Sandwich Mac Users Group (SMUG) – Session 2

The Sandwich Mac Users Group (SMUG) met last night to indulge in another evening of geeking out and sharing interesting Mac related things. Ben had brought along his Hackintosh - an Advent / MSI Wind netbook hacked to run OSX – very cool stuff. It sounded a bit fiddly for me though…

We shared lots of tips, tricks, websites and apps. So build on the last meeting’s list, here are some more useful apps and websites for use with your Mac.

Tips
o MacHeist is a website offering bundles of Mac apps (usually 10-12) where the cost of the bundle is reasonable (~$49) and the value of the software contained in the bundle far exceeds that if you were to buy the apps separately. Usually the bundle includes some productivity apps, helpers, image, audio or video editing tools, and games. There is usually one key app that is the “hook” but most of the stuff in the bundle is useful in some way or other. Well worth a look. HOWEVER, the deal only happens annually – so you need to keep an eye open for the next round of MacHeist.
o Hongkiat.com hosts a couple of very good blog entries detailing 100 free useful Mac apps. Part 1; Part 2.
o Nigel has his list of Mac apps stored in Evernote.
o Scott shared how to convert MP3s to Audiobook format: Get the MP3 file and right-click, choose to save as / convert to AAC. Hard delete original MP3 (send file to trash). Soft delete AAC (don’t send file to trash). Find the AAC file (m4a) and rename to m4b. Reimport into iTunes.

Apps
o The Hit List – GTD, task management app.
o Freemind - Java-based mind mapping software.
o Burn - When I had problems trying to burn a DVD with data using the usual Mac methods, Burn saved the day. It’s plain vanilla burning software but works very well.
o Spotify - Stream music directly from the web. The music starts streaming very quickly… The Free version has adverts appearing sporadically, the subscription versions don’t.
o Airfoil - Streams music via the network to other computers, Airport hubs, Apple TVs, iPod Touch or iPhones with the Airfoil Speakers app installed.
o The same software company offers many cool looking audio apps: AudioHijack for recording from apps, and any sound sources on the Mac (Skype, iChat, etc.) and Fission which offers lossless audio editting.
o NuevaSync - Syncs smartphone calendars, events with Google Calendar, Gmail contacts, PIM information.

RPM track by track (part two)

Vignette & Vignette2
These two tracks came out of a thought I had pre-RPM which was to do short tracks with only one idea. In the past I’ve been guilty of stretching musical ideas too thinly and making tracks too long, or not getting into the main theme or idea quickly enough. With these two tracks the aim was to get in, get the idea down and get out in the shortest possible time.

In Vignette I had an idea of creating a track with a long delay and 100% wet reverb so that you hear the delayed line very much like an echo. I laid down the chordal part which sounded pretty much like I had intended. But then I thought it might be nice to add a little melody line over the top. Again I tried to keep the idea sparse and to the point. And to a certain extent I think it worked. 40 seconds of music. But that’s enough…

In Vignette2 I was trying to do something similar, but using a nice sweep echo effect. Again, same kind of idea – get in, lay down the main theme and get out of there. I added a little bit of post-processing, but on the whole it’s just as I played it. Again, 40 seconds. In, idea, out.

My RPM album track by track (part one)

I described RPM in my last post. 28 days in which to produce 10 songs or 35 minutes of audio. It’s high pressure, creativity on speed, late nights, hard work… Now it’s finished. I thought I’d take the opportunity now to unpack, debrief and unwind and give some background to the creative process behind some of the songs.

The Song That Never Was
As part of the Twitter Festival (Twestival) Imogen Heap provided vocal parts for a song that had been commissioned for a TV programme. Unfortunately the music never made it to air, so she instead uploaded the vocal parts to the Twestival site for folks to download and remix for a donation to charity. This seemed like a great opportunity to work with some great vocal parts – I’m a big fan of Imogen Heap – and the parts were beautifully recorded. I started by listening to vocals parts and laying down a chordal part on my bass to accompany the tune. I worked on the vocal line from the “instrumental verse” and used the Slice-to-MIDI function in Ableton Live to break the part up into interesting parts and rearrange them into something interesting. At first I had no real thought to include the main vocal line, but later on reflection I thought it would be good to include it, so I broke it into pieces and worked to bring them in in half time compared to the original line. My big breakthrough came when I had the idea to restrict the song to only 140 beats. Twitter is driven by posts of 140 characters or less. So what could I do in 140 beats? At 95bpm 140 beats would be about 1:28 minutes. It’s amazing what having this kind of restriction does for song construction. It means no fat, no padding, put the ideas down in a concise way… So here it is:

The Thrushes Sing
My wife Catherine said at the start of RPM that she had some songs that she could contribute to the project. This is one of them. We started by finding some samples that were not bound too much by tempo, Catherine laid down the vocal parts (in the living room) and I added the “twitter” parts. This, and the Imogen Heap song, were two examples where tunes came together almost by accident to give something quite extraordinary. If you listen to the arrangement here, you’ll hear that the backing tracks fit in a way that goes beyond good planning or luck. They just seem to fit beautifully with almost no effort from me. Divine inspiration or something. Must be. I’m very pleased with this track. I think Catherine has done a wonderful job (it’s her melody) and the whole thing hangs together really well. I hope you agree.

The best of the RPM songs are available for listening and downloading (for free!) at ReverbNation.

RPM – Creativity on speed

Two years ago I participated in the RPM Challenge – record 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music in the month of February. 28 days later you have a whole CDs worth of material that didn’t exist before. It isn’t a competition, there are no prizes, no judges, no phone-in public vote. You simply commit to producing the goods at the end of the month. And to force you into “Completer – Finisher” mode they want you to mail your finished CD to the organisers in New Hampshire, USA. They then load it onto a Jukebox so that you can share what you’ve achieved and hear what others have been up to. It’s all good.

Last time however I only found out about the challenge one week into February so in the event I had only 3 weeks to complete the CD. I found it tough going, lots of late nights staring at Ableton Live sets, frantically trying to find something that sounded interesting and not too cliched. All this on top of the day job too… It was great discipline to hit the big red button marked “REC” and record whatever I was doing, rather than setting up, noodling around a bit, then chucking the result away at the end in order to go and walk the dog / surf the net / make tea. It also forces you to accept what you are producing as you’re doing it, rather than filtering your output too severely at the first listen – “First-pass metabolism” effects indeed. By the end of the week I was completely knackered and remember posting to the blog saying “Help, I’m pooped, I’ll never get it finished…” or words to that effect. I got a lovely reply from one fellow RPMer saying “Get a grip, you’ve got a week left. That’s 25% of the whole time.” Which was enough to make me put a little extra effort in to get it all finished up. The end result was very satisfying – not because I think it’s a musical masterpiece, far from it, but rather I have something that I know I created in three weeks and captures what was happening at that time, warts and all.

So RPM09 is just about upon us and I’ve signed up to take part this year. It was good to have a year off last year – I was busy training for the London marathon – and I think I’m better prepared than last time to take it all on. I’ve got my tools all ready, I’ve been scouting about for some inspiration and I’ve got some possible collaborators lined up and ready to help out with sounds etc. So it should be fun. I’m Hank Spaniel over there just as I am here. I’m hoping to post work in progress here to let folks listen in to the creative process and help inspire me on.

STAY TUNED!

Top apps for new Mac users

I had an enjoyable evening geeking out over Macs this evening with some colleagues from work who have just purchased their Macs. This means that I was actually one of the more experienced Mac users in the room, and I’m afraid I may have bored them rigid with “…and here’s another brilliant app / widget / shortcut…” Fortunately though they were very patient and tolerant and shared their own top tips for tools like Firefox, MAMP, iPhoto etc. It’s great how the built-in Mac software works together to do pretty cool stuff very easily. It’s also great to see how Mac switchers get excited when they find cool widgets and tools to play with that help them do the stuff they really want to do.

All great fun and very inspiring! Here’s a short list of the apps we looked at that I reckon are useful for new Mac users:

• Soundflower lets you route audio around within the Mac so you can record your Skype conversation for a podcast or record a commentary while demoing iTunes or Garageband etc.
• Evernote is a fantastic notes app that works on the Mac desktop, iPhone and the web that allows you to share notes and access them wherever you are.
• Voodoopad is a neat little self-contained wiki for capturing ideas when you’re not ready to think linearly.
• ScreenFlow is the must-have utility if you’re into making screencasts, demos etc.
• Mouseposé is also very useful for demos and screencasts if you need to highlight the cursor or want to show shortcut keys.
• MacTheRipper will deal with pretty much all the DVD backup and ripping you’ll ever need.
• Handbrake is the tool for converting DVD to pretty much any video format you can play on Apple hardware.
• Flip4Mac will allow you to play WMV files on your Mac.
• Time Machine in Leopard has pretty much made hard-drive backup an automated process, but SuperDuper is what you should look at if you’re in pre-Leopard mode or if you want a more literal copy of your harddrive.
• Audacity is an audio editor that allows you to trim up audio files, split them into sections using markers, process them with a variety of nice effects, and batch convert from one file type into another.
• MAMP allows you to “host” fully featured webpages locally in order to develop your website offline.
• Picturesque tweaks images for blogs, brochures  – changing perspective, adding borders, generating reflections etc.

EDIT: (More tools for consideration!)

• Cyberduck is an FTP client.
• iStatMenus provides in depth information about the status and performance of your Mac: Hard drive space, temperatures, memory, CPU use,  network activity etc. etc.  Provides dashboard. iStatPro provides similar information as a dashboard widget.
• Caffeine keeps your Mac “awake” while you’re watching a movie or chatting via webcam. Stops the sleep and screensaver mode.
• Seashore is a useful image editor that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Photshop Elements or The Gimp but is featured enough to be useful.
• Delicious Library isn’t really a necessary app, but it’s quite cool. Take pictures of the barcodes on your books, CDs, software etc. using the iSight camera and the Delicious Library will then store the image of whatever you scan in a virtual library. Track what you have!!

Social media midwives?

I had an interesting chat tonight at our church Carol Service with one of our lovely friends who is a midwife in Kent and has been travelling out to the northern Ethiopia fairly regularly over the last few years to help train local nurses in midwifery (sp?). It’s a really fantastic thing they’re doing – basic training will increase the chances of both women and babies surviving child birth. At the time of their last trip they were featured on South East Today and its great to see the work they do getting recognition and publicity. They face many challenges both before they go and while they’re out there, logistical issues of getting the things they need to the right places, making sure that they have the right authorities and permissions to go and train, physically getting there, health and safety issues while they are in Ethiopia, etc. etc. Our friend mentioned tonight that she would love a way of being able to “get the word out” about how things were going, quick updates for supporters, messages to friends to let them know how they could help and so on. I immediately thought of how Stephen Fry had used SMS and Twitter to send out little messages and updates on his most recent trip to Africa filming “Last chance to see…”. Presumably the midwives could use this to send messages out (assuming they got SMS reception) and friends and followers could then get their updates. Kind of like ordinary SMS but one to many rather than one to one. Also, I thought that if they set up a blog (like this one in WordPress.com) then perhaps they would be able to update BEFORE the trip to bring what they’re doing to more people’s attention and provide some background to what they were doing and why. Then, hopefully update the blog with Twitter updates while away on the trip.

SO… I guess I have just volunteered myself, as local, friendly geek, to look into the practicalities of setting all this up and seeing how we can get Twitter to play with WordPress and all that jazz. Of course, it may be that this is just me jumping off the deep end with a hare-brained idea, but we’ll see.. I’d welcome thoughts, ideas, caveats, offers of help… Can’t promise payment, but your good deeds will not go unrecognized!

the human touch

“We all need the human touch” as Rick Springfield once sang…

Today I received through the post the latest CD by singer-songwriter Miriam Jones. I was first alerted to her music through Uncle Stevie who I think dropped me a line via ReverbNation to say something to the effect of “Check this out, I think you’ll like it”. I clicked through, had a listen, was really taken with the songs I listened to and as a result I took the plunge and purchased her CD “Being Here”. So when Miriam announced a month or so ago that she was in production for her new CD “Inside Free” I was really interested to hear how it would sound. Following the lead of artists like Lawson, Dodds and Wood, Miriam did a “pre-release” download of her album with work in progress versions of the tunes and bonus tracks. This pre-release subsidises the costs of manufacture and ensures that artists recoup some of the cost before the CD proper is even released – a good thing indeed.

So where does the human bit come in? Well, firstly Steve says to me “Check this out” – recommendations from friends means a slightly better chance of liking it, and then following through with a purchase. Not bad. Second though (and this is the bit I really dig!) I got the physical CD through the post today from Miriam and lo and behold, inside the CD cover is a little hand-written note saying “Thanks!”. How cool is that! That’s an artist engaging with the people that buy the music to the nth degree. And it adds something human into the process of buying music.

Nice one Miriam!

Twitter links:
Solobasssteve
MiriamJones
LawsonDoddsWood

The process of making music – Introduction

I had a music lesson with my old friend Steve Lawson last week while visiting the splendid Social Media Cafe. I love meeting up with Steve and talking about music and stuff – he’s a real source of inspiration. Steve has expertise in many, MANY aspects of the music business and is now extending that expertise into the world of social media interactions via the web. I’ve been a fan of his music for about 8 years or so. All round, he’s a top bloke in my view.

Anyhoo, we had this music lesson and believe it or not there was not an instrument in sight. I may have attempted to play him a track from my laptop, but in the end that didn’t work so we spent a whole hour without playing or hearing a note played. The focus of this tutorial was on the PROCESS of music making, concentrating specifically on a solo performance – whether that’s solo bass, electronica, DJing or something quite different.

Steve broke down what he had to say into several sections: impetus (the “why” in the first place), the creative process, performance and reflection. What drives us to create music? What skills, methods, inputs, processes affect us when we’re making music? While playing are we really “in the moment” and being entirely aware of what’s going on with the music, actively listening, evaluating the next notes, motifs, samples, tracks? Are we filtering what choices we make by second guessing what others may want to hear, or are we going with our own first choice? Are we prepared to react and work with our mistakes whether those are the “lucky accidents” or “the wrong thing”? Do we have sufficient technique to pull all of this off? Are we playing within our sphere of expertise or are we pushing the envelope? If the former, is that sufficient? If the latter, is that a calculated risk? Are we engaging the audience with music or are we relying only on impressing them with our technical wizardry? Is technical wizardry alone sufficient to keep the audience engaged for more than a couple of minutes? (I hope the answer to that last question is obvious!).

We then touched on Research and Development – a topic close to my heart and it seems one of Steve’s current obsessions. Thomas Edison, the famous inventor once said “I have not failed, I have simply found one thousand ways that won’t work…” Research is an activity that involves study, learning, innovation, idea generation, trial and error, finding ways that don’t work, looking for those that do.  Development on the other hand takes this information and applies it, turns the idea into reality and brings it to fruition, making it accessible to you (as the performer) and easily implemented. Sometimes the idea born in Research never makes it through the Development phase. Either the skillset isn’t there to implement it yet, or it may not be possible to implement easily in performance (it may not be repeatable). Some glitchy stuff I have tried has been like this. Using the SUS commands on the looper to build glitchy chords and rhythms. It may sound cool here at home, but I’d never be able to repeat it confidently in performance. I MAY be able to approach something close, but I’d need to be much better at reacting to the “faults” in the loop before committing to that approach. Of course, we are assuming here that live performance is the goal in all of this – bedroom performance and home recording could also be a valid goal. In those cases the ideas and doability of them are not limited to what can be repeatable in performance and the sky is the limit. But here we’re concentrating on things that could be performed – as a way of engaging others more directly in our music.

This is really just an Introductory blog to the topic. I aim to go on and expand on each of the topics as I work through what Steve taught me, and perhaps through comments on the blog folks might contribute their own thoughts.  I also plan to post a wiki to go with this series of blog posts, keeping track of the salient points of what Steve said and adding in some of my own thoughts and creative process musings so you can see where I’m at. I intend to post “work in progress” tunes to ReverbNation and / or sound snippets to this blog so that you can hear some of my R&D. I hope that sometime in the next year I might actually play live as Hank Spaniel so that you’ll get to hear how all of this waffle works out in practice.