http://tangentialcold.com/ Tangential Cold: A Note or Two en-us TangentialCold tcRSS beta © blog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://tangentialcold.com/images/tancold.png http://tangentialcold.com/ http://tangentialcold.com/ Dave Shot First is the website of a guy doing an online podcast drama called "The Unbelievable Origin of Superspiff and the Toothpick Kid". He contacted me about some of my Creative Commons music and so the song you hear at the end of each podcast is actually me. His podcast drama is in the super-hero noir genre. The episodes aren't long, so take a listen and see if you like them. They are in order though, so if you don't want to be completely lost, start with #1. You can start with episode 5 though as that's a stand-alone, but you'll want to listen to #1 before continuing with the series. Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:14:00 -0700 Composer Journal Entry http://tangentialcold.com/ This has nothing to do about nothing, but I saw it on Dave Lartigue's page. Here are the rules. Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with your picture. So here ya go: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:09:04 -0700 Composer Journal Entry http://tangentialcold.com/ I should probably just write this in an email to my wife because surely she's the last one visiting my page still. At any rate, I recently got a new computer. It's a 24" iMac and I love it. So I installed Cubase 4 (which I hadn't touched in half a year) and installed all the updates. W00t. Then I installed some updates to my Firewire 410 audio interface and hooked it up to my Kurzweil PC88MX and it worked. It worked correctly. Right off the bat. Previously I had MIDI issues and I wasn't able to fix it, but apparently a new firmware update to the audio interface was all I needed. And here's the kicker. Each apple iMac comes with an Apple Remote. It's a little remote control mostly used to control volume and playback for movies and such. At any rate, Cubase supports it. So I can sit across the studio at the keyboards and remotely tell the app to start or stop recording. Now THAT is convenient. Also, in my studio, I've recently added some Roland VDrums which I purchased off of a friend who was moving out of state. The end result is that it's like falling in love with making music again. Composing again. And if this wasn't enough, Sophia is now taking piano lessons and has been doing her own compositions in Garage Band. So take notice. I'll be upping my own music as well as that of Sophia soon (for wildly fluctuating values of 'soon'). Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:42:53 -0700 Composer Journal Entry http://tangentialcold.com/ I've always been a fan of hacks and mods. Some of my favourite websites are dedicated to making hardware do things other than originally intended. Now we have a group of folks using iPhones and a Nintendo DS creating music. They call it iBand and it's worth checking out. It sounds pretty good considering some of the limitations in both software and hardware. Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:58:26 -0800 Composer Journal Entry http://tangentialcold.com/?SID=17 [September 29 2008] First track with my new iMac. This was done using Cubase v4. I tried to keep it feeling natural, so I turned off quantization and did the piano part in three seperate complete takes and just chose the best one of the three. The drums were triggered using my Roland VDrums and the bass-line was just me on the keyboards. Creative Commons Licensed Music http://tangentialcold.com/?SID=16 [July 14, 2006] First track with my new MacBook Pro. It's also the first track in a long time that I do not play any actual instruments (sad to say). Part of that is because I wanted to get my feet under me musically. I had not seen the new version of Garage Band and I wanted to take it for a spin. This is the result. The drums are canned loops. The bass is done as a virtual instrument and I did the midi by hand (ie: note by note). You can see a screenshot of garageband in action in the journal. Creative Commons Licensed Music http://tangentialcold.com/?SID=15 [April 9, 2006] For my wedding aniversary I got a Bodrann (a type of Irish frame drum). My studio had been dormant for many months and I just hadn't the time to work on some musical ideas I had. When I got the drum though I really had some ideas with what I wanted to do and made the time to do them in. I did this piece, end-to-end, in about 3 hours. It was fast because I limited myself to 1 drum and 1 piano. I cheated just a little bit because I used a couple of bass guitar samples. Other than that, all the drumming is me on 1 drum. It doesn't quite have the start I want, but I'm not displeased with the way it came out over-all. Creative Commons Licensed Music http://tangentialcold.com/?SID=14 [April 2004] My first crack at using my upgrade to Cubase SX. All my other Cubase endevours were done on the PC with v5.1 VST. I used some simple kit loops from GarageBand and then layered everything else up in Cubase. I really wanted this track to feature some vocals, but when I completed the bassline, I couldn't for the life of me, come up with anything to actually say. So the track meanders a bit more than I care for, but I am pretty happy with the mix. I think I did a far better job with compression and EQ in this track than most of my other tracks. Creative Commons Licensed Music