So it appears that despite weeks of neglect, the old blog is still standing. Guess I should post something before the tumbleweeds start to clog up the server.
One of the reasons for the dearth of posts lately is the new toy I received for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. The M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 is a MIDI controller with a full-sized, hammer weighted keyboard. I cleaned some junk out of my office so I could set it up (on its stand) next to my computer desk. When seated in from of the iMac, the keyboard is on my left.
A little over a year ago, when Garageband was released, I immediately ordered a copy. I picked up an M-Audio KeyStation 61 from eBay. At first I played with it alot, and even posted a song. But eventually, I used it less and less.
There were a couple of contributing factors. The primary reason was that my only Mac at the time was a laptop without a permanent location, and my keyboard also had no place to live. Everytime I wanted to make some music, I had to clear everything off the family room coffee table and drag out the keyboard, laptop, cables, headphones, etc. The other factor was the keyboard itsself. I’m no virtuoso pianist (quite far from it), but I’ve played a real piano since I was a kid, and I just couldn’t get used to the plastic, spring loaded keys on that keyboard.
The new setup has fixed all of these problems. With the iMac on my desk and the keyboard to the left, everything is always setup when I want to sit down and play. And the size and feel of the keyboard have made a huge difference.
I haven’t composed/recorded much so far. I started out working on a few melodies I had in my head, but quickly found that both my piano muscles and my music theory muscles had long atrophied from lack of use. Mostly I’ve been practicing various piano music I had on hand and working through various “How to play” books that focus on fake-book style playing, refreshing my knowledge of chords, progressions, etc. The important thing is, I’m having alot of fun doing it. The composing/recording will come in its own time.
In the near future, I hope to post a review of the keyboard, Garageband 2, JamPack 4, etc. For those of you who don’t care about such things, I’ll try to get back to posting other things as well. The one down side of my new setup is that when I come sit down to catch up on my blog reading and maybe post something, it’s very easy to flip on the keyboard and make some music instead.
Having recieved an iPod for Christmas (thanks Sherri!), tonight I began updating my music library. For a number of reasons, many of my CDs are not loaded into iTunes, and so not available to my iPod. In addition, my CDs were scattered – some at work, some in my car, some here in my home office. Today I gatherered everything up at work and brought it all home.
Many are still missing. Among those that are not, I’ve found several things I haven’t seen (or listened to) for a long time. Rediscovering them has been great. I’m particularly pleased to have found my copy of the Police boxed set. Some of these songs I haven’t heard in years- like “So Lonely” from Outlandos d’Amour or “Invisible Sun” from Ghost in the Machine or so many others… Man, there’s a lot of good music in there.
Once I get the whole library up-to-date (as much as I can… I think a sizable part of my CD collection from high school/college is still back in Virginia somewhere), I need to start rating everything. Eventually I want to create smart playlists that play things I haven’t listened to in a while… more frequently for higher-rated stuff, less often for lower rated stuff. Put it all on shuffle and see what shows up.
Something else I rediscovered… I find it interesting how slow it feels to rip a stack of CDs. Even though the average import speed is north of 10x, which means 5 or 6 minute imports, I’ve been spoiled by broadband, fast processors and plentiful memory. Waiting just seems so old fashioned.
“We’re not evil.” If ever there was a great slogan, that one’s gotta be in the running. It’s the slogan of Magnatune, the open record label.
Magnatune is a record label which sells downloadable music in a number of formats, including actual CDs. All of their music is Create Commons licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike ). You can listen to everything online- every song in its entirety. You can purchase the music by the album, and decide what to pay- from $5 to $18 US, add $4.97 to your chosen price for a physical CD. Choose your price wisely, as the artists recieve 50% of every sale. $8 is the recommended price. Pricing is also available in Euros and Sterling. You can even license the music for commercial use, directly online. Choose your use type, duration, etc., and the price is calculated instantly.
Of course, the music is what really matters. I’ve listened to a number of items from the Classical and Jazz/Blues genres, and I’m very impressed. Other genres include New Age, Metal/Punk, Rock/Pop, and Electronica.
My favorite so far is the album The Depths of a Year by pianist Ehren Starks, with Kate Gurba on cello. I’m always on the lookout for good instrumental music to listen to at work while writing code. The album is described as “piano and cello jazzy new age.” The first track, “The Tale of Room 620″, is just indescribably good. Give it a listen, and look around. You’re bound to find something great. If you do, leave me a comment below with your recommendations. I’ve already got three or four albums I plan to purchase, once I’ve given them a full listen and decided on the purchase price.
Recently I wanted to move some MP3s from my work PC to my Powerbook. My Powerbook was not on the network, and I didn’t really want to connect it. I did have a 128M USB thumb drive handy, and decided to move the files in batches. But how best to collect them? I use iTunes on both machines, but iTunes organizes the files into per-artist and per-album directories. Since I was going to making a few trips (multiple batches), I didn’t want to try and copy the directories; once you run out of space, it’s a pain figuring out what was copied and what wasn’t.
Playing a hunch, I fired up iTunes on the Windows PC, and opened the thumb drive in Explorer. All of the songs I wanted to copy were in one playlist, so finding them was easy. I then selected a bunch, and dragged them from iTunes and dropped them in Explorer. iTunes Did The Right Thing and copied files onto the drive. When the drive was full, I pulled it out and plugged it into the Powerbook. I opened the mounted drive in Finder, selected all the MP3s, and dragged them onto the Library icon in iTunes. Again, iTunes copied the files… this time, into the iTunes directory tree.
A few more round-trips, and all my music was moved. With a bigger device, I could have made it in one trip. And everything Just Worked the way you would expect (and want). Very Nice.
In the days following the announcement of GarageBand, a number of websites have popped up devoted to the new product. There has already been some convergence; garagebanduser.com has joined forces with gbusers.com. Now the combined site has been rechristened MacJams.com, and will focus on mac-based music making of all types. Although they don’t seem to be linking to it yet, they do provide an RSS Feed.
The other GarageBand site I’m currently subscribed to is SonicCat, which provides an RSS feed as well. If you know of any others active sites, especially that provide feeds, please leave a comment.
GarageBand arrived today. As I alluded to previously, I had a few problems getting iLife installed, owing to my partitioning scheme. With that all resolved, I spent some time this evening playing with GarageBand. Here’s a few thoughts and observations. (Note: I also have the JamPack installed)
- GarageBand is alot of fun to play with. It’s also a very powerful app.
- Mixing loops is much harder than it looks. If you watched Steve Jobs’ Keynote, you saw Steve piece together a tune in about 5 minutes that sounded pretty good. Steve already new what loops he wanted. For every loop that will sound great in your tune, there’s at least five more that don’t.
- The categories in the “loop browser” are only partially helpful. “Relaxed” and “Intense” are a bit subjective.
- Most of the loops have a descriptive name and a number. So while it only takes a minute to sample “Rock Steady Beat 01″ through “Rock Steady Beat 04″, you’d better set aside some serious time to check out all 219 loops named “Club Dance Beat”. Again, the categories are somewhat helpful, but it can still be frustrating trying to find just the right loop. Over time, I’m sure the favorites feature will help.
- MIDI is a complicated subject. I bought a MIDI Controller keyboard on eBay, and tried it out with GarageBand. While it worked, for a long time the volume of the software instruments was very low. I need to research the features built into the controller a bit and learn how best to use it.
- There are two kinds of loops: samples and sequences (my terms; I don’t know if GB has names for them). The ‘sample’ loops are recordings of actual performances. Many of the Orchestral Strings loops are samples. Sequences, however, are pre-recorded MIDI instructions driving software instruments. Both kinds of loops and be transposed and tempo-adjusted.
- Sequence loops can be changed to other instruments.
- Multiple loops and even recordings can appear in a single track as long as they all use the same (software) instrument and the regions don’t overlap.
- To avoid making a loop-based song too monotonous I tried to use different loops that had the same instrument. This is much easier with sequence loops. Since these loops are playing software instruments, they all sound the same. You can play “Latin Nylon Guitar 01″ followed directly by “Latin Nylon Guitar 05″ (both sequence loops), and it will sound as though a single musician was playing a single lick. Sampled loops, on the other hand, can vary quite a bit. “Orchestral Strings 08″ sounds like a different group of instruments than “Orchestral Strings 09″. This isn’t necessarily bad; but is important to understand.
- Between GB and JamPack, I have 529 bass loops, 352 guitar loops, and 800 drum loops.
- There are far too many loops of things I’ve never heard of (what’s a santoor?) and far too many sythesizer loops. Not nearly enough basics, like piano blues riffs and accoustic guitar struming.
- The software instruments selection is also a bit lopsided. Way too many synthesizers. Not enough real instruments. There are some nice combo-instruments, like full horn sections for horn-stab effects, but surprising no solo versions of alot of instruments. No trumpet, oboe, french horn, clarinet, tuba, etc. Several solo saxophones are present; they sound okay but not great.
- It’s possible to change keys during a song, sort of, but it’s a bit of a pain. For example, in order to do a 12-bar blues progression (I I I I / IV IV I I / V IV I I) with a base line, I had to break up the base line into individual sections (called regions), one for each chord change. Then to actually accomplish the chord changes, you transpose each region by a number of half-steps. You have to repeat this for every loop in your song, although you can multi-select regions and transpose a group at a time.
- The copy/paste feature works well, including multi-track copy/paste. However, pasting always pastes at the current insertion point. If you are listening to your song in loop mode as you edit, the insertion point is constantly on the move.
- It’s really a lot of fun.
That’s all for now; I’m sure I’ll have more later.
I put together my first song tonight; I’m not sure that it’s finished, but I’m going to post it here. It’s called Mirage, it’s under two minutes, and around 2 meg in size. If you enjoy it, please let me know (and if you don’t, well, let me know that too).
It‘s here! More Later. Maybe.
GarageBand won’t arrive until tommorow, but the USB Midi Controller (Keyboard) I bought on eBay arrived today. It’s an M-Audio (a.k.a Midiman) USB Keystation 61. The CD contained drivers and software for OS 9, but nothing for OS X. A search of the Midiman website was not much help either; the only drivers listed for a Keystation 61 were the OS 9 drivers.
Unsatisfied, I Googled a bit. Information was scare, but I pieced together enough to believe that M-Audio/Midiman has a unified OS X driver for several of their products. It turns out I was correct.
To obtain Mac OS X drivers for the following M-Audio or Midiman products:
- Keystation 49 or Keystation 61
- MIDISPORT 1×1, 2×2, 2×4, 4×4, and 8×8
- Oxygen8
- Quattro
- Radium, Radium49, Radium61
- Sonica (firmware loader only)
- Uno
Go to the M-Audio Drivers page and search for drivers for the Radium 61. Grab the drivers labeled “M-Audio USB MIDI OS X“; at the time of this writing they were version 3.1. (OS 8/9 and Windows drivers also available). The list of supported devices above is taken from the README; I just made some of the product names more explicit to help the search engines.
To get everything working, I had to install the drivers, reboot, and the run the “Audio MIDI Setup” application in Applications/Utilities. The device then appeared, and I was able to test it from within Audion MIDI Setup (choose the test icon, press a key on keyboard, the Mac beeps) and within the Trial version of Intuem.
As I previously mentioned, I pre-ordered GarageBand (and the JamPack) last week. At the time I ordered it from the Apple Store, the “Shipping Date” was listed as “Delivery by 1/16″ – the same day iLife ’04 is scheduled to hit stores. I also got free 2nd day air shipping.
I checked my order status today. My order is listed as open, with an estimated shipping date of “on or before 1/15/04″. If it ships on the 15th by 2nd day air, I don’t see how it will arive by the 16th. We’ll soon see.
In related news, I ordered an extra 512M of RAM for my PowerBook from Crucial Monday. I got an excellent price ($138), and free second day air shipping. It shipped Monday, and will arrive today (Wednesday). Everyone said Crucial is the place to order memory for Mac; it seems they were correct.
I also bought a 61 key USB MIDI controller (Keyboard) on eBay; hopefully it’ll will arive by Friday as well. Can you tell I’m excited about GarageBand?
Update: As of 4:30pm Eastern, my Apple Store order is partially shipped. For a while, earlier today, it was listed as partially shipped, but both items were listed as open (i.e., unshipped). Now iLife ’04 is showing up as shipped via FedEx 2nd Day Service. What’s really interesting is that the FedEx pick-up scan is only about 80 miles from my home. So, they have two days, and 80 miles to go. Will they take both days? I certainly hope not. Now, when will my Jam Pack ship?
Contrary to my previous post, I will not be at the nearest Apple Retail Store on January 16 to purchase iLife ’04, including the brand new GarageBand. Why not? Because I just ordered it from the Apple Store, with delivery “by 1/16″. I also grabbed the Jam Pack.
This is my first time ordering from the Apple Store. I’m interested to see if they arrive by the 16th. I also got free shipping. Not sure what the cutoff is, but it’s more than $49… It wasn’t free when iLife was the only thing in my shopping cart.
I had considered buying the $99 49-key USB Keyboard that Apple is selling, but I’ve decided to wait and shop around a bit. After all, I’ve got nine days.