Many interesting things were announced today at Google’s annual I/O keynote and meeting. Google “Wave” is now open to the public with no invite necessary. That should attract more users and get some “network” effect going, making it a more useful service. Another little one, kind of under the radar, is the availability of some custom fonts, free and open source, that you can easily grab the code for with a few snippets and apply to your webpage/blog. This is useful for design purposes and to have a little fun being creative with your page. I grabbed one already and applied it my header “Stephen Pickering” up there. What’s nice is, besides the fact that they are royalty free and open sourced, that since Google is hosting them on their own servers, the fonts will render properly on any “Modern” browser. I just checked on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, and my header rendered correctly. Not sure about IE, since I don’t have it. Before, if you applied custom fonts to your page, more than likely other browsers wouldn’t render it, as they only support a few of the main fonts that are commonly used. But the Google servers make sure the code is there for most of the browsers to render it. Didn’t work on my iPad, however. I still don’t understand or like the fact that the iPad uses a “mobile” browser. Very lame on Apple’s part. Flash notwithstanding, the screen real estate is large enough on a tablet, that one should expect a more robust browsing experience.
Here comes the summertime, the feeling’s in the air.
I remember cigarettes, tube socks, sun burns and long blond hair.
Here comes the summertime, yeah it’s coming soon.
I remember living upstairs, drinking iced-tea and swimming pools.
And the feeling doesn’t last that long.
Before you know it, it’s up and gone, oh yeah.
The things we do…
In the summertime, yeah it’s coming soon.
I remember watermelon, finger banging, purple rain and being cool.
Here comes the summertime, the feeling’s in the air.
I remember drive-ins, soap operas, fireworks and county fairs.
And the feeling doesn’t last that long.
Before you know it, it’s up and gone, oh yeah.
The things we do…
Yet another cover of Josh Rouse’s 2006 album “Subtitulo.” I guess I could call myself “1972” and become a Josh Rouse tribute band! Hahahahahah. No really, it is one of my favorite albums, and he’s one of my favorite artists, but really I was just in the mood for making covers lately, mostly just to practice Garageband. Oh just got a new Presonus Firestudio Mobile so I can record directly into Garageband. So I’m so happy, and it’s much more fun producing now. The only thing I’m dissappointed in is that I just realized that Garageband doesn’t support sample rates over 44.1k, and I was hoping to work with 96k. I guess I’ll have to move up to Logic, although at least it does support 24-bit depth rate, so that’s better than my 16 bit Boss BR-1600. The FireStudio also came with recording software that’s suppossed to be good and does support the full 96k, so I guess I’ll make my next song on it, but I do love the ease and fun of Garageband so much.
The only thing is that I still can’t get the recording levels right. It’s like when I’m laying down the track, it doesn’t sound loud enough, so I crank it to what sounds good, but then when it comes down to the final thing, there’s always some clipping during various parts, which makes the “Normalize” feature of Garageband render the tune way to low, or if you un check that, the tune is just blurry and overall unlistenable. Drives me crazy!!!!
I found one solution in the program called Wire Tap Studio, a Mac program that tries to accurately record exactly what is playing through the Mac Audio Engine, which makes it sound a little better. At least listenable. What’s weird is that within the program when you are playing all the tracks, everything sounds pretty good, especially through the high quality headphones, but when you go to export it, I guess it comes through the compression, everything comes out the other end sounding crappy.
Wire Tap helps because it tries to accurately record what’s coming out of the Garageband sound engine, but you can still here a lot of clipping and distortion in at different points in the track. I’m going to have to really focus on my analog tracks, recording them maybe even a lot lower than what initially seems right. I don’t know. What’s so weird is that the professional loops, even the the wave ones, will barely have any level, but they will sound crystal clear, and plenty loud enough.
I want to be able to record those kinds of tracks!
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.
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.
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.
