The Last Candle

Here’s a pretty thing.

Notice the numbering beneath the headphones preamp. Isn’t that cute?

The pictured shiny box-thing is a Presonus FireBox, an audio-recording interface for my computer that’ll allow me to record various guitar meanderings and mishaps into a digital format. The hardware is an attractive piece of work, all brushed metal and various shades of blue, but has enough inputs to allow me to grow past the one-guitar show, if I ever get that far.

Steinberg’s Cubase LE, a recording and mastering application, came packaged with the FireBox and so far looks to be the real learning curve for a while. From a user-interface persective, take a gander at the screen capture Steinberg chose to represent Cubase on the app’s Web site.

That picture, my friends, represents a nightmare of unaesthetically-pleasing tiny buttons, fake knobs and sliders, and a unpleasant mish-mash of small text, pictures and controls in general. I’ve only spent about a half-hour within the application so far, but the nicest screen to look at is the blank, grey window of the program when no projects are open.

Not much has happened on the functionality side of Cubase, either. While I’m sure there’s a massive amount of options and flexibility beneath the POS interface — that massively multitude of options may be the interface’s demise, after all — the application looks like it might have some usability issues.

For example, scrolling up and down on the mouse wheel makes for a very fitting use for zooming in and out in any application, but within Cubase zooming is accomplished by holding down on the left mouse button and moving the mouse forwards and backwards. I’m not sure how I discovered that action for the first time, but the movement definitely took me a bit to accomodate — not intuitive.

Adding and recording to audio tracks is, at least, pretty straight-forward and simple, so I was able to put a little blues shuffle to disk within the space of a few minutes. Creating an MP3 of the track (or an “Audio mixdown,” as Cubase professionally calls it) was a little more difficult, though. In order to output the music (or “music,” in my case and playing technique) I had to select the range of audio. Selecting the range seemed unneccessary — I had only recorded about 20 seconds of guitar anyway, and Cubase probably has the punch to figure out the beginning and end of the recording tracks. The program would not be coerced otherwise, however, so I had to go about figuring out where the range selectors were located.

After twenty aggrevating minutes of poking through the interface, which included a lot of accidental zooming in and out, I discovered that 1) the range selectors are little blue arrows located in the project timeline, which makes sense, but also that 2) the left-side selector can be moved to the right of the right-side selector, which apparently creates a negative range or something that the program accepts but won’t let you export, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. Not only could you make a funky inverse range, but a range selector moved o’er into Negative Land is represented graphically by a nearly invisible blue arrow filled with black on a black background. Not only did I have to figure out how the program worked, I had to first find what I was looking for in the program.

My (admittingly very short) experience with Cubase is in complete contrast to Vegas Movie Studio, the other media creation app I use on a regular basis. Unlike Cubase’s garish appearance, Vegas is nicely arranged and very clean. More importantly, several times through the learning process within Vegas I wondered, “I want to know how to do [particular action, like scrubbing or zooming]. [Such and such mouse or keyboard action] would make sense — I wonder if that works?” Most of the time I’d attempt the action, and the hoped-for action in the application would occur. That’s an intuitive interface. I’ve read very little of the instruction or manual for Vegas (which is probably a mistake — the program probably has a lot more to offer that I haven’t seen yet) but it’s no trouble to zoom along and create some pretty swish content without fussing with the application itself. I sure love that.

I expect Cubase to be a lot of fun as well, but only after I spend a bunch of time reading instruction manuals and futzing around with the tiny text and small buttons. I’ll love it eventually, but the beginning of the relationship looks to be a little rough.

Hmm — Sony makes a music production application that appears to be very similar to Vegas Movie Studio. Hmmmmm.

Now, back to the blues shuffle.

As the months pass, the notables continue to pile up — that is, the notables entering my musical circle continue to accumulate at a frequent and happy pace.

Earlier this year I detailed that this was the most prolific year for music releases, and that has continued to date. Besides a multitude of lesser-known (but no lesser-rockin’) bands, I’ve picked up or noticed a release for each of my favorite bands; the only missing artist is Blind Guardian, who released an excellent record late last year. Even still, Nightwish has a new album coming out in two weeks, right alongside the new Porcupine Tree EP, Nil Recurring.

Besides metal releases, Pat Metheny released an album with the prodigious Brad Mehldau, a combination I was fortunate enough to see live, a performance that included the bizarre-but-beautiful Pikasso guitar. Pat Metheny is also releasing a remastered verion of Secret Story, probably his best and most popular album from his sizeable jazz catalogue, next week. Also representing the jazz genre, Bela Fleck released The Enchanted, a terrific duet album with Chick Corea on piano, a couple I was also very fortunate to see live (and at a venue just ten minutes down the street, too).

Now that I think about this year in concerts, the schedule has been excellent. I’ve missed a couple, which will unhappily include the incoming Sonata Arctica concert this Saturday — hey, the new album probably stinks live due to the numerous and overwhelming vocal overdubs anyway! — but the divine month of May brought three Porcupine Tree concerts to the area, creating the best month of live music I’ve ever had.

On the Internet side o’ the Verse, I’ve made a couple of excellent discoveries: one’s a podcast — actually, a lot of podcasts — and the other is a streaming radio station.

I listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast not for the Apple commentary and opinion but for the general silly banter from the several interesting and typically engaging hosts. (Note to Leo Laporte: I don’t think you’re hitting your expected market on that one.) At the end of each episode the hosts suggest “Mac Picks,” or what they suggest as an outstanding bit of software or, rarely, hardware in the Apple world that complements the, um, “Apple X-perience” or whatever true Apple geeks lovingly call wading in that stuff.

Having owned only one Apple product in my lifetime, a 3rd generation 10GB iPod that has kept the tunes flowing through five years and a battery transplant like a pro, I’m rarely interested in the MacBreak picks (except when the pick involves witty banter, natch). Last week’s episode was an exception, however, after guest host Andy Ihnatko recommended Magnatune, a Web-based music purchase service that also hosts a free montly or so podcast for each of its available genres.

Sounds swell, doesn’t it? The world needs more straight-up music-based podcasts, the wonderful and hop-skip-jumpy Irish & Celtic Music Podcast being the only one I’ve listened to on a regular basis. That short supply will likely change with the arrival of Magnatune, however: Magnatune offers about 50 podcasts, one for each genre, and each episode I’ve listened to so far is about an hour.

Doing a little pseudo-math and to reiterate, that’s fifty genres, at one podcast roughly monthly, for an hour of new music for each episode. That’s pretty damn fabulous, I say, even if I’m only interested in about a third of the genres. Magnatune surprisingly doesn’t have a Celtic or Gaelic-themed podcast, so the Irish and Celtic Music podcast will mesh nicely with the setlist. Besides, any content deficit can likely be reclaimed by the Woman Singing Electro Pop podcast.

Finally, a plug for Whisperings: Solo Piano Radio, a streaming radio station that plays only theremin, didgeridoo and piano ensemble pieces, with notsomuch the theremin and didgeridoo parts.

I haven’t been attached to a streaming online radio station since my electronica days about seven years ago, so falling into something like Whisperings is a little bit of a gear shift for my listening habits. I’ve been listening to the stream for three or four days, and even though I have already completely forgotten where I discovered the existence of Whisperings (thank you person, page, or entity-thing!), this station has already proven to be a great boon to my productivity and apprecation of music while sitting at the computer (read: during most of my time spent awake).

Whisperings plays what it advertises, solo piano pieces, one right after the other continuously. The guitar (or theremin) has become my instrument of choice for playing, but the piano is likely my favorite instrument to hear, for all the reasons that this radio station exemplifies. Piano-focused music has been an area of my music library that has been lacking for years, but the arrival of Whisperings allows me to catch up with all of the beautiful ivory-ticklin’ I’ve been missin’, and my re-up has started well: Whisperings is the only music — album, podcast or otherwise — that my dial’s been tuned into for extended periods since I discovered it.

— Hmm. So the last half of this post was kind o’ a big ad. I think I’ll have to make the next post a big rant against establishment (that’s right: establishment — all of it, everywhere) to rebalance the blog.

There’s not much to say before introduce a simple 16”x22” dry-erase whiteboard, so here’s a picture.

Besides the names of the Seven Samurai, it’s not too special for a whiteboard, is it? It’s white and has a vaguely specular finish. The markers have an awful chemical stink. It’s a 21st Century chalkboard.

But I like whiteboards, or rather I like a place I can throw out temporary ideas or topics or system breakdowns or silly things that I can wipe away later for another silly thing. Some of the stuff sticks, and that stuff get relegated to the ephemeral status of “project potential,” things that I might want to waste some serious time developings (and then, later, tossing out). The other 99% of the content is smudged and wiped away with a sleeve.

But that whiteboard pictured above is very limited in, say, potential: The area of the ‘board is almost three feet, and yet it does not nearly approach a span that could comfortably accomodate a single calculus problem or software engineering pre-production chart. It probably couldn’t even contain any of my awful poetry (a rare occassion, fortunately).

Besides, do you know how much a 16”x22” whiteboard costs these days? 20 bucks, easy. 3’x4’ is more than $30, and that’s still not enough space. I need something much, much larger.

So I visited Lowe’s, and I visited a webpage, and the following is the result.

Behold my 4’x8’ of whiteboard goodness, baby. (For the smartass readers, no, it didn’t come from Lowe’s with all the drawings.)

That sucker will take a chapter of calculus problems, a book of bad poetry, a full concept and semantic rendering for a double-A arcade game. Or, as can be seen, it can take a whole smattering of silly and wonderful pictures. Whenever folks visit, they stop by and put up a bit of art. It’s lovely.

Cost for this 32 square-foot construction? Materials were $22, plus a caulking gun that looks like a little sub-machine gun. Amazon’s not going to see my business on this one.

Which comes to the end question: is it sad that I am moved to constructing something only when the result has a overwhelming sense of cost-effectiveness? Probably.

During the evening of June 28th, a spirited and very fun game of Catchphrase ensued at the apartment of a couple of friends.

I have the footage to prove it.

For the curious, I’ll now detail a few aspects of the making and production of this goofy little film.

The original video was recorded on a smart little Canon SD1000 that I adore over the course of about two hours. The camera was set to take only one frame every second instead of 30 or 60 FPS, accounting for the studdering movement. The film looks pretty darn cool in any case (hey, it’s a cinematography decision!). Besides, how else was I going to record nearly an entire evening’s worth of gaming onto a memory card?

The source footage is far from perfect: the top third of the frame is basically dormant, and the camera could have been positioned better to see all players at all times. Paul is out of the frame half of the time, and Jill or Joe are usually covering up one or the other, depending on who is in the foreground. Only Anthony and I survived the bad composition.

I edited the original 1FPS footage using Vegas Movie Studio 7, which continues to be terrific for my needs, beating the hell out of my previous and very poor choice of movie editing software, Virtual Dub. No, Virtual Dub was never meant to be editing software, and the fact that I used it previously for anything more than transcoding makes me out to be a bit of a rube. Vegas Movie Studio, on the other hand, has proven to be excellent.

The original footage runs about five minutes and thirty seconds. The song I’d picked as an overlay, Runner by Susumu Hirasawa (which is available as a free free download at Hirasawa’s personal page), was about three minutes long, so I edited the footage down to that length. I don’t think I could entertain an audience with five full minutes of the original material anyway, at least not without adding a lot of digital effects and another song, stretching the original concept way too thinly.

Most of the pre-production involved finding the best clips out of the 5:30 source for the finished product; my web gallery has a scanned copy of the document used to keep track of the best clips, although I didn’t use all of them.

Over a month was spent — not continuously, of course — creating this little three-minute movie. Strangely enough, the core clips were aligned and set after just a week or two; most of the production was spent polishing up the beginning and end titles, and smoothing out the digital effects to mesh with the music more easily. A few days were spent determining how to show off Paul’s bird-flipping skills without hanging onto the frame for too long, which would break down the pace of the film, or showing the frame too quickly, which would ruin a nice little bit. The picked compromise works decently but isn’t perfect.

YouTube did a surprisingly good job synchronizing the audio to the video, which was very important in this particular movie. Previous uploaded videos required a few tries with different encoders to get the syncing correct, but this upload worked on the first try. YouTube still compresses the audio and video noticably (not surprisingly — they’ve got a lot of content to manage), but I have a personal rendering at full quality 640×480, with good sound.

• The gag image that appears in the opening titles just before the game begins is a great and goofy photo of a very bearded Paul from our Sterling apartment days, which was a few years ago. I added the Phoenix Wright image bullet as a additional gag. The appearance of the image isn’t a great choice, but I needed some transition to sting on the cymbal crash before the bulk of the music and video takes stage, breaking up the titles and the body of the film, and putting up that image was a decent fit.
• The soap bottle and soda can in the foreground were unintentional props (both resting on the kitchen sink, which was directly behind the camera), but worked out really well in defining the space when the kitchen light is turned on during the drink break.
• The blue vase-thingy that appears briefly during the beginning of the film was a big candle holder (I think) that was promptly removed, having constantly been in the way of line of sight among us. Consider that tidbit a really sucky Easter egg.
• At 53 seconds Joe notices he’s sitting in front of the camera. That wasn’t a problem, but he thoughtfully moved a little to the side.
• Paul remembers flipping Anthony the bird, but he doesn’t remember why. He sure looks pissed about something.
• Jill and Joe switch places later in the game session to change up the teams, not to appease the filming. Looks good on the tape, though!
• Paul and I get into a small boxing match during the course of the game, but I’m not gonna say when it happens. Tee hee!
• Finally, the film’s title is a mash-up of Catchphrase and Paprika, the latter being the recent Satoshi Kon film scored by Hirasawa. Chaser, the song in Catchphrika, song wasn’t used in the film but is similar to another tune, Chaser, that was.

Catchphrase is a really fun game. If you want to get a sample of the madness that entails a typical game for us, I tumblelogged a clip picked out of an audio recording from a more recent session.