yeah, four shows there plus cold case and without a trace all produced by Jerry Brookheimer and There's a lot of cross pollination going on among those shows exactly There's also of course the law and order franchise five shows plus New York undercover Conviction and homicide all from Dick Wolf. Now. There's I don't know if you talk about it at any point There's also all the Chicago shows from Dick Wolf. Absolutely. And and in fact the Chicago shows also cross over and Do that with law and order shows, right? They've been on law and order SPU We have the Star Trek franchise Five different shows with lots of characters. Yes, even even when it didn't make sense like in the last episode enterprise Yeah There's also the Beverly Hillbillies franchise with three shows. Now one thing hit interesting here is ebb from Green Acres Appears on Beverly Hillbillies, even though they had previously watched Beverly Hillbillies as a TV show on Green Acres and in fact did a play based on the show. They watched Beverly Hillbillies in that universe were like the Kardashians. Yeah It was like reality TV in that universe Yeah, the Cheers characters appeared on Frasier quite a bit in fact the Cheers bar When it when the show ended was removed and replaced with Frasier's apartment. It's the same stage We also have shows on the same network on the same night. This was very popular NBC's Thursday must-see TV characters would cameo on each other shows Friends mad about you Cheers wings Caroline in the city hope and Gloria the single guy now The really interesting thing about friends and mad about you was that they had they each had a character who were sisters They were twin sisters, right? So it was Phoebe and Ursula. Yes, so, you know You'd occasionally get the crossover, but you'd also have her appearing occasionally on both on Man about you as Ursula, right? Yes Phoebe, right now this all culminated in the 1994 blackout Thursday event When a fictional East Coast blackout tied together multiple shows Seinfeld was on that night, but was excluded due to production issues Basically, they weren't included and the show had been shot several weeks earlier and so they couldn't do it later though Paul's character on mad about you turned out to be sub-leasing an old apartment to Kramer So they tied those two shows together. Yes, and then mad about you Later tied their show to the Dick Van Dyke show by having an episode with Alan Brady Oh, that's like that's like 30 or 40 years later. Yeah, exactly ABC counted with their own TGIF crossovers involving Full House, Family Matters, Step by Step, Hagwin and Mr. Cooper, Supreme of the Teenage Witch, and Boy Meets World While CBS made fun of the whole thing with Shameless Monday at crossover involving Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens Aaron's spelling shows loved their crossovers. We mentioned Charlie's Angels on the Love Boat Charlie's Angels were on an episode of Vegas Love Boat and Fantasy Island had a crossover in that a guest on the former show played by Lanny Anderson continued on to the latter show So she took a cruise and then she went to Fantasy Island And immediately went to Fantasy Island That's the same character You'd think more people would do that, I don't know You might as well combine them, it's a combo trip you'd save for money You know, I find it totally weird that you cannot watch any of these Aaron's spelling shows online anywhere Yeah, I looked this up and by the way a great source is called Can I Stream dot IT And you can look for any TV show or movie and find out if there's anywhere it legally streams The only thing I could find was episodes of Charlie's Angels are available on Voodoo to purchase at $199 apiece Yeah I don't know, we don't know why spelling shows are that way Maybe they just think nobody wants to watch them, I don't know There were multi-part episodes that started in one show and ended on another We had Iron Side and the Bold Ones Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman Different Strokes and Hello Larry Magnum PI and Murder She Wrote That one strikes me as very odd ER and Third Watch And we mentioned Dick Wolf's Chicago franchise is basically nothing but a crossover Yeah, all the Chicago shows are so interrelated In this past season we just had Bones and Sleepy Hollow crossover Oh and that was just horrible It was terrible We also have cases of cameos and these are really weird Superman was on I Love Lucy Lurch from Adam's Family And Colonel Clink from Hogan's Heroes were in Batman window gags This is when they're climbing up the wall and somebody pops out the window We had Face Man from the A-Team Arnold Jackson from Different Strokes June Cleaver from Leave It To Beaver The Hulk, Kit from Knight Rider And Aunt Esther from Sanford and Son were all in the same episode of Amazing Stories And then Mr. Carlin from the Bob Newhart show was on an episode of Alph In fact, Mr. Carlin is on several different shows But not as many as a character we will soon mention We also have strange crossovers One example is Community where Abed appeared on an episode of Cougar Town as an extra And then mentions it on his show Because Community was a very meta show But you mentioned these overarching crossover concepts The first one being the Munch principle John Munch, played by Richard Belzer First appeared on Homicide in 1993 And then his character there retires from the police force And goes to work in New York on Law & Order And over 20 years his character showed up on Law & Order S-U-V-S-V-U Highest S-U-V Law & Order, tried by Jury Arrested Development, X-Files The Wire, The Beat, 30 Rock And not to mention he showed up animated on The Simpsons Plus a Jimmy Kimmel live episode in character So it's 10 shows in all He played the same character in live action longer than any other character He beats Frazier Crane and Marshall Dillon from Frazier & Gunsmoke respectively But this all pales in comparison to The Tommy Westfall Theory This came out of a blog entry by Dwayne McDuffie in 2002 A comic book writer who died in 2011 Tommy was a rarely seen character on St. Elsewhere This 80's medical drama He's the autistic son of one of the lead characters And we learn in the final scene of the series That the entire series was made up in Tommy's head Because he's holding a snow globe with a hospital in it Now the problem here is that St. Elsewhere characters I think basically because NBC wanted to cross promoter on his shows Characters from that show appeared on Cheers & Homicide And shares continuity or characters with The White Shadow It's Gary Shandling's show, Mash and the Bob Newhart Show That's another case of Mr. Carlin appeared on St. Elsewhere And some of those shows then generated crossovers of their own It is all begat here There's a Tommy Westfall Universe site That as of last year found links to 419 TV series Some of which are very tentative such as Easter Eggs in the background Like there'd be a company in show A That's on a sign in the background on show B So like, oh those must be in the same continuity This goes all the way back to Isle of Lucy in 1951 So really all of these TV shows are imaginary Well, daaar But the idea is that all of these shows are technically in the same continuity Yes And finally we just got a cross network crossover Flash and Supergirl both from the same producers Who have multiple shows in the same continuity With Flash and Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow But we had an earlier cross network crossover this season When Constantine appeared on Arrow However, you gotta put an asterisk on that Because Constantine had already been cancelled by that point I have to say, I really did enjoy that Flash Supergirl crossover And technically, they're not in the same universe That's right, they made it clear It's separate continuities He vibrated His way into that other continuity Is an alternator, you know So don't expect that to happen all the time Although they're talking about doing another one next year already Well and well they should Didn't the JLA appear in the JSA to a yearly crossover in the comics So it's just gonna be another crisis And while you're waiting for that crisis to occur You can check out our radio podcast How I got my wife to read comics on iTunes Or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com From the pop culture bunker, I'm Indy And I'm Mark, thanks for watching I'm off to another crossover Mark's gonna go appear on another show


All right, ladies and gents, I think we're going to kick off the Open AV workshop now talking about Fabla 2.0 so I'll just wait a few minutes and See if there's anyone from outside still walking in but apart from that I can kind of talk a little bit about yeah, what's going on what we're going to be doing in this workshop. So My name is Harry Harry VanHaren. I'm lead developer of the Open AV project for the last year and year and a bit I've been working on a drum sampler So what I mean with drum sampler is we're not talking melodic sampling in that you know You pitch one like audio sample up and down to create an instrument But instead we're talking more about you know having a collection of samples and triggering them to form drum loops So each sample isn't necessarily melodic content, but it's more like a certain drum hit like a kick drum or a hi-hat So that's what Fabla 2.0 is aimed for And particularly for a live performance scenario, so I have on the table here in front of me a machine micro It's a drum sampler kind of a hardware piece of kit And I have a little keyboard as well that we might get to using towards the end of the workshop Apart from that what I'd like to talk through is yes, I'm Harry from Open AV. I have that covered Essentially, there's a lot of features in the Fabla 2.0 sampler that did not exist in Fabla 1.0 So Fabla 1.0 is the currently released drum sampler and Fabla 2.0 has these new features So we have pads, live view, we have multi-sample support, so like multi-layers of samples We have per sample controls so we can do a lot more flexibility and do a lot more processing of the samples And there's per pad controls, so it's a little more complicated to say a little It's a lot more complicated But that that complication and those features actually let you do a lot more interesting things particularly from a live performance point of view Add on to that something that Open AV is working on called the aux bus or auxiliary bus It's a way of thinking about effects processing. It's a way of doing things like side chaining, reverb sends And it's particularly that to try and yeah improve the way on On stage you can work with these because a lot of the like in Ardor for example There's really complex and amazing routing things you can set up But they're not really workable in a live context in my opinion And the nice thing there is if like about aux bus that we think about like effects processing in a much more limited But also manageable way that really gives the efficiency of the workflow That you'll have live. So I'm gonna first show wait. Am I skipping ahead? Yes So I'm gonna do two little demos That's essentially gonna be the main content of this workshop first I'm gonna run JAL so it's a standalone Lv2 host so fabla 2 is an Lv2 plugin So it'll work in most of your your favorite DAWs But first I'm gonna run it in JAL which is like a very minimal run it as if it's a standalone program And I can show you just the features of like that are contained in fabla 2 itself Then we'll bring in some extra parts and I can show you how to do the routing or what what this aux bus feature is about and then in the last bit of time what I'm gonna do is load up an Ardor session that I've prepared with a little drum loop and some some other little Side things with sidechains and some effects to show how I see this aux bus feature being used in a in a professional DAW for actual music production as opposed to live performance so moving on from there what I have at the moment is Apologies for those on the stream who can might find it hard to see it's a dark theme. I'm afraid and So what I have is fabla 2 here. Basically, this is the main interface I call it the pads view because here in the center.  He has some really nice velocity layer drums there and there are open content So for this workshop, I thought it'd be nice to at least introduce how to work with multi-layer samples in this drum sampler and Some of the yet to introduce these samples or to use these samples to introduce them so at the moment the way this is set up is Fabla's running and we've loaded some different samples here. So you can hear the kick drums and This is essentially doing taking five samples of individual Velocities so the top one here is the softest and if you listen carefully each time It's like a more powerful stroke on a kick drum.  It gives you that kind of human feel the realistic drum sound to some degree Now there's another project called drum gizmo and they really take this to a whole new level and they do studio grade drums with like really high Like they use up lots of resources of the CPU and things like this and they get this amazing drum sound Really respect their project fabla 2 is taking a different angle on drum sampling. This is more geared towards either You know your quick and easy good enough sounding drum kit or electronic music production, which is personally my own area so fabla 2 isn't You know your replacement for the drum gizmo basically drum gizmo does amazing quality drum sounds into the studio and then fabla 2 is more a lightweight approach to doing Drum sampling and trying to achieve reasonable results with reasonable amounts of CPU usage for live performance more so than for studio grade work So with that in mind what I'll do now is I'll kind of just talk through What I Envision most people will want to do with fabla 2 which is load a few samples and play a little drum beat So the next thing up that I'll start is basically if we go here to this pad There's nothing actually currently loaded on it So if I click it we see just a blank UI, but if we right-click it shows us a File browser and we can basically choose the sample that we want to choose. So let's get a Snare drum perhaps the pearl snare. I like this one. So I've loaded that now We can see on the hardware. I don't know if the people on the stream can see but I'll describe it So on the hardware the the button lights up when there's a sample loaded And then we can trigger it with the hardware still pretty simple stuff So there is something a little funky going on, but that's okay So if we load another sample, I've loaded layer 2 just now. So I'll load layer 3 this time. So now we have two samples That's one of the samples and we have a switch mode here on the user interface Which allows us to change how the samples are actually going to be chosen and What I'll do is I'll switch to There's the different modes the first sample We're going to change the velocity map to just be from 0 to about 0.5 So these are flow point numbers basically what range of velocity do you want this to be on? So now we can see if I press this hard it'll choose the other sample So this is like the harder. I press the button here the different sample It's going to choose based on velocity mapping. There's four types of mappings here. So it's flexible enough There's round robin. That's the one on the kick drum here then there's the Different velocities. So if I press it hard or if I press it very soft, it'll pick a different sample And there's also Some some others that I'm still kind of prototyping a little there's one It just plays the same sample every time I deal from music production like real electronic music production Take a kick drum and just leave that kick drum sounding the exact same But then for more Yeah, humanistic or human kind of feels or just more dynamic music that you're not really looking for The exact same kick drum all the time. You can do some things like weighted random and these kind of other Scheduling I guess sample scheduling things Um, just to continue on let's load up a little hi-hat somewhere as well. There's uh, I'm sure there's hi-hat here somewhere I don't see it just yet Where is it? There we go rock hat closed sounds good to me so then you can Just play really simple drum beats nothing fancy there, but it's enough to kind of have a bit of fun if you're playing with your bandmates Okay, that's the basics of loading samples in fabla and playing them So the other fun thing is live view. So you'll see here on the left We have a little label called views and then we can trigger pads So that's the one that we're currently on But if I switch to live view, then you can see three of the faders here are up So there the samples that are loaded And what this gives you is essentially just like the analog mixer here in front of me A view of everything in the 16 pads that we were just looking at So the the information is the same. It's just a different point of view on that same information Where am I trying to go with this? So if we go back to pad view I can see here that we have for example a fader and that fader is the same fader as the one that's actually here So there's there's multiple ways of looking at the same data But depending on what you're currently doing you want to be able to see other information Here you can really easily balance this drum kit. So say that hi-hat is a little quiet What we can do is just bring the fader up And that one's quite okay, but maybe the clap needs to come down just a touch. So Maybe that's better. Who knows the point being if we have a lot of samples Then you need an easy way to be able to mix these right Now there's some more complex issues, which is that every one of these kick drum samples Has its own like you might have not sampled them at exactly the same Gain so if we click this pad here or this sample rather we can individually adjust the gain Of each of these layers But because we need to be able to balance the layers and actually mix the whole all of those layers Afterwards you need two volume controls one per sample and also one per pad And the pad here being just this bottom left one for all the different kick drums So in live view you don't see the the each individual samples volume anymore You only get the fader which is actually the whole kick drum So this is kind of like you need to abstract away the lower level details as we move through the views And that's exactly what this live view does So it takes um these pads and Presents you with faders just like an analog mixing desk like what you'd be used to if you're a sound engineer And you have a kick drum microphone here. You have a snare drum microphone and then you mix those Now some of the more advanced features, um, will I go straight to them? Yes, I suppose I will um So we've loaded some samples. We've mixed them roughly according to this Now what we want to do is to apply some reverb And we want to apply reverb to the hi-hat and the snare drum So a little bit on the hi-hat a bit more on the snare drum give it a nice tail But we do not want any reverb on the kick drum This is quite a common thing because kick drums are loud and they make reverb sound really muddy particularly in a live context So that's not what we want How do you do this with fabla one? So the previous generation this just wasn't possible Because internally the drum sampler would mix those samples together output one stereo And there's no way to retrieve the kick drum without the snare and the hi-hat signal anymore. They're all mixed together So what does this aux bus feature that i've been ranting about for the last year actually do? It presents more outputs. It's pretty simple on anyone familiar with analog mixing desks You usually have your master faders and then you have one or two group faders or buses um And what those do is they essentially take the signal from a range of other tracks and mix it into one Similarly here what we have is 16 pads. So 16 tracks shall we say And we have four auxiliary buses So an auxiliary bus is just somewhere where audio gets rooted to gets processed and then gets sent to the master Now in the case of fabla 2 this is a little different because we have this fantastic thing called jack So I thought why would I leave the internal routing of the reverb or delay or the compression? Just inside fabla 2. Why don't we expose it to jack and let people choose their own effects to actually process this with Okay, enough talking. I'll get to actually doing something useful I'm going to load up another of the open avi plugins. This one is roomy. It's a reverb. Yeah, you can see that. Okay So what are we actually trying to do again? We're trying to apply some reverb to the hi-hat and snare drum But not the kick drum. How do we do this? We're going to turn up the top dial here. So it's a little difficult to see perhaps There we go Um So we can see that there's a dial at the very top The first dial along the across here at the top is they're all orange colored and this slider is colored orange too So they represent the same thing Essentially everything along the top the first dial gets sent to this first auxiliary bus And that's the one that I've labeled as reverb or delay Now, of course people are free to abuse this to whatever they like But I think it's a pretty use case a pretty useful use case or pretty normal use case even to work with that as a reverb send So you'll see that I turned up the snare quite a lot and I turned up the hi-hat to about halfway And what that's going to do is it's going to take the signal that is output on that pad and it's going to mix it into this auxiliary bus What we're going to do now in jack is root from the output from that auxiliary bus to this roomy effects Which is a a reverb And we're going to turn the reverb 100 wet So if we turn up the reverb send here, it's not going to increase the actual Volume of the sample itself You're not going to hear the input audio coming into that aux bus at all that just gets discarded The reverb that results from this actual audio coming in is going to be heard however So it's like a crossfader between wet and dry. That's literally what it says on the dial there We're turning it to 100 wet Which means that the the dry sound won't be there That's kind of important for mixing because you don't want to you want to be able to increase the volume of a snare drum With the reverb being proportionally louder, but not if you increase the amount of reverb You don't want the snare to get louder. Um, anyway away from the the sound sound engineering topics um I'll showcase very quickly what's actually happening right now So we see that phabla exports quite a few output ports There's two master left master right. They're fairly obvious and then there's auxiliary one left auxiliary one right auxiliary two auxiliary three auxiliary four So we were using auxiliary one earlier. Let's connect that To the roomy input on the left and let's take the one for the right to the right At the same time what we can do is take the output of roomy and connect it to the system So essentially the playback Now remember that the output of roomy is purely wet reverb. There's no dry sample there at all Okay, what i'll do is i'll turn down the reverb here We'll play the snare and i'll gradually turn this up And then you can see okay, there's a bit of a bit of a reverb coming in there as well What i'll do is just turn those up But the kick drum is still dry. There's no reverb now And that's the feature that has essentially in my opinion been missing from Well, at least the the fabla 2 sampler, but perhaps even more of the general linux audio system that we can't Achieve this mix of certain notes get reverb and other notes don't Within one instrument because if you have a stereo output, you've mixed them all together and it's too late For workflow reasons, that's a really really important thing that like as open av and as the software that i'm working on It this is the type of workflow that musicians want to use live on stage This is something like it's it's kind of like okay. I have a sampler I need to be able to send things to reverb and other things not it's a very basic feature and it's possible using this as Yeah using fabla to do use this aux plus feature Now it is also possible to do this in order already with fabla one You load two instances of the same sampler and then depending on which samples you want to have reverb or not You can switch between two different tracks. This means you're editing two tracks of media You have to copy paste snare notes across your hi-hat kick drums are on one track and your snares are on the other track because Come on. That's not a workflow. It doesn't work. It's like i've tried i've tried and it just doesn't work So that was the the motivation behind fabla two and this aux plus feature which essentially takes Your tracks has these four auxiliary sends and lets you do the same thing that this analog mixing desk does And mix down your samples in a way that's much more musically inclined So That's the the main kind of use case right now I'll cover it a bit more when I load the ardor demo later because I actually have a sidechain set up there as well From the kick drum to a baseline But what I'll focus on first is a little more of the features of fabla two because it has a couple of tricks up at sleeve I don't know where to start because I basically I coded this stuff in the last two weeks And it's almost certainly going to go wrong at some point, but it'll be fun. So let's go um What what plans do I have for fabla two? So these are things that probably won't be in the 2.0 release But hopefully in 2.1 2.2 when it's actually became stable and done So we have something called the sequencer. I presume most people are fairly fairly familiar with how this works You have essentially 16 steps or 32 steps. You program in your beat and then it goes and plays it So this should work And it probably won't Okay, let's have luck I need to set this. Ah, yes. Okay. No, so I can demo this graphically shall we say or for anyone particularly interested in this feature Um, talk to me after the workshop. I'll be around. I'll have this stuff set up somewhere on a table And we can do that The reason it's not working now is I have two versions of fabla one with the fancy features with some other things disabled Um, I'll show you the sequencer after the workshop. What I can show you now though is some other Um, kind of use cases that I've been thinking about for fabla So right now if I if I play these what we've done is we've loaded audio samples into these pads But why not be able to sample midi notes in there as well? because There's a lot of scope to being able to trigger like specific chords or something like this just purely in midi So what I'll go is jump back to here. I'll grab the asa midi port Lpk goes to this might be a little difficult Two seconds a to j a midi D All right And there we go All right, we'll connect this to To Okay, let's see if this works And of course we'll need something to generate some audio. So I'll grab the nuts of effects Here we go. We'll take the advanced one Is All right, we'll grab a preset close now a little more rooting and we're almost there So we see that fabla 2 has a midi output port. This looks a little bit suspect Because it's a drum sampler. Why would it have an output port exactly this use case? So we can sample midi notes from for example this keyboard in front of me into one of the pads and then have that pad When we play it rather than outputting audio have an output midi notes Which we can send to any synthesizers in ad sub effects in this case Which allows us to basically build a kind of a chord sequence in some pads And then we can take the output of z in ad sub for example and add that to the system So hopefully If I get this all right Let's bring this one back. Okay, things are starting to get a little more complicated. But let's try keep on top of it Can we see all of that? Yeah, okay So, uh, first we'll test z in ad sub with a little keyboard Okay, that's working Now what I'd like to do is play some notes here You can see that currently the the keyboard is actually lighting up the the drum notes on the The user interface of fabla 2 However, what we wanted to do was actually um Have these midi notes be recorded into fabla. So Fabla has a recording feature it can record both audio and midi So what I showed currently was loading drum samples as wav loops from The hard disk essentially If I had a microphone on things I didn't bring them I didn't have enough space in my bag But it can be done and I will show it in a future open av video That if we have a sound card or a microphone plugged in that we can basically beatbox or record samples into each pad in fabla and then it will And then it'll um play back whatever samples you have Now some really important features there are if we have samples that have been recorded on the fly We need to be able to change the start point of that sample because chances are if I press this button and go To beatbox something at the same time. I'm not going to quite sync them up So what you do is you record it like you you beatbox you press record you go And then you stop recording and then afterwards You just adjust the start point of that sample to where you want the actual kick to start And that means if I'm drumming the moment I hit the pad is actually the same moment the sound starts Not a lead in of silence and then the kick So these are the kind of workflow items that need to be for for live performance These need to be very much streamlined and that's kind of the workflow that I've been working on here With these things like changing your start points pretty easily and it takes a little requirement, you know if you'll You can record those three hits individually But then you do need to kind of tweak them for you know, five to ten seconds before you can Do something with that and that's something I haven't seen how to fix that problem yet of having to edit those samples In theory, it's possible to do onset detection of the Recording and then like choose a sample point or a sample start point Automatically and that is something that I'd like to look into and try and really make this totally life-proof So that I literally press these three buttons while beatboxing and it's sampled and automatically adjusted the parameters of sample playback To be like the most live and intuitive way of performing Okay, moving on from here. What I was talking about was recording things so I won't demo the audio recording because it's pretty self-explanatory if we makes in outputs an audio and record it to a pad the pad will play it back Just like it's playing back the wav loops, but the midi sampling is a bit more fun Um, so I'm going to attempt that right about now um If I press a button here on the hardware you see it light up and that will automatically record into that pad next when you're playing So I press this one then there's a record button on the hardware here I'll sync up three notes And then it doesn't work Um, let's have a look so I think I have some uh Debug output here of fabla somewhere. Okay, so we can see that Essentially if I press this pad it is writing midi notes. Yes, they're printfs in a real-time callback. I should not be doing that um There are some other things here that I shouldn't be doing but let's have a look. Um Yes, there's a weird little one that is in ads to um Connecting to the that one doesn't work, but if I connected to a to j Yeah, so what just happened is we sampled some notes. I'll sample three different notes all right So they're sampled into this pad right now if I switch to a different pad what I can do is sample three different notes Okay, that's reasonable now keep going we'll sample maybe this And then we'll sample something else again. All right So there's a really really basic chord sequence on four pads, but that means you can go Two seconds I don't have a kick drum anymore by the sense I wonder what happened there I probably over-recorded it with something all right Ah, thank you very much That was it indeed. Um, except for that. I just recorded silence over all of them. So I'll load up a sample here. Um There we go Okay Yeah, okay That one Okay, something's gone weird here. This is a good example of vice fab la two is not released yet And I have maybe a different solution So you can see that it becomes relatively okay ish to uh Get get these things, you know live performance with these tools working Some cooler features of fab la two and I'm a little conscious of time. Okay. I have about 10 minutes left Um, so what you saw here is relatively basic things going on What we would probably like to do is if we press one pad and we let go of it It will play these notes and send note-off events as well And then if we play the next pad it will play note or send note-ons and then send note-offs But sometimes you want to basically stop the previous chord playing a little sooner than expected Even though you're still holding the note down essentially mute the older playing ones and start a new set This is particularly relevant with kick drums for electronic music anyone who has familiarity with 808 kick drums There can be very very long samples, you know the real heavy punch one and then there's the short 808 kick And if you play the short kick you want to first mute the or at least at the same time Mute the the long punch like the really drone 808 kick So you can do this and it's using these two features here. We have empty and o f So empty is mute and o f is your off trigger A mute group is essentially a group of samples that if one plays it's going to stop the other ones in the same group as it But rather than having that tied just to you know, if you play a sample in this group It will automatically mute all the other ones in the same group There's a concept here of having split that in two So you can put all these samples in one mute group, but you can also have kind of a trigger group to turn all the other ones off Okay, hard to explain. What am I trying to say? I'm going to grab this chord for example, and I'm going to put it on the mute group of one If I can There we go and I'm going to change the off group to one similarly for this sample I'm going to do the same thing So what should happen now is if I press one of these buttons and then press the other It's going to mute the previous chord Or at least send the note off events corresponding to the note-ons that had sent earlier So the synthesizer should react and mute the other notes So what this gives us is a situation where Essentially, if you're doing live live performance with chords It'll kind of clean up the previous chords and keep it should keep a more, you know, well defined chord progression So I'm still holding the first chord I played just there, but it's been muted because I played a second chord afterwards It's And a few note off messages were missed Um, so you can see see the the use case of it there kick drums being one very primary use case Another being drum loops Actually, if there's a drum loop playing that you can switch between them using a fairly primitive way of sending mute groups The other being this midi sampling so that you can turn notes off on a synthesizer when you're triggering different things It allows also really fast kind of beat programming and doing kind of fancy tricks and automatically all these samples being cleaned up Why would we split the offset and the mute is basically if you want A symbol to also be the end of your chord sequence or the end of your baseline Then you want to press the symbol and have the baseline automatically be muted every time you press that symbol Or some sound effects and that's exactly what this allows. So it allows the offset or the off trigger Which is currently number one here To be different than the mute group. Um, if anyone has questions about this, I won't go on about it now But do come talk to me later I can try and load up an 808 example and try and make it more clear as to why I think this is actually really An awesome feature for live beat programming in particular So what have we covered? We have the pads view. We have the live view covered We have the auxiliary buses being sent. We have external effects including a magic rooting in jack Or q jack control as the case may be um We've covered sampling sampling audio sampling midi notes And the next step is to kind of think about okay. What else can we use this aux bus feature for? So there's a side chain auxiliary bus as well, which is ideal for if you have a kick drum and a baseline beside each other and Quite often in a live context when there's a kick drum You want to mute the bass because they'll interfere in frequencies usually and when the kick drum dies away Usually a pretty short envelope on an acoustic set at least Then you want to bring the baseline back up another use case minimal house music where you have that That's all side chaining Envelope of the kick drum then take away the bass if there's no kick drum bring back up the bass So there the kind of use cases that this can be used for as well Because we can for instance root this kick drum using the the third auxiliary bus here As the side chain key, which is the signal that's going to take everything away Now i'm going to like hack away here for a couple of seconds and set up an arder session I'm going to first kill all of these um And this is the little impromptu part of oh no wait the whole workshop is impromptu my bad. Um So we have jack running and i'll currently load up arder So There we go And there should be something there All right, all right, all right We're getting there So what I have is a an arder session here This or arder session contains a couple of different tracks. So there's fabla 2 is on one track Uh, that's this track here the highlighted red one currently Um, I'm trying to change that. Yes, there we go So some interesting to note is that arder on the left. Can you see that? I'll move it a little bit in two seconds Okay, so Arder has amazing rooting capabilities Most people are probably familiar with at least the basics of them What fabla 2 does is exposes one stereo master output with the lv2 port group flags It's a flagged as a master. So arder can actually in theory start getting very smart about how to expose these and how to root them automatically What it does is the first two outputs So the two on the very far left in the the view here are essentially the the master outputs Like we saw in the previous jack rooting diagram And then each stereo pair after that is one of the four aux buses So there's 10 stereo or like 10 10 mono audio outputs in total, but they're grouped Why does this matter because in arder's rooting diagrams or rooting dialogues What we can do is start rooting these auxiliary buses to different actual arder buses And then we can do the processing in those So that's exactly what's happening here. We have fabla 2 it's taking midi input no audio input And then in the rooting diagram, which I can't currently see one moment I can open up the rooting grid And what we can do is We can see that we have arder buses and there's a bit of a weird and wonderful Root in bits of rooting going on here. Let me take this down to the center Okay, so we have essentially the output one and two is going to the master in And then we have three and four, which is the first auxiliary bus going to the reverb in And then we have some other sidechain inputs going on here So I won't delve too much into the rooting details right now And what I'll talk through first is the the other tracks that are currently available And so there's a reverb bus that has the roomy plug-in just like the one I showed you earlier You can see that we have a X amount of Reverb it's 100 wet So I'll just send that away. We have some midi strings I recorded the strings just so I wouldn't have to load a synthesizer right now in the process as well And so that's that's a bounce of the four chords that I showed you earlier Which were actually sampled from the midi track into arder And then at the bottom I have a bass synth, which is actually Robin Garious's reasonable synth that comes bundled with arder Playing some really nice low notes and I was going to try to use a lead synth, but I didn't get around to that part So the fun parts are essentially we have fablatou, which is going to do the drum the actual drum beat It's a really simple drum beat We have a reverb bus. We have strings bounce and then there's a sidechain bus here So, okay, I'll break it down a little fablatou reverb to the Certain the snares and the hats so they're being triggered in the fablatou track They're being sent to the reverb just like we had in the last example We have fablatou again The kick drums are routed to the sidechain The sidechain bus has duck out one of the open av envelope plugins sidechain compressor essentially The bass synth is being routed to that compressor as well And that's going to give us the sidechaining action that we're actually been looking for all along Okay, I'll play this first Then what I'll do is start muting individual parts and kind of talk through what happens when we do certain things I'll just turn this down two seconds So I may have lost the main arder interface I think I I think it's here somewhere, but it also seems to have disappeared. Okay There's a different solution. Hopefully which is try and find us All right Right, I do apologize for this guys And what I'm going to do is I'm going to reload this arder session because With the dual screen something's gone funky on my my laptop setup. So give me two minutes We're going to just run through that again very very quickly this time. Hopefully I will manage to keep the interface There we are. Okay So that's that's the little four bar loop that we're going to have a kind of inspect a little and see what what the details are And if we open the fabla track here, we can see a really really simple drum loop happening with kick drum hi hat snare hi hat kick drum Those are rooted as follows in the fabla 2 interface now There's some little bugs remaining here, which include that certain things don't show up when the midi notes trigger them and such But we can see approximately what I demonstrated earlier in just the jalf demo The same thing occurs here that we have a hi hat and a snare being sent to a reverb bus The reverb bus despite that it's way down there. It is actually turned up bugs for our remaining work to do in fabla 2 But we also see that right here. There's a dial which is the kick drum being sent to the third auxiliary bus The third one is the one I've labeled as the the sidechain key The important thing here is for those not too familiar with sidechaining is you have one Signal that you want to be affected the baseline in this case and you have a key signal Which is when to take the other signal down So that's what's happening there um Then let me leave that over there um The other fun part is actually on the sidechain bus itself So this is dukkah. Basically what it does is takes the Key signal analyzes the volume if it's over a certain threshold. It's going to dip the other audio So it's a very simple envelope gate essentially Um, what I'll do is I'll just play this again and we can actually see That if we set the threshold correctly So what you see is that the screen actually indicates when the volume reduction is happening and we can change exactly when it's doing this Now if I was to for instance mute fabla 2 We can hear the bass drum is now no longer coming up after the beat But it's actually being triggered on the beat each time. I can try and turn that up a little in the mixer because it's actually very quiet So it's still not particularly loud, but it's a bit more obvious. I hope What I'll do now is unmute the fabla and then you'll start to hear that the bass drum actually comes up Mute the strings good plan. Thank you Uh, let me find the strings first mute. All right Let's try that again. So the other thing that's actually happening right now is that the I changed the delay time of the dukkah plugin, which is here somewhere else, oh There spotted it Um, so there's a time parameter Which allows changing how long the delay is after an envelope before it comes back up Now in theory or if not in theory in practice too, I suppose And that's synced to the jack or to the the host bpm of the lv2 host or such So currently it should be running at 128 divided by one two three or four Which gives you the like your time essentially how long it takes before the kick drum comes back Um, all right, I'll jump back to the mixer one for one moment As far as the demo goes, I suppose that that's as good as it's going to get right now I'll I'll reload the session in a while on offline and uh, kind of Yeah, that was that it's side chaining. It's not particularly done yet. It still needs some work There's a reason that fabla hasn't been released yet. So that's what I'm hoping to get to hear Uh somewhere Okay, two seconds And send and send mini lack, okay Yes So I've been through all of these fabla 2.0. Is it released? No, it is not unfortunately And the source code is available in its current state on github. It's relatively stable It's not totally there yet relatively. I mean it works for me works on my machine There's a bit of user testing remaining and such So, uh, I do hope to release it soon. I have also been saying that for about three or four months So take that with a pinch of salt at the same time. There is actually quite a bit of development went on in the last couple of weeks months Um So that's currently where we're at. Hopefully soon. Um, thanks I'll take any like pressing questions now. Otherwise, uh, guys, if you want to set up then, uh, that's that's cool I'll kind of talk for a while with any questions or anything And then, uh, so the super bushel is the the next presentation up I didn't check irc if there's any questions Uh, oh cool. So, uh, robin gary has commented That ardor's upcoming plug-in pin management is going to be awesome with fabla 2 I have never heard of ardor's plug-in pin management functionality before but i'll definitely be looking into it after this I'm sure somebody here knows. Um There's no audience microphone that I can see for questions as bruno. I think there was a question there All right. Thanks robin for chipping in on that one And there's a question coming here Well, you wanted to explain it afterwards, but maybe it's good to have on video as well What is the thing with the the start and stop mute groups? Like I No one understand normal music group mute groups. Let's assume Other people do too, but where Where's the difference? Okay, so I'm I'm just gonna unpack while I do this. I hope I'm not being rude by not looking at you guys um So what's the difference is that this allows you to mute a group of samples Without actually the sample itself getting muted by the others in that group It provides a kind of a piece of flexibility Which allows you to do much more like dynamic mapping of on and off groups than you could possibly do if Any sample in a group would mute all the others. It's essentially kind of like sending someone. Hmm. What's a good analogy? um Was there a suggestion there? No, uh Um, I I it's it's a hard one to explain and actually I didn't think of this feature It was a user's feature request. They said no, you're doing it the stupid old way Do it this way instead have two sets of groups One to trigger other mute groups to turn off and want to actually be in a certain mute group And it it makes a lot of sense. It's it's a really nice way of working because it decouples essentially A sample from being muted. So the thing being acted on and the thing that does the acting So it's kind of like orchestrating. It's like me saying to if there was a choir here in front of me my lovely audience You're the bass guys tenors altos sopranos that I can say like, okay, you guys all stop But I don't have to stop singing myself at the same time And I don't sing by the way So so that's kind of the the use case in that you can control other things that are going on without being influenced yourself By that mute group. Does that answer the question kind of or? Yeah Yes, or I can repeat the question but yeah microphone So if I got it right you have the ability to have like one clip or sample Mute some other group of samples, but like if the others are like they're not a Group as a whole as a mute group, but the one that mutes the others doesn't necessarily have to be muted itself While the others are so you're in that sense independent thing go exactly this. Yes. Thanks. Yeah No, it's it's a nice feature and particularly for live usage. I really like the fact it's very interesting because we're very much like We'll see that in a couple of seconds when we're talking We're we're thinking about very much related things fantastic. Great. Great to have you guys next up as well I'm gonna switch off here. Thanks very much guys been a pleasure talking about all the features. Appreciate it


Excellent. and speaking of things that are different in this world, I'm Steve Goldberg, a very proud member of this congregation and I'd like to extend a special welcome not only to the mothers and grandmothers in the group today but also to any guests, visitors or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that it's a very special place and we invite you to join us at our fellowship hour right after the service. In a moment I'm going to ring the gong which is our signal to join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning and then you'll have a chance to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Please remain standing for our opening words and the lighting of our chalice. One of the old ones stood up into the morning light and spoke to those who had come back to the river. Now we have come again to this place. It is a good thing. My life apart from you is not as strong. Yes, I have danced and I have told the stories at my own fire and I have sung to all six of the directions but when I am with you, my friends, I know better who it is in me that sings. And now if you will join together in our words of affirmation, love can nurture our spirits and transform the world. May the flame of this chalice, honor and embody the power and the blessing of the love we need, the love we give, the love we are challenged always to remember and to share. And if you will turn now and greet those around you. I now invite anyone who'd like to come for your best friends. That is awesome. I love it. Hi, how's your morning? Happy Mother's Day. Our story today is called Grandma in Blue with Red Hat. Have you ever heard of this one? This one's new to me. Let's see what you think about it. It's about a little boy who loves art. Do you guys love art? There he is. He loves to draw and he loves to paint both what he can see and what he sees in his mind. But Saturday is the best day for him because that's the day he goes to art class at the museum. He's been going there forever. His grandma always brings him and she says have a great day and he always says see you at home. Ms. Montabello is the art teacher. She knows everything about art. She asks them did you know that anything can be in an art exhibition, toys, hair clips, guitars, water bottles, anything. He wonders if anything can really be in a museum. Do you see what they're saying? It's brilliant and beautifully crafted. What is it that that could be an art exhibition? Ms. Montabello calls them her little Picasso's. Picasso was a famous artist who liked to paint in his underwear. Pablo put some clothes on. The Guggenheims are on their way over. So the little boy wonders could underwear be in an art exhibition? What do you think? No? Anybody think yes? Do you see how it says Calvin clean? I think that's kind of funny. Ms. Montabello always asks us can any of you little Picasso's tell me why you think this is in the museum? She always asks that when we look at art. Alice says because it's beautiful. Sasha says because it's different. Henry says because it tells a story. Thomas says because it came from somewhere far away. Jack says because it makes me feel good. Alex says because it's funny. Karina says because there's only one like it in the whole. Ms. Montabello says there are no wrong answers when it comes to art because most of the artwork was given to the museum. Maybe he thinks someday I could give artwork to the museum. Now grandma's waiting when he gets home. She says what did you do in class today? I tell her and then I realize grandma is beautiful. Grandma is different. Grandma is funny. Grandma tells me stories. Grandma comes from far away. Grandma makes me feel good. There is only one of her in the entire world. I should give grandma to the museum. The next week I tell Ms. Montabello about my idea and she tells me that I should ask the curator of the museum. He says your grandma sounds like an exceptional grandma. But as much as I would love to accept your gift we do have a rule at the museum. We do not take grandmas. And that's when he has a great idea. He worked hard at drawing and painting and reading about artists. And then the big day arrives. My dad and grandma help him get ready. As dad hangs the pictures he says a little to the right, no no too much just tilted a teensy bit to the left. My friends are there. Grandma's friends are there. Mom and dad's friends are there. And Ms. Montabello and the curator are there. Welcome to my exhibition everyone. As the guests look at the pictures they say things like this one's beautiful. This one's different. This one's funny. Do you see the funny one? Grandma on a skateboard. I think that's my favorite. This one tells a story. This one makes me feel good. I especially like this one Ms. Montabello says what do you call it? Grandma in blue with red hat. Grandma says what a wonderful exhibition. It is one of a kind. Just like grandma. So thank you all for being such great listeners. You can go out and think about what kind of art exhibition you would make. We're gonna rise in body or spirit and sing you out with him 300. Be seated. Our readings today from two of our members the first one from Claire Box. My step-grandson's are young men. Isaac the older will be graduating from college on Mother's Day. When he was born I was offered the title of Godmother. I replied okay if we can change it to goddess mother. I did and still do deeply love him and Andy his younger brother they have taught me so much. When my husband Pell known as George DeSum was obviously close to death Isaac and his mother came to our home. It just happened to be spring break. At first Pell could talk and share a bit however by Monday he became much more ill. It was a very sad and difficult time as his symptoms increased. Isaac sat with Pell and I for hours at a time. After a day or so I said to him you know you can do something else. Read or even go out for a bit. His response was no this is where I want to be. A couple of days later his father and brother arrived. Isaac continued to sit with me and we talked about what was happening to Pell. Issues like why he could not talk or could he still hear us. Such open sharing between the three of us. When Pell began to have trouble breathing we talked about the death rattle and that most likely he was aware of the struggling. We kept talking to him, memories and love. The day he died two express packages arrived. About two hours before his death Isaac came into the room picked up his grandpa's hand and put a book under it saying here is your book. Does he understand? I only nodded. It was the memoir Pell's book written in the last year. The publisher rushed an unbound copy with a cover in hopes he would receive it before his death and so he did. Isaac was 18 and applying to colleges. I didn't learn until later that he chose to write his entrance essay about that last week with his beloved grandpa and all that he felt and learned. I remain so grateful for his lessons in love, commitment and courage. And this story from Joyce Carey. On Easter Sunday Philip and Alice invited the family over for a fine spread. The whole family now extends to four great-grandchildren. The youngest Grayson is five years old.  It's a pretty good idea to have a supply of things for the kids to do, especially when it is cold as it was on Sunday and going outside is not an option. My contribution was a variety of board games including Candyland and Battleship. Grayson couldn't interest anyone in playing Candyland so he started setting up Battleship. When I was a kid Battleship was a paper and pencil game but this one was fancy. A plastic grid to place your ships on and a corresponding plastic grid to work out the position of your opponent's ships. Grayson's opponent was Phil who was playing the game for the first time. The worthy opponent set up their battlefields three ships each on numbered grids that the other player couldn't see. The idea is to guess the location of the other player's ships by calling out coordinates like G7.   All seem to be going well. Grayson called out a number and Phil would say whether it was a hit or a miss. Then it was Phil's turn to guess. I noticed that no matter what coordinate Phil guessed Grayson said it was a miss. Phil had no red hits. Grayson was giggling and having a great time. Family members started drifting over to see what was going on. That little rascal was moving his boats. If Phil guessed a hit Grayson's boat sailed to a new coordinate. Grayson's dad asked why he was moving the boats. He said because I want to. Nobody cared. The game was more fun because Grayson was so delighted in his clever strategy. The best part was watching the two players at work both intent on their game boards both having a good time. The youngest and oldest players at the party 84 years difference in age which made no difference at all. I wonder if Grayson will remember playing with his great grandfather. Will he remember how he outfoxed the old man by simply moving his game pieces? Grayson may have a future in a field that requires creativity and duplicity. Maybe he'll run for office. Thanks to the meeting house course and the Society Choir for both being here this morning and blessing us with such beautiful music of peace. If you notice there's an insert in your order of service that lists the names of all the meeting house course and society choir members and we are deeply grateful for the hours and hours of weekly rehearsals and listening to sermons multiple times. Thank you, thank you. There is news in our world today news you may not hear through the regular channels. Insurgent grandmothers are fighting the status quo successfully seeding peace, justice, education, health, human rights and a better world for grandchildren everywhere. When I heard the indigenous teaching that states there will never be peace on earth until the voices of the grandmothers are heard I wondered what was happening with grandmothers. What I found were grandmothers in India learning solar engineering to bring light to their villages. I found grandmothers in Argentina searching for and finding more than 100 grandchildren who were kidnapped during a military dictatorship returning them to their families. Their search continues. I found grandmothers in Israel monitoring military checkpoints to prevent human rights abuses against Palestinians. Grandmothers are campaigning universally and vigorously for political, economic and social change. Grandmothers around the world forming and joining groups stimulated by our tightly connected and troubled world compelled to improve the future for all the children. I will admit I wasn't too surprised partly because of the stories of my grandmother. By the time I was born my grandma Crocker was in a wheelchair debilitated with rheumatoid arthritis and multiple strokes that left her unable to walk and learning how to communicate with halting speech. Yet I heard the stories from my father the calls in the middle of the night from worried new parents because she was the town's midwife delivering babies at all hours checking on children who were feverish or had a concerning cough comforting worried parents and crying with new ones as she placed babies into waiting arms. She was also involved in the political world campaigning door to door for those she believed in whether it was the mayor of Carbondale, Pennsylvania or Eisenhower. I cherish her very shiny like Ike pins. Through her stories I learned about compassion and caring for others. I learned about passion and speaking up for what you believe and I learned about the power of grandparents and elders. This power is in teaching important lessons and doing so with strength and grace. In looking around the world I found grandmothers teaching generosity and compassion modeling resilience and mercy sustaining traditions catalyzing change seeding hope and peace. Now both of my grandmothers passed on when I was in my early 20s and there have been many days as a parent myself that I desperately wanted to pick up the phone and call them for advice wisdom a listening ear. So since they are no longer with me I reached out to seven grandmothers here at FUS women I deeply respect and admire and I asked them this what has it meant to you to be a grandmother? How has becoming a grandmother changed your life? I learned when I listened to our grandmothers they found a great joy in being in the moment part of it comes with the knowledge that they are not going to be there for this little person's whole life you do these activities with them and you think well they remember this at all what of me will they remember? You put love out they said and that love is there and you hope that they will carry that sense of well being and fun and all the things they learn from you they'll carry that into their adult lives caring for these little beings that you may not see grow is much like caring for the earth I have learned they said to do what I can let go to try and make a difference when and where I can I am always asking what can I impact today their words reminded me of a poem from Joseph Bruchak that's called Birdfoot's Grandpa the old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping live drops of rain the rain was falling a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you can't save them all accept it get back in the car we have places to go but leathery hands full of wet brown life knee deep in the summer roadside grass just smiled and said they have places to go to too have a unique perspective of seeing the world change over time and the grandmother spoke of the importance of sharing the difficult times as well as the joyous ones to bring perspective on what is happening now when you share your stories of struggle and challenge and you talk about how you changed how you grew how you survived you teach the message of putting your energy into what you can change and where you can serve they described the power of learning from those who have gone before what they learned from their own grandparents and how communities have sustained them in times of struggle and again I thought of the words of Alice Walker that she wrote called in these dissenting times to acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves that the line stretches all the way back we remember them because it is an easy thing to forget that we are not the first to suffer rebel fight love and die the grace with which we embrace life in spite of the pain the sorrows is always a measure of what has gone before much like the grandmothers around the globe these grandmothers remember what kind of world is being left to the next generation and how their role as an elder was to teach the importance of service the opportunity to do what you can and the willingness to support those who are taking the lead in fighting for change they spoke of lining up on the street to cheer on the high school students who marched out of classes to the capitol to rally for gun control they said they were the ones bringing cookies to the demonstrations to surprise the ones fighting for change in a lot of ways they said you realize it's no longer your fight this next generation is speaking up and out and wearing themselves down we can bring the love to the demonstration we can bring kindness we can remind them of the goodness that is still there Rachel Naomi Rehman in my grandfather's blessing tells this story often when he came to visit my grandfather would bring me a present these were never the sorts of things that other people brought dolls and books and stuffed animals my dolls and stuffed animals have been gone for more than half a century but many of my grandfather's gifts are with me still once he brought me a paper cup I looked inside it expecting something special it was full of dirt I was not allowed to play with dirt disappointed I told him this he smiled at me fondly turning he picked up the little teapot from my dolls tea set and took me to the kitchen where he filled it with water back in the nursery he put the little cup on the windowsill and handed me the teapot if you promise to put some water in the cup every day something may happen he told me at the time I was four years old and my nursery was on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Manhattan this whole thing made no sense to me at all I looked at him dubiously he nodded with encouragement every day he told me and so I promised at first curious to see what would happen I didn't mind doing this but as the days went on and nothing changed it got harder and harder to remember to put water in the cup after a week I asked my grandfather if it was time to stop yet shaking his head no he said every day the second week was even harder and I became resentful of my promise to put water in a cup when my grandfather came again I tried to give it back to him but he refused to take it saying simply every day by the third week I began to forget to water the cup often I would remember only after I had been put to bed and would have to get out of bed and water it in the dark but I didn't miss a single day and one morning there were two little green leaves that hadn't been there the night before I was completely astonished day by day they got bigger I couldn't wait to tell my grandfather certain that he would be as surprised as I was but of course he was not carefully he explained to me that life is everywhere hidden in the most ordinary and unlikely places I was delighted all it needs is water grandpa gently he touched me on the top of my head no he said all it needs is your faithfulness this was she says my first lesson in the power of service but I didn't understand it in this way then my grandfather would not have used these words he would have said that we need to remember to bless the life around us and the life within us he would have said when we remember we can bless life we can repair the world for each of the women I interviewed there was a message of blessing they wanted to get to their grandchildren a message that they hoped was being transmitted to all children and that is you are okay you are safe here you are loved grandparents are the ones who could lie down on the floor and engage in games for hours on end with no sense of being rushed to move on to the next thing they were the ones who could dance in the rain at the top of their lungs to make the rain go away without any worry of looking foolish they were the ones who listened to the heartache and figure out how to be their person in that situation how to soften the blow how to help them find wonder and joy again their deepest hope was that each child in this world had a person who taught them unconditional love a love that would be there for them throughout all life when times were rough they'd be able to call upon it they may not say oh that feeling there it is that's grandma but that feeling of love and support and the knowledge that there is at least one person in this world who thinks you are amazing and fantastic exactly as you are today that will be there to hold you and sustain you perhaps the best thing I got from the grandmothers was the realization that this is the work for all of us to do I have learned that we can all be elders regardless of age Thomas Moore said I've always found that word elder a little strange I've never had the ambition to become one I've never really known for sure what one is yet many people I run into speak of elders with a hushed reverence and recently a friend told me that the main point in growing old is to become one on reflection I can see that becoming an elder could be a good way toward feeling positive about growing old and doing some real good in the process elder means that being older is an honor and carries with it a particular role of quiet leadership and teaching what I learned from the grandmothers is this be comfortable with your years whether it's 20 or 80 how you define the required age to have the mindset of an elder is completely relative and up to you whatever your age except it speak forth rightly and calmly about it be proud of your years and become friends with the process of getting older spend time with the young and truly love them some of us can become jealous and envious of youth and become angry in the presence of the young some of us complain and criticize and judge when you learn to love exactly where you are in life and learn to love yourself in that process you can open your heart to those who are younger and are looking to you for guidance I've spoken before about my time in kindergarten since October I've been leading Owen's class in kindness and mindfulness activities to be honest with you it is the best half hour of my week there is no pretense in kindergarten they are uniquely who they are and the more time you spend with them the more they let that show and the more you can learn to meet them exactly where they are in the process they have taught me to be gentle with myself and accept myself and wherever I am in the same way I'm there every Monday and I get paid in hugs and smiles and questions and giggles it is the best volunteer gig in the world use your knowledge and wisdom to benefit others Thomas Moore tells the story of his father's desire to teach middle school students about a city's water supply not a very exciting topic for middle schoolers but when he stood in front of those children he was using his technical knowledge of plumbing and water treatment but he was also an old man talking about his life and inspiring young people to make something of themselves there's direct learning he says the understanding of the technology of water treatment but there's this indirect learning when you see how an old man found joy in his life's work an elder would be wise to keep both kinds of learning in mind you can teach technical skills but you can also teach inspiration and that's the one I'll leave you with cultivate your power to inspire the word inspire means to breathe into so you can inspire into another person a reason to work hard and be creative and engage in the world meaningfully you take your own good breath and give it to someone else your example can light a fire there's a lot of negative news out there today we see leaders that act as petulant children with bullying behavior clinging as hard as they can to power to get their own way you can inspire them with your actions your beliefs, your example to live another way we do not have to go out and create huge new movements for change if you feel called to do so please do because our world needs your wisdom and your passion and your love but each one of us can elder in small ways to our friends, children, neighbors, communities advising from our own experience and making a conscious decision to be available to be present, to spread kindness and what we have learned in our own time so may we each go forth today remembering to bless the life around us and within us for when we each remember to stop and save a toad to spend time with a child to teach the miracle of growing things we can bless this life and then we can go forth to do our part to repair the world and I now invite you into the giving and receiving of today's offering which will be shared with a fund for women you can read more about them in your red floors and we thank you for your generosity as we appreciate your monetary gifts we appreciate the gifts of all those who gave of their time this morning our greeter was Elaine Lohr Usher's Patricia Becker Wally Brinkman and Cynthia Nolan on sound Mark Schultz in the kitchen making that coffee as Jeannie Hills and our lame minister Anne Smiley Rose Detmer is our tour guide if you are interested in a tour after the service come right up here to the front and she'll meet you there and our flowers today are in honor of Joan Burns who was recognized on Friday for founding the Masters in Genetic Counseling Program at the University of Wisconsin 40 years ago we have two opportunities to let you know about today between and after all the services this weekend peace poles will be decorated along University Bay Drive you may have noticed them as you came into the parking lot some classes and families and members have signed up to do it but there are posts for you if you would like to participate just head out to the lawn choose an unclaimed post there's a craft table full of all kinds of supplies under the eaves let your peaceful creativity materialize and later this month our intern T.K. Browning will be leaving F.U.S. and in June Michael Shuler will be retiring so today and for the next few weeks there will be a table in the commons where you can write notes to T.K. and his family also to Michael and Trina and there's more details in the red floors we gather each week in this place made sacred by the presence of both the Holy and the Human brought together in this space and in this time we come together to sing and to pray to be still to be alert to celebrate to see in others their best to see reflected in their eyes our own to dream together of a world of justice to remember our sorrows and our joys this week we hold all those silent celebrations and quiet struggles that live in each of our hearts for all these and more may we lift our hearts in thankfulness today and pray only to be more aware and thus more alive blessed be and amen and if you'll rise now in body or spirit our closing hymn is number 368 if and of love there is so much work to do we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy help us hold fast to our vision of what can be may we see the hope in our history and find the courage and the voice to work for that constant rebirth of freedom and justice that is our dream may it be the song on our lips and the work of our hands as we go forward this day and all the days to come our time together in service here is ending and our time in service to the world begins again blessed be and go in peace and please be seated for the postlude


Hello, everyone. Thank you all for coming. I delighted to be here today. Unfortunately, the second speaker, Shambara Nat, didn't manage to join me today, but he passes his excuses and wished me good luck. Today, I'm presenting a smart baggage tracking. If you don't mind, I'll start with a short introduction. My name is Elena Chavkina. I lead IoT practice at Altairos. Altairos is a professional services company that provides services around cloud fundery, starting from deployment cloud fundery and ending building applications on top of cloud fundery. Altairos IoT practice is focused on cloud-based industrial internet solutions. In the last year, we implemented the number of prototypes proof of concepts for industrial internet. And today, I'll tell about one of it. Smart baggage tracking. But first of all, why baggage tracking? What are the particular reasons for choosing this area, especially for our company, for professional services company? Today, digital disruption is the talk of the town. Go digital. Digitalize your business. We hear it so often, so digitalization become a buzzword. The same with platform as a service is cloud computing, cloud native development. But what are the examples how cloud fundery can help businesses? Six months ago, Altairos decided to exemplify how the aviation industry can benefit from employing cloud fundery. With GE digital mentoring, we decided to build a baggage tracking solution, sensor-based end-to-end for airlines. Where did we start? We started with getting a clear understanding of the problem. And we started with learning the industry standards. A lot of documents, resolutions, reports, I don't want to tire you with all this stuff. So I'll tell a story. A story about Jessica and Mike. Meet Jessica and Mike. There are cloud fundery engineers and they are going to Frankfurt to the cloud fundery summit. Jessica and Mike are flying from San Francisco to Frankfurt through Chicago. And both of them have checked baggage. Jessica and Mike are thinking about the summit, but they don't know these sad statistics. According to CETA report, more than 23 million bags were mishandled in 2015. Most bags were delayed. And there are the reasons for mishandling. The biggest point is flight connections. But also a considerable number of mishandled bags related to the failures during baggage loading and unloading. But let's get back to Jessica and Mike. Jessica and Mike arrived in Frankfurt. Was a trip convenient? Not exactly. The story started in San Francisco with a long line to check in. But it was okay. They expected the long lines they were at the San Francisco airport on time and everything looks good till they landed in Chicago airport. There wasn't much time between flights around an hour. And Jessica and Mike ran to the gate. As soon as they reached it, they realized that the gate had been changed. Fortunately, they reached the correct gate in 15 minutes. But Mike didn't manage to buy the candies for his German friends. Unpleasant. But it's still okay. They arrived in Frankfurt on schedule. Mike's bag has been delivered. But where is my bag? Asked Jessica. Half an hour later, the bag still isn't there. And Jessica goes to the baggage service office to file a claim. Meet Ronald. Ronald works at the baggage service office. And Ron can tell a lot of sad stories. Ron says the normal cost of handling a bag is $10. The cost of delayed bag is $100. And the cost of lost bag could be $3,300. Moreover, mishandling bags make negative impact on customer satisfaction and can lead to additional losses. Jessica is filing a lost baggage claim. Ron is assuring that the bag will be found really soon even though he isn't believing it. And Mike is dreaming about the airport of the future. How do we make travel more convenient? How do we build the airport of the future? First of all, we should think about the essential improvements such as baggage tracking, such as guided navigation, informational services. And then we should consider optional improvements that can make a unique passenger experience like transfer services, home delivery, and all these services should be in one application, none in 10 of them. International Air Transport Association is also thinking about improving the baggage handling. And as a part of the in-back program, they launched Resolution 753 that obliges airlines to have end-to-end baggage custody information by June 2018. What does it mean? The main goal of Resolution 753 is provided to absolutely transparent vision of baggage handling for the all stakeholders, airlines, ground services, passengers. As Andrew Price says, this need comes from the industry members. So airlines want to know the weakest points in baggage handling chain and want to improve passenger experience. Let's look at how airlines and airports improve passenger experience and implement Resolution 753. Delta Airlines invested $50 million in RFID implementation. The test installations show that the bags are tracked at a 99 success rate. Alaska Airlines are doing a pilot project with their loyalty members. They distributed 500 electronic backtacks to their frequent flyers. And Las Vegas, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Milan, Amsterdam airports has all the essential infrastructure to work with RFIDs. Alteros has been involved in several initiatives with airlines and picked up a lot of knowledge about improving passenger satisfaction. So we decided to build this solution on top of GE Pradex as a suite of microservices and rest APIs. Let's look at the main features that were implemented. Our application works in two operation modes. Normal operation mode went back tracks from checking point to the claim belt and this operation mode supported that the baggage will be delivered on the proper claim belt on time without any issues. So the passenger finds his bag on the claim belt on time. The second operation mode handles exceptional cases like delayed bag, like closed bags. Also we implemented the restful IPI for the airlines to comply with Resolution 753 that allows airlines ground services to get all necessary information about the bag status. And all participants in this process get information in real time mode and all of them can get push notifications. Let's look about the push notifications and their role in the system. Push notification from passengers perspective guide passenger from the start of their journey to the end of it. They show the bag status. They warn about changing the gates. They warn about changing in boarding closure time. And optional push notification can contain information about the shop offers. At the start of the project we faced a number of challenges. How do we build our application secure? How do we manage the huge amount of data from the sensors? Which sensors do we choose to comply with industry standards? How do we reach high availability and scalability? And finally, how do you build our application quickly? At the start of the project we made three important decisions. We decided to use intelligent IoT platform which shows RFID tags as a sensors and we decided to use microservice architecture approach. Let's talk about each of them in detail. As intelligent IoT platform we chose a G-Predex. What is a G-Predex? Predex is a general electric cloud fund distribution optimized for industrial internet needs. Why Predex? First of all, because it's cloud foundry and it ensures fast development and fast deployment. But what does, which benefits does Predex offer in our case? First of all, Predex is built to promote and support microservice architecture approaches that we've chosen. Secondly, Predex provides a unique ecosystem around industrial internet of things. They provided a rich catalog, G-Digital together with their partners built a unique catalog that contains services and solutions around industrial internet of things. There are security services. So you can use security from the box, from the age devices to the mobile application. There are data management services, advanced analytic services that you can use in your application and build it really quickly. And the most amazing thing about Predex that it isn't vendor locked solution. The Predex catalog can be extended by adding additional services and additional applications. Because it's cloud foundry, you can develop, build, park or service broker and include your service into catalog. What issues have been solved by using Predex? Security, data management, device management, scalability and high availability. Let's look at the second our choice RFID as a tags. What is RFID? Radio frequency identification uses electromagnetic fields to automatically track tags attached to the objects. The tags could be passive and active. Active tags has a local power source like a battery and can work within 100 meters from RFID reader. Passive tags collect the energy from the nearby RFID reader. The operating principle of RFID is quite simple. RFID tag or transponder generates a unique signal that can be read by RFID reader. RFID reader sends information to the server or to the cloud. And RFID reader can work in read and write mode. What are advantages of RFID as technology? That isn't a new technology. It's extensively used in logistics. It's quite secure and well standardized. That's why we chosen it. And what about the benefits RFID in aviation? First of all, RFID have the higher reading rate and the higher data reading speed than barcodes. Reading rate for barcodes, it's around 80-85%. If we speak about RFID tags, the reading rate could be 98-100%. The RFIDs could be read through the boxes in bulk. They could be read at an angle. So what does it mean for the airlines? It means decreasing the number of mishandling bags, reducing the back transfer time, and also less frequent flight delays. From the ground services perspective, it means considerable improvement in operational efficiency and for the passengers, benefits are obvious. The passengers can be sure that their bag will be handled properly. What infrastructure do we need to implement RFID solution in the airports? First of all, the check-in points should be upgraded by adding RFID printers or RFID writers. RFID printers work with printable back tags and RFID writer can work with permanent back tags. Both types of tags are comply with industry standards. And also we need the number of check points. The check points could be fixed like a gate and the check points could be hand-held. The third factor of success in our project is microservice architecture approach. Why microservices? Because they can be developed separately. They can be scaled separately. You don't stick to one technology, to one programming language. You can work on different microservices in parallel and you can reach the maximum productivity faster. And also you can maintain microservices easily because you don't need to bring down the entire system to fix the issue in one microservice. Let's look at what has been done under our proof of concept. We implemented more than 10 microservices that logically can be divided into backend and front-end groups. They aren't forced to use the central data storage. Message queue handles microservices communication asynchronously and they can be used to load balance microservices requests. The services don't share the common runtime so they can use the different technology stacks and they use them. And let's look at one of them. The most important service in our application is Tracker UI. Tracker UI, the main goal of Tracker UI to show the back status for all participants in the system. Tracker UI is built based on event-driven approach and it updates information on the page without reloading immediately upon a real new data. Let's look how do things work from inside. Asynchronous messaging is primary communication pattern in our system. Tracker UI and Tracker backend keep a web socket connection opened at all time and sends requests to each other. Tracker backend sends the information to Tracker UI and Tracker UI updates the information on the web page. The Tracker backend listens for the events in the system and continuously update information in database. We use RADIS as data storage for our prototype and only Tracker backend has access to the data storage and decides what to store and how to store. Message broker is used for internal communication between microservices. The real demo solution is available on Alteroses booth. We installed two checkpoints and we can show how the back status changes in real time. So welcome to Alteroses booth and look at our solution. And also you can watch the video record of demo. It's available on this link. And if you want to see the whole implemented features and if you want to look at the whole implemented functionality, please feel free to contact me directly after this session during this day and I'll be glad to show the whole implemented functionality and answer your question. That's not in the end of the story. Let me tell a little bit about adoption step for this solution. We recommend to start adoption RFID baggage checking for assessment, the current infrastructure, current software. It could be reused and that's a way to cut the costs when we start implementing the new baggage checking solution. Then we suggest to assess the technologies used in this solution. Why is it so important? Because the accurate baggage checking is just a part of the big in-back program. So industry is in a lot of improvements and the technologies should ensure easily adoption of innovations and new regulations. And as a third step we recommend test installation in the airports. The best way to start this installation is choose hardware vendors. Actually in our solution we don't stick to one hardware vendor. So we can work with different hardware vendors. And as a second step we recommend to grab test data, analyze it, and to improve the reader's location map to reach maximum productivity in the airports. But what is the cost of implementation? The cost of implementation depends on the number of checkpoints in the airport. So it depends on the size of the airport. And according to IATA forecast for class B airports and major carriers, the payback period could be less than 12 months. That's all my presentation. And I'm ready to answer any question that you may have. I understand that this application remains, the real primary thing is tracking, right? So from some point when you get the tag to wherever the airport. So the systems must be connected. Yeah, definitely the system must be connected. So that's why as a first step it's recommended to use printable RFID tags that can contain the regular barcode and RFID into it. So the printable tags that's the point how to adopt this technology. And they widely used for example in Hong Kong from 2008 and in Las Vegas, McCarran Airport. Any questions? I mentioned microservice architecture. So first of all, actually I'm surprised a little bit that we use lettuce as a backing because I thought it was not guaranteed persistence. But I'm not sure compared to an asset database which we're eyeballing. The other question. Let's do that first. Yeah. Okay, okay. About RAZEX backends. First of all, it's not production radar solution. That's a proof of concept of solution that is built in three months by two developers really fast just from scratch. So that's an example how we can use cloud foundry and how we build application on top of Jeep, RAZEX for example really quickly. And TREDIS is used just that's easier. But taking into account that we use microservice approach we can connect to the other data storage easily. Don't change the whole system. We probably want some long-term history as well.  The question was you said microservice architecture. So which microservices did come up in the design? Do you have any information about that? So how the application code was cut to microservices? Do you mean the microservices that was implemented by Alteros? Is there just one microservice? The tracker? Not tracker. No, no. You can see that there is tracker UI, tracker backend, stuff backend. You can see the number of analytics engine, tracking engine, checkpoints. So there's a number of microservices. Not only one, just I picked just one to show it as an example. Yeah. What is the communication between the software and the edge devices? The communication is provided by GE Predyx. On the edge devices we install Predyx machine or Predyx edge, the special piece of software that connects to Predyx cloud and sends information to Predyx cloud. Only Predyx machine can be connected to Predyx cloud? No, yeah. But actually this make our work easier. It makes our application more secure. Of course, you can connect to the Predyx cloud without using Predyx machine, but it isn't so secure. Oh, you exceeded my technical knowledge. But I answered this question a little bit later. Okay. Predyx Edge, is it running in some special or just a regular machine that you run yourself with? Predyx Edge, yeah. Predyx Edge is running on Raspberry Pi. You can run it on Intel board. So it doesn't matter. It runs on each device. It's not on Predyx device, it's just. For example, we run it on Raspberry Pi 3 and our test booth is based on Raspberry 3. So that's not an issue. You can use different kinds of hardware. So thank you for your attention. I'll answer your question a little bit later. Thank you.