Monthly Archives: April 2010

Quiet Town

Posted on by
Reply

Quiet Town by spickeringlr

iPhone Link

This is a cover I just made of a Josh Rouse song called “Quiet Town” which is the first cut off his 2005 album “Subtitulo.”

For some reason I’m in cover mode, or mostly just practice mode with recording and working in Garageband. I really have to get an interface for the computer. I can’t stand working with this BOSS BR-1600 anymore. The screen is tiny. But I do like going into the closet to record with the condensor mic. Feels like I’m going into the “studio.” Feels like I’m doing some work. It’s relaxing.

Cutting an Entire Bar Out of a Garageband Song

Posted on by
5
  • Click the “+” at the top of the App Window just below the “Mixer” heading to create an “Arrange Region”
  • I think it defaults to 4 bars, but you can take your cursor and make the arrange region any size you want
  • Click the region to highlight it in blue and then hit your delete key.

This does a Delete + Move function so the area you want to get rid of dissappears and moves the entire rest of the song, including each track’s “meta” data, neatly together. Moving the meta data is important if you’ve created customized volume or panning sliders for individual tracks. Just moving the tracks themselves by dragging them doesn’t do this.

This can be done anywhere in a song, but it occurred to me that usually when I make a recording I’ll have one or two bars at the opening of the song thats filled with silence or noise from getting ready to cut the take. And then when I’m done, I may have eight or nine tracks that need to be moved, along with their data to the actual beginning of the timeline or else when I exported it, the export would take that silence/noise with it. I needed a way to move all the tracks simultaneously, which is a terrible pain to do individually especially if, as is usually the case, many of the tracks aren’t “joined” and even then, there’s the problem of the meta data. I guess I wouldn’t have this problem if I did a count in, but even then, I think a count in is only one bar, and I usually need two before I’m ready to record.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments.

Update 4/30/10 – I just realized when I made “Quiet Town” today and needed to do the same thing that that little “+” below where it says “Mixer” at the top may not show up depending on your settings. If that’s the case you need to go to Track>>Show Arrange Track and click that, and then it will show up.

Update 4/9/11 – What I’m doing now for my Garageband projects is using a program for Mac called Wiretap Studio. What this program does is record into a .wav file (that you can easily convert to .mp3) directly from the Mac Core Audio itself. You end up getting better results because when you export via Garageband usually one of two things happen. If you’ve selected “normalize” things sound fine, but usually the volume is way to low. And if you don’t select “normalize” you get the loudness, but at the expense of quality. A lot of clipping. Wiretap gives you the loudness of a contemporary CD, but with the clarity of how it actually sounds in Garageband itself. Also with this solution, I don’t have to worry about moving the tracks to the beginning of the garageband interface. I simply move the playhead to where I want to start the recording. Then I click record on Wiretap. Then I start the playhead. The few extra seconds in the Wiretap file can be cropped to give you better control over the beginnings and endings of songs.

One Easy Way to Stimulate Your Creativity

Posted on by
Reply

So, I was listening to the podcast “TWiT” yesterday, as I have been doing pretty much every Sunday for the past several years. Then I happened to listen to the Podcast that comes right after it called “East Meets West” with Tom Merritt and Roger Chang which I usually don’t listen to, but did because because Leo was going to stay on for it. Anyway, in one short snippet they talked about how they always think of their best ideas in the shower. Well it turns out that it’s more than just a coincidence. What’s happening is that blood vessels are stimulated by the warmth. They expand and your brain becomes oxygenated.

  • So if you want to stimulate your creativity or need to come up with a good idea, take a hot shower.

If you want to boost this effect, take a hot tub or whirlpool bath, especially after a work out.

It reminded me of my own experiences with this. I have a whirlpool bath. I was in the habit, several years ago, of getting in it everyday. I was going through a period of writing songs and poems. I noticed great lines seemed to just come to me when I was in the whirlpool. I got to where I’d put a notebook on the vanity. It was quite exhilarating. I was in and out of that hot tub ten or fifteen times during a bath. That was the only problem. I couldn’t enjoy my bath! But if you need to come up with some ideas, or have a specific project in front of you, this is a great technique. Take advantage of it.

Here’s a snippet from the podcast, where Leo, Tom Merritt, and talk about this phenomenom.

Hot Shower Stimulates Creativity by spickeringlr

What are your thoughts about this? Do you have any other suggestions for stimulating creativity?

A New Poem | “May’s River” (Part Deux)

Posted on by
Reply

Illustration by Stephen Pickering. "May's River" (cc) 2010. painted on iPad using ArtStudio, with added figurines using Picnik online graphic editor.

You tore on past the river’s flow.
Now I know, now I know.
You walked from the house’s door into the snow
An instinct to let go, to let it go.

The menagerie fortress tower
looms larger by the hour.
Talking to the morning’s vestigial crops
into the elevators’ chop, chop, chops.
And disturbing them like making rings
Outward bound as the sunshine morning sings.

You of the potato patch’s mouth, mouth, mouth
have grown up too early to shout, shout, shout,
and now you’ve got trouble in the military man’s
house, house, house
given way to your sacred gifts’ sound
down South, South, South.

All the Milky Way’s a stir
with the blasted World,
of the strange gifts at night when two strangers eyes meet
down by the wharf with fresh cod to eat
and malted whiskey to drink.
They drive back on one tire
As a family waits by the hour
For some vestigial return at least
For some reason to leave the porch and heat.

‘Twas you that rounded the edges and fastened the ties,
soaked the oars in morning dew butter
before the wind in the hollow’s current died?
Each moment a little more dishonest, and a little piece of you tries,
A little piece of you dies.

Dies to the factories making crap
for the kids churning and drowning in the school’s cyndricular vat.
They reach for the elbows of the crow’s soaring flight,
but their hands seem too tiny in the subliminal sky.

They do not sing beyond it’s beauty.
They come home and sink their little heads into the factory pillow.
The hawk haunts the sky, and the ducks huddle under the willow.
All morning long with a fever blistered pitch
Those sculpted cliffs dive headlong into the ravine’s ditch.

Could you shower up for morning sup
And return fresh and green like a planted cup?
We’ve made winter soup and duck.
We’ve made sauces in planters and pink strawberry wine;
All of this and more from the edge of some perennial vine.

You will come to the forest edge when it’s time.
This we know from the story book rhyme.
You will pass through the walled garden’s oval arch
In time to escape the troops’ Kaiser’s Day march.

We will gather for a picnic ’round Robbins’ Lake.
Take a turn north just before Haliford’s gate.
Be sure and set the case of our dozen forebears down.
So that she may rest without soiling her satin white gown.

Two minutes into her eyes:
the inter tube by sunrise.
Back by noon for a surprise.
Smoothed over by gems from the boogie nights.

The Queen you ask, the heat of the midsummer Sun.
Aye it’s her, that’s the one.
Hold her in your diary secretly until the pressure of emotions
Lifts the gold of the ancient Spanish wreck.
May the two of you bathe in doubloons
Never leaving your room.
None are good enough to fly into this sacred space
that all of eternity’s changlings cannot erase.

But before you leave if you could do only one thing:
Pick up that dial, call the complex, and let it ring.
They and their party will have gone to the beach for the day.
This will give you time to think of what to say.

She wants a little house deep on the other side of the woods.
We know she talked on and on about the city and her friends,
but some lies are understood.

Go wait under that shed and close your eyes
blasted even as it is by flashes of the darkening sky.
Don’t you think she would if she could?
(I mean turn around and stay. Of course, she would.)
But the dancing goes on all night at Park Place.
You’ve done the right thing to leave without a trace.
They won’t remember anything not even your face.
All this time you thought that one memory couldn’t be erased.

Ruby lights throb chaotic motions from the room.
Blue, crazed, and wild, they lay out lines for the glowing Moon.
The jeweled lights never cease
to point toward the balcony’s deserted seat.
You come down a golden flight of stairs.
The company has arrived, waiting down there.
Up from the bottom and flopping onto the beach
even she comes up from 20,000 leagues.

You turn the corner and walk up the street
Thousands of children are at your feet.
His majesty HRH has just flown in.
No one met him at the gates for the parade to begin.
Inside even the cells of the carpet nubs couldn’t withstand
The pressure of a human being freaking out the light barrier
And so dragged the little shanty of a house back in time.

Passed out by the celebrations you left in time to climb the ocean cliffs
leaving alone the flowers she brought you to bob on the tied up skiff.
Parsing weed, bushes, trees, and vine
you’re bruised, scared, and knee-scraped by the sheer climb.

The circled gate
Opened not a minute too late.
And there further than the mountains dotting the African shore
lifted the hand of the one whose eyes gave birth
to an opening in the middle, between Jason’s clashing rocks,
of the Universe’s sacred door.

Sent from my iPad

(cc)2010. Stephen Pickering.

Neither Twitter, Facebook, nor Apple Will Survive the Open Web

Posted on by
Reply

I was thinking about this subject tonight, that there is no way such closed systems as Twitter and Facebook can survive the force of the open Internet in the coming years with the price of data, storage, and bandwidth all marching toward near zero cost, much less be an Eco System or “Platform.”

As these communication and computation costs lower each
year, it will drive so much innovation, the walls will be torn down.

See, what is exactly the value proposition of a closed network such as Twitter or Facebook?

A) The Network Effect.

The Network Effect, or “Metcalfe’s Law” says that the value of a network equals the number of users it has squared. Obviously, the more users the more exponentially the value of said network increases. Facebook has 400million users. Twitter around 50million. You might think Facebooks network effect is tremendously greater than Twitters, but Facebook is a much more closed network. On average a typical user may have 100 “friends” or network connections. On Twitter you can connect to virtually anyone on the network simply by “following” them. It doesn’t have to be a reciprocal agreement. Everyone on the network is accessible to you. This means Twitter’s more open Network is of far greater value than Facebook’s larger but more closed Network. That’s why Facebook is in a tremendous frenzy to open their network more through “Pages” “Facebook Connect” and changing the default privacy settings.

So if Twitter’s vastly smaller, but vastly more open network has more Network Effect value what does that mean? The more open a “network” is, the more valuable that it is. This means there is an incentive to build a completely open network. So one will be built, or shall we say, not built, but merely “facilitated” because the act of building one implies some degree of closed. The completely open network already exists. It’s called the Internet.

We all know how many users and how much traffic Facebook has every month. They say its like an upward hockey stick. But how much value are Twitter and Facebook giving off each month?

And how much traffic and how many users does Internet, Inc. have?

Basically you trade your identity and your content for their network effect. Also they throw in their bandwidth, storage, and programming. As of now this has value, plenty of it and that’s why you see the spike in these “networks'” traffic.

But now the process of them selling you down the river begins. They figure they’re giving you network effect, bandwidth, and storage for free in exchange for them selling your content. Sounds fine, right?

But the problem is innovation will drill a hole into any walled garden. Quickly, innovation will fork around sand boxed networks and find ways to connect people without them giving up their identity or their content. Each day, storage and bandwidth prices drop. They are heading rapidly to zero. So that part of the economic proposition is losing weight very quickly as well.

Twitter isn’t the network. Facebook isn’t the network. The network is the network.

Even the mighty Apple, as much as I am blown away by this iPad I’m typing on, can’t survive this onslaught of the open web. For instance, tonight I was watching a TV show on the wonderful ABC app and it occurred to me that I was being forced to watch the commercial because I couldn’t minimize the browser. it felt Pavlovian to me, being trained by the nature of the device, forcing me to behave in a way I didn’t want or like.

I don’t think the user will put up with theses strategies for long, and I’m sure the open web will come to the rescue.

It also occurred to me tonight that Gmail keeps 5 years and 25,000 of my emails forever available and searchable and yet Twitter only let’s me go back and see a few weeks of my Tweets, with a substandard if not plain archaic search system.

That’s just plain lack of innovation. And Facebook is hardly better.

Technology, driven by innovation as it is, is a poor place for a lock in business model. Technology doesn’t want to be trapped, and will eventually fork around it’s captors.

Sent from my iPad