After months of planning and logistics, we finally had our first California Twirl Contra Dance! I’m very passionate about building welcoming and inclusive communities around folk dance, and this monthly dance series is based on those ideals. We use gender-free role terms so that everyone can be comfortable dancing in any role they choose. Contra dance is about connection, community, music, and fun. I’m so proud to lead the team of volunteers who made this happen, and excited to see where this dance series goes.
Christmas Matters Holiday Carolers
This fall I became a member of Christmas Matters Holiday Carolers, a professional caroling ensemble in Los Angeles. We are a group of about 40 local singers who learn a huge book of choral christmas arrangements and are hired out in quartets to sing at holiday celebrations and other events. We wear Victorian-esque costumes when we sing, it’s a ton of fun! I loved learning the music and singing together with lots of wonderful people.
Megaverb—New Goodhertz Plugin
After a long wait, we have finally released a new plugin at Goodhertz! Megaverb is a gritty reverb based on 1980s digital reverbs, with intuitive controls and a gate for easy gated reverb fun. We had Jennifer Hsu interning with us over the summer, and she took the reverb in Lossy and expanded it into a full-fledged plugin.
I was involved in the design of the Gate section in Megaverb, especially the transient based detection mode and the overall gate smoothing and character. I also added the metering for Gate Sensitivity, helped with documentation, and sang two bars from “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” for a demo on the product page.
We are very excited to announce the release of Goodhertz plugins v3.3! The most exciting part of this release is that Vulf Compressor now has a sidechain, which has been long requested. It also includes lots of optimizations, so all the plugins run significantly faster.
In this release I added the sidechain meter, measured and implemented optimizations, and contributed to lots and lots of bug fixes and testing. 🙂 Read more on the Goodhertz blog here.
Regency Era Dancing Dress
My friend Hazel and I spent a weekend together sewing a regency era dress for English Country Dancing. I’d never made a gathered cap sleeve like this one before. Such a fun weekend project, and it’s very fun to dance in!
We are very excited to finally release version 3 of Goodhertz plugins, a huge update that adds cross-platform support and new formats. This update essentially required rebuilding our plugins from the ground up, as versions 1 and 2 relied on a lot of proprietary Mac-only tools.
I was especially involved in low level optimizations to make the plugins run efficiently on PCs, transitioning visualizations to OpenGL, and lots of finding and fixing bugs. Read more on the Goodhertz site here.