Friday, May 16, 2014

Through GoFundMe.com and some tax refund, I was able to purchase Numark Mixture DJ Pro 2 and Harbinger speakers. I thank all the donators who made this possible. Without the support I received from friends and family, this wouldn't be possible. Yet the challenge became a bit nasty. My iMac laptop is old (10.5.8 version) and wouldn't recognize the Sarato Into 1.2 software that goes with the Numark DJ device. I had e-mail conversations with the Sarato company who made the software, which didn't get anywhere toward success. So I had to head over to Apple Store at Eastview Mall, a long trip from my home and back. I had to get my laptop upgraded to 10.6 version. It took 45 minutes to upgrade. Finally the Serato Intro software was turned on instead of quitting all of a sudden. The Apple Store tech people were amazing and helped me a lot. When I hooked the DJ device,  the Serato Intro software wouldn't recognize the DJ device. I went to Guitar Center where I purchased the device and speakers, and showed the man what was wrong. He called a Numark Mixture DJ Pro 2 expert. It turned out that I must have the DJ device hooked to the computer and download the Serato Intro software at the same time, which I did not do. When back home, I did just that and it worked. Then the sound didn't come out of the new speakers. I realized on the next day that I didn't plug the cable into the back of the speakers deep enough and they were loose. I pushed them in deeper and then the sound came on beautifully. 


After 2 weeks of struggling to solve the problems, I am now finally ready to learn, practice, and hone the skills I need to become a DJ. I watched YouTube videos of Numark Mixture DJ Pro 2 to get ideas of how it all works with tricks and so forth. I am going to work on the DJ skills daily as much as possible to reach a goal to become DJ WildPoet. That's the trademark I would like to use to call myself when DJ-ing around out to the public when ready. I will create business cards, post the videos of my DJ-ing, and create a network with the DJ entertainment industries or whatever available. I just played around with Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart" song and it was really fun to speed up the tempos, tweak the pitches, jog the track, and so forth. I also played around with my own electronic music as well. I am very excited and looking forward to entertaining the audience in the near future when I'm ready. 


Here are the photos of Numark DJ device and the speakers, hooked up to my iMac laptop, for you to see.



Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Dangerous Signs Performance at MuCCC, Saturday, May 10th

I and the cast members - Dangerous Signs - performed at MuCCC twice on May 10th, which was at 3 PM and 8 PM. The show was for MuCCC's College Theater Festival. We performed Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious" song, translated into ASL. We then did skits about the twilight zone related to fear, darkness, superstitious, and so forth. We also did skits about common fear or ignorance toward deafness and deaf culture by hearing people that we are familiar with such as Harry Potter's family hating magic comparing to hearing family denying ASL and things like that. We also did "Zombies" skit, created by Malik Paris, using each letter of the word Zombies, which we acted as zombies and Troy Chapman used the letters (fingerspelling) and using them to represent something. The example is using the letter "O" as eye falling of the socket, using the letter "B" as a blade to chop off the head, and things like that. At the end, we all performed my originally composed electronic music with my recorded voice poem titled "Blade Gray Sky". We all collaborated together on this whole work to show the dark side of things I saw and imagined at New York City. The example is "Young kids shoot heroin in darkened alleys."They sat on the floor and acted out shooting heroin and getting high around me. The show went very well. We had a discussion group with an interviewer after the 3 PM show and 8 PM show, learning what the interviewer and audience had to say about our work. It was a great experience. Here are the photos taken during our show.