Category Archives: software - Page 3

sawdust and fear

Posted by on March 19, 2009 No comments

since i got my sketch posted early this week, i took last night off and sat in bed. i was doing a little light reading. i saw that my trash was full on the laptop and went to empty it. somehow, my entire desktop directory made it in. quick fingers managed to save only one directory from oblivion. this was not good. fortunately for me, my beloved wife nagged me into using time machine not too long ago and i was able to recover everything except a couple of tracks from my most recent sketch. not too bad all told.

lots of time in the garage this past week. the kit guitar has been routed to accept the bindings. i can use my new bending iron this weekend and get everything tucked away and glued up with any luck. tonight as i was routing the back i noticed that what i thought would be an epic failure was averted by binding of exactly the right height. better lucky than smart.

i have to say that i hate working with power tools. routing out the sides was nerve wracking. a sneeze or false step can destroy hours and hours of work. i much prefer hand tools but for tasks like this i just don’t have the time. all that said, i still find working on guitars to be supremely relaxing and fulfilling. i spend all day making things that can’t be seen or felt. it’s such a joy to be able to reach out and touch something in which i have invested much and time and thought. this is fun.

pics will be posted sometime next week. i need to do something worth showing a picture of and i think the herringbone purfling with rosewood bindings will be just the thing.

logic studio ate my jazz post

Posted by on March 3, 2009 No comments

i should be posting about the second set of lessons in the awesome jazz guitar book i mentioned below but i’m not. tonight i was distracted by logic studio and the coolness that it brings to the table. i upgraded (after teaching the dudes at the apple store about how the pricing works…sigh) and have been having a little too much fun messing around with it. the deal is, quite simply put, that the difference between logic express and studio is vast.

if all i got out of it was the space designer plugin interface, i would be quite content. in fact, that’s why the upgrade was planned. the presets and less than adequate access to specific parameters left me feeling like there was too much missing when defining the sound of acoustic instruments. my studio is a very dead, very small spare bedroom that lacks anything that resembles character. the living room/dining room of the house has hard floors and sounds great but there’s that whole “little boy and dog running all over the place” hurdle to clear. so i need to have a little something extra. space designer brings the love.

also of note, the sculpture synth. it does some funky modeling and produces some really lush pads. i’m a huge fan of camel audio’s cameleon 5000 soft synth and sculpture gives it a real run for its money. most of my studio time tonight was burned just moving sliders and messing around with weird pads. it’s really exciting to have access to this.

i still haven’t touched main stage or wave burner or soundtrack pro. wave burner will likely be that app that i can’t live without, but we’ll see.

also of note is the presence of all of apple’s jam packs in the logic studio suite. there are some that i could live without and a pile that really do provide that certain something. a point of departure or an enhancement. a lot of the loops to my mind are the equivalent of dumping some onion soup mix into a meatloaf because although you know you could measure out each and every spice you really have other, more important things you could be doing. yeah, the apple loops are like that.

i’m very pleased with the upgrade. this week’s sketch will probably be some more silly electronica with wild, overdone pads and drum loops processed through whatever i can dig up. this is seriously fun stuff.

and next week it’s back to the jazz studies! seriously! come back thursday for tunes.

creativity and notebooks

Posted by on February 4, 2009 No comments

i’m not a fan of the GTD method. the idea of stuffing my life into three bins and forcing myself to deal with items through an algorithm seems silly to me. it works for a lot of folks, but that’s them. personally, i work on a very simple set of rules. if i’m at work and something comes up, i take care of it immediately. this is due to the fact that sleeping will likely remove the task from my memory. with my creative work it’s a little different.

i have roughly 100 notebooks lying around. i’m no johnny come lately to the moleskine notebook. i’ve been using them for years to keep track of my progress with my creative work. there are several flavors. there are journals which are meant to be places where i dump my brain. it isn’t the kind of writing that i want to have read and it had best not be during my lifetime. that’s my head in there people. stay clear. then there are notebooks. i treat those like a free form list. i block of each day with a line and run down it adding things like “call the doctor” or “think about strings and tin cans.” all ideas are the same and they get reviewed weekly. if something is really important, i will put it at the back of the notebook where i keep the TODO list. it seems wanky. it probably is.

but for most of my journaling needs, i use software. i was addicted to journler for almost two years after moving away from notebook by circus ponies. journler was/is pretty keen but i fear for it. it isn’t open source and the developer could pull the plug any time. so i have gone back to notebook. no, it’s not open source either but it isn’t a solo developer who appears to be burning out. this change is both good and bad. it’s nice to have a new piece of software to screw around with and it’s neat to shake up my routine now and again, but it’s shaking up my routine. i’ve mentioned about 1,000 times that i don’t have much time available for the creative work i do so mucking it up with a new piece of brain dump software creates danger and opportunity.

in any case, digital notebooks are nice because i can dump in all kinds of media clips. web pages can be copied and pasted. it can house PDFs and the other miscellaneous junk that i dump into my “hey this might be useful” bin.

so that’s that. i have new software. this does not excuse my lack of a sketch this week. the fact is, i have a sketch out to a friend of mine for some collaboration. more on that later. in the mean time, i am mixing and re-mixing earlier recordings to see what i’ve got now that i’ve been sitting on the stuff for a while. i’m enjoying it. some of the stuff that i thought sucked really doesn’t and some things that i thought were great haven’t aged well.

more music soon.

also, we should all sit back and see if kevlar updates his blog this week or fails miserably again as a member of the web 2.0 content generation online community. insert tag cloud here.

whispering

Posted by on January 27, 2009 No comments

things are moving briskly around here and lately it’s been all about quantity. the inner critic has been pretty quiet and that is likely what has been pushing my process along. a critical ear deep inside is a very useful thing but it gets in the way of doing the work. sometimes it’s better to slap something together and think about it later. all of the recordings and songs that i put together become ipod fodder the next day. putting them online puts me in a position to get some feedback and more importantly, motivates me to continue posting.

keeping the momentum is the hardest part.

the piece that i finished up tonight features the badly mangled voice of my good friend Amy. i don’t think that she has anything web-ish that she’d want to have linked (let me know if i’m wrong) but if she did, i would! i don’t think that you’ll hear it when you listen to this, but her voice brings a cadence and a color to this very static almost wind chime-like backdrop. it doesn’t really matter if you hear it. what’s important is that it pushed things along for me. check it out in the link below.

heavy nerd content ahead. you were warned.

today i did something pretty significant in my nerd life: i dumped my subscription to the linux audio users mailing list. the fact is, though i was an ardent supporter of gnu/linux and all of its promise, i don’t have time for it. i have learned the hard lesson that with gnu/linux and the audio software that runs on it you may not pay in money but you do pay in time. right now, i have no time. in fact, it’s been almost three years since i last fired up my debian box for any reason.

i have a full time job that doesn’t relate to my creative work. i have a wonderful family. i have a thousand things to do and one and a half hours a day to create when conditions are perfect. my laptop (yes, it has to be a laptop) has from the time i lift the lid to the time i put my fingers on the keyboard to be awake and functional. as i am launching my software, it needs to be finding the nearest network connection and negotiating my connectivity without any need for my intervention. when i plug in a peripheral, it needs to find it and make it useful immediately. and when i’m done i will close its lid and it had better suspend itself and be ready when i open it next time. sounds like a mac to me.

there is a lot to be said for gnu/linux and i will continue to push it as a great server solution, but for the composer on the go with little to no time for continuing education and system maintenance, it’s just not going to work out. keep up the good work and thanks for the memories!

thus endeth the nerding.

if you have some time, please take a listen to my latest and drop me a line on facebook or twitter or comment either here or in an email. i love the feedback!

white whisper

Creative Commons License
white whisper by j.c. wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at othertime.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://othertime.com.

if it’s not one thing it’s another

Posted by on October 8, 2008 No comments

this week’s excuse for not getting into the studio is brought to you by: a gastrointestinal virus!  seriously, there is nothing more disturbing that having to hold a one year old while he wretches until empty.  that was sad in a deep way.  my catching it was not only inevitable, but painful.  so five days came and went and i’m not really sure what happened.

in lieu of useful musical goodness, i will instead post a little bit of a thought piece i’m working on.  my general thesis is: do the tools we use to make music make too many decisions for us?  in other words, does someone who uses a particular piece of software for recording, composing or editing gravitate to certain styles or characteristics because the tool being used makes it more difficult or much simpler to do what the composer would do otherwise?  this might only be of interest to me and it might be that way simply because i use a million different pieces of software to do what i do.  but is that because i am not particuarly drawn to any one environment or is it because i use what i need to use to do what i need to do?  i see in many forums people who live and die by one package.  that just can’t be healthy for the user or for the art.  all of that said, here is my introductory sketch for what will likely be a silly essay that a dozen people might read.

Introduction

When electronic music came into being, there were very few places in the world with the equipment necessary to produce it.  Those with access to these studios were those who had enough background in very specific disciplines.  Every piece was an experiment of some sort.  While thought was given to the composition of the work, it must be said that perhaps more of the effort and inspiration went into devising the methods of producing the work.  After all, these composers were building their entire tonal palette from scratch with each work.  With the technology of electronic music moving as quickly as it was, there was always something new to learn and the studio was more of a laboratory.  The level of detailed knowledge was incredible.

Computers quickly changed the game.  There was still a lot to know and a different set of skills to acquire, but as microcomputers came onto the scene the barrier to entry was lowered drastically.  More and more people could create music with the slowly but steadily growing number of pieces of software and hardware for making sound.  Slowly but surely, digital audio became a stock component of even the lowest cost personal computers.

With the hardware readily available, the software followed.  As the computer allowed the composer to step away from physical patch cables and oscillators, it also took on more and more responsibility for the details of sound creation.  This came at a price.  After all, if the software that one is using takes care of the low level items such as setting the sample rate where should its responsibilities and functionality end?  To see the opposite ends of the continuum, one need only compare Csound and its orchestra and score text files to GarageBand’s “Magic GarageBand” feature that actually creates a song for the user.

This is where the questions begin and the discussion takes flight.  The composer has taken necessary steps away from the technical side of producing electronic/computer music.  No longer is it necessary to understand the mathematics behind sample rates or the various forms of synthesis.  A computer music composer doesn’t even need to know how to program a computer.  But how far away from the inner workings of the computer is too far and to what extent do our tools make that decision for us?