Launch of the Birthday Songs Playlist
On the morning of November 16th, I awoke to a Facebook notification that my good friend and colleague Jen was celebrating her birthday. I immediately recalled baking up a birthday song for her last year, and sure enough, Facebook issued a Memories post featuring that very video. Holy moly, what a change in my home studio in the span of a year! Sparse surroundings, less gear and gadgets. I love Then & Now comparisons in general, and this one inspired me to sing to Jen her birthday song once again, this time from the current TranSan Studio. Of course, I’m thinking: while I’m at it, why don’t I bump up the instrumentation a bit? Give it a beat, throw in some arps… generally modernize it with the help of the latest version of GarageBand on the iPad. As I said, I love checking out Then & Now stuff, so I decided to start the new video off with a look back at the old one, which transitions into a rising synth intro before the remake kicks in. Immediately you can see the dramatic difference in lighting and colour balance. The greatest feeling was getting a message from the birthday girl saying that the whole family (husband and three kids) serenaded her with the new video as they brought in the cake. I’m told that the youngest Jen-ling was more enthralled with the video treat than the star herself! I look forward to revisiting this lovely tune again for a future birthday. Perhaps in a dozen years or so I’ll have re-worked it into a fully orchestrated piece! In case you missed it on the front page, you can check out the video on YouTube. Remember to Like and Share, and if you haven’t already, Subscribe.
Whackin’ a Boom Whacker for Sampling
The new TranSan Live Replay is up on YouTube now, featuring all eight camera angles. Well, until two of those angles decided to take a hike. One camera was connected to a laptop via firewire, and the laptop decided to take a nap after a while. We checked, and indeed the power settings were set to sleep the OS after a time, but usually an active application will prevent that from happening. Since I was streaming directly to the hard drive via VLC, without monitoring the display, it would seem that VLC’s keep-awake setting didn’t apply. The other camera that took a dive long before the end of the show was suffering from a slight disconnection of the power cable. I had taken the camera off the tripod to insert the SD card, and I guess I nudged the power cable. It didn’t pop out, just pulled out a very little bit, enough to break the connection. As far as I could tell visually, the cable was connected just fine. When I checked it after the show, it did give a slight pop as it slid back into place those few millimetres. Comedy of errors. Despite the technical glitches, I had a blast experimenting with Ross’ Boom Whackers, a colourful set of tuned percussion instruments. I clipped my lapel mic directly onto the rim and got some nice, clean and powerful samples. I must say, Garage Band does make sampling quick and painless. For the second week in a row, Julie and I went through my special conversion chart to convert a TranSan fan’s name to musical notes. In this case, the name converted to just several B’s and E’s, some flat, some not. It quickly turned into a calypso-inspired pattern that gradually grew into a lovely tune I call Whackin’ and Samplin’. Watch it on YouTube now!
