I can’t say enough about what Kutiman has brought to the world stage. For those who haven’t watched his ground-breaking video album: Go watch it immediately!
Kutiman – Thru You
This is incredible. I mean, the music – stylistically speaking – is nothing new, but the approach is earth-shattering!
These are not professional musicians, most of them are just people doing what they love and posting it for the world to see. Now they have a voice through Kutiman’s work.
I love it! I want more! That said, I got me some video editing software and I’m going to hit the lab and start playing with ideas.
Beardyman said it best: “This is the new sound!”
OK, ReWire has been been around for ages. Fine. I get it, I’m a Johnny-Come-Lately. Whatever. This is both a rant and a rave.
RAVE: I’m using Logic 8 and Reason 4 together in a recent song for my yet-unnamed super secret music project. Overall, I am very happy with it. I have a set of badass patches that I have previously only been able to use within Reason. Specifically my fine-tuned custom drum patch that I use to make scratch tracks come alive.
So my process for drums would be, for example:
- Write out the drums in MIDI using my sequencer and facsimile drum samples.
- Export the MIDI.
- Import the MIDI into Reason.
- Rewrite some of the MIDI by hand to map rolls and accent beats to the appropriate keys
- Save the file to the project DIR.
- Export the audio from Reason
- Import the now-pimpy drum scratch back into the sequencer for instant badassery.
So in that respect, ReWire saves me a lot of hassle, especially if I jump the gun and do that whole process preemptively before the song is fully incubated.
Here is something ReWire fails me on:
RANT: I just want to be able to open a project and go. With ReWire, I have to open a project, then open the rewire application, then open the song file in the ReWire application, reset the tempo (because Reason is too dumb to remember that I keep telling it the correct tempo) and THEN go. Bit of a pain in my ass. But, because the drum samples I use within Reason are so spectacularly badass, I don’t want to reprogram them within Logic.
So.
I like ReWire, but I think it fell short of my hopeful mark. Is it impossible to send openapp, openfile, closeapp commands from the host application?
ALSO…
Maybe this is just something to do with my own lack of knowledge with Logic 8, but why can’t I use Logic’s sequencer to control Reason’s tracks? I have two sequencers going side-by-side… and while I love Reason’s MIDI sequencer, it makes more sense to me to have all my project data (audio and MIDI) housed in one sequencer.
I’ve been away awhile, tinkering. Now I’ve decided to change the tune of my blog and scrap most of the old posts. I’m not cutting-edge enough to write a successful coding blog, and I’d rather not sit idly. So, from now on my brain dumpings on this blog shall be primarily music-geek related — that is, I started up a huge new musical project and I’m going to blog about it as religiously as I can, in as many nerdy ways as I can. =)
Okay, I like Ubuntu… or at least I did… well, I still do… it’s complicated. I like all the new features of Hardy Heron, but it seems to come at the price of performance. I can almost go so far as to say my Dell C400 running OpenSUSE 11 outperforms my desktop running Hardy Heron.
My laptop is a Pentium M @ 1.2 ghz w/512mb RAM. My desktop is an AMD64 @ 2.2 w/1.5gb RAM.
WTF.
… and don’t get me started on when I had HH running on my laptop. It was totally useless for just about anything useful. Not even running XFCE could save the day.
That said, I’m downloading Linux Mint with high hopes — but not expecting miracles, as it’s based on Ubuntu.
I started a github project for those of you following the SASS Blueprint Grid.
SASS Blueprint Grid
Just reading about HAML 2.0. Man. I wish I wasn’t packing up for a move. I wanna play with it! Suffice it to say, I’m more of a SASS junkie than a HAML fiend, and the new SASS 2.0 features alone are enough to make me salivate.
Mix-ins is by far my favorite new feature in SASS 2.0. Now you can write chunks of reusable code:
=clearfix
display: inline-block
&:after
content: "."
height: 0
clear: both
visibility: hidden
* html &
height: 1px
… And place it within whatever rule you like
#sidebar
+clearfix
border: 1px solid black
Talk about leaner, meaner and more productive. Holy crap!
I’ll be rejiggering the SASS grid generator in SASS 2.0 in the next few weeks. I also have a new SASS project underway for when I have more time, SASS 2.0 will play an integral part in making it all work… without tipping my hand too much, it involves color schemes.
I have extended my initial SASS grid to work with the Blueprint grid library. Now I can leverage the Blueprint grid in a completely SASSy way.
Please refer to Blueprint CSS for instructions and tutorials on how to use the grid.
Feel free to download, use, distribute and modify my work as you like.
[dm]2[/dm]
I just noticed this and thought it was more noteworthy to my blog than to Twitter;
If you go to the non-www westernunion.com, it does not load. It just sits there and eventually times out at the DNS level without sending a 404 message. This is by far one of the worst cases of poor canonicalization I’ve ever seen. Obviously it’s not hurting their ranking, but still — I would be horribly embarrassed if I was the website manager.
Trying out Microsoft Live Writer for blog posting now. So far it hasn’t borked my shiny green W3C validation, so maybe Microsoft has scored two points with me today. First OneNote, now Live Writer, and I’m working on some design and front-end projects for a Microsoft employee group using SharePoint.
I guess I should stop bashing MS, they’re really trying to dig themselves out of the hole. Vista really didn’t help, but if you ignore the glaring mar, they’re pushing out some pretty darn cool applications. So I will begrudgingly give a hat tip to Microsoft, after years of sucktitude, they are finally coming around.
The right tools for the right job, I suppose. *grumble*
Since my primary use of Evernote is to jot down music ideas while I wait for something else to process, I’ve decided that it’s too many steps needed to use Evernote effectively. Until a direct audio recording and playback plugin is developed, it’s pretty clunky to record in Adobe Audition, save the file, open the folder then drag+drop to Evernote. I’d rather just press a button to record, then move on… especially since I’m usually doing something else when music ideas come to me.
It was a natural progression to go to Microsoft OneNote as audio recording is one of its main features. I can put as many ideas on one ‘page’ as I like, which is especially useful to me as I might come up with several variations on the same theme in one setting. I do this quite often.
OneNote also has text-within-image recognition and indexing, though I’m wondering how Evernote and OneNote stack up against each other on that front. Evernote was able to recognize handwriting fairly easily, and while I haven’t done any comparison, the demo of text recognition in OneNote only shows computer fonts being recognized, which doesn’t impress me.
I’m not sure whether I will switch over entirely or keep using Evernote for textual notes and to-dos etc. I’d much rather keep all my notes in one place, but seriously… Evernote rocks the kazbah as far as search and tags.
