colartz blog

Decided I would try to do something every day on Twitter, just for the hell of it. My wife had come across something to do with 6 words that you might wish to have on your gravestone (one day!), and some of the things were really good. So, as Colartz is seven letters long, I thought I would go for seven words, and call it “sevensz” - 7 letters, too, of course!

As it is only a once a day thing, I thought it would not take up too much time, and I can send it in via SMS, so that is also OK. They will all be labelled ‘7z: something or other in seven words only’, for example.

Anyhow, check out the Colartz Twitter site if interested. No doubt it will likely be boring, but there may come out the odd gem . From restraint and limitation comes invention!

Also popped into my head that is possibly a new twist on the Eno ‘Oblique Strategy’ cards. Well, maybe not .

It is possibly in the same kind of area as a Haiku, but that is based around syllables, and sevensz is around words…

Have been enjoying this book Here Comes Every Body, Clay Shirky. It is well written, entertaining, and easy to read, and offers some real insights without being overly analytical (I can’t get on with those kind of books).

It is the kind of book you can dip into and go “oh, yeah” as he helps make a neural connection or two (the “Birthday Paradox” group dynamic being an example).

I have not yet got to the end (too many other things to do), but I recommend it and I will persevere with it (whereas I am finding Groundswell much more empirical and heavy going, even though still interesting).

I finally got around to posting my 3 news songs: You Are The Reason, Boomerang and Just A Man. You hear them from the “songs page” on the colartz website. The lyrics are also there, too.

OK, so I will come clean and say it is me singing again. If you can just get past that, and imagine the songs are covered by a talented singer, then maybe you could find a way to enjoy them . Mind you, I do owe any vocal listenability at all to Melodyne, and for that I big time thank the chaps at Celemony.

2 are just me and my guitar, and on the third I play base and have used a drum riff from Cakewalk’s Session Drummer. OK, I know it is repetetive, but I never was much cop at figuring out drum lines.

Having done these, I think I am going to go and have a lie down

Hoping you enjoy them: Tip - in all cases the best bits are near the end

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I have been really happy with my Lexicon Lamba unit since posting a review of it (below), and have found that most of my problems relating to it are actually with Sonar.

What I mean there is that if I unplug the Lambda, then Sonar 7 seems to require me to go through a number of iterations (start, change audio settings, close, re-open) before it can settle down and work again (with MME or WDM). If I then plug the Lamba in again, to work with ASIO, I have to do it all over again. I cannot see why it should be so difficult. The other gripe I have with Sonar (perhaps only related to the Lambda) is that when I am using another app with the Lambad (e.g. Media player), then I get no noise out of my monitors. But, as soon as I load Sonar, I get some nasty background low level continuous whine/noise. I have no idea why.

Anyhow, I hope to upload one or two of my new efforts soon. The vocal and demo quality is still poor, but then I do not claim to be a good singer or even a good lyric writer. And it seems my playing and arrangement skills are not so hot either. Hmmm. So, why am I bothering? Go figure!

My Lexicon Lambda review (posted at Dolphin Music):

“This is a great looking unit, and broadly does what I wanted it to do. It lets me record a Mic and an instrument at the same time as a MIDI input - the reason I wanted that was to be able to record the MIDI from a Roland GR-33 MIDI guitar unit, at the same time as a direct out from the the guitar and a separate (phantom powered) mic. The bonus for me was that it also has 2 line ins, so I can record old tapes to MP3.

I intially had some big problems with the ASIO drivers. Although I could record (with Sonar), whenever I played anything back I just got bad noise. I had the same problems with MME, but I got it working with WDM. Thankfully, whatever it was now seems to have resolved itself, but I don’t know what it was I did (so I hope it does not go wonky again).

Aside from that, I found that when I hooked up my Sontronics STC-2 Mic I had to wind the Mic knob up to maximum to get a decent level, but I was getting quite a bit of noise from the Lamda the very last 1/10th turn.

I run Windows XP on a Macbook, and the installation CD would not recognise the Windows drivers - which luckily I was able to download from the Lexicon website (www.lexiconpro.com).

It is not that easy to see when the red clipping and peak LEDs comes on, as they seem pretty faint.

If you are not in the US, you can only get tech support from a dealer, not from Lexicon.

All in all, a nicely packaged and presented unit, that sits well on my desk. And, I think it is going to do the job.”

Well, I have been hard at it this last week, getting down another 3 songs for entry into the UK Songwriting contestUK Songwriting contest, which has a closing date of end June every year. I really don’t know why I do it, because i am never happy with the results of what I create, or even where i come up in the results . I guess it just provides the pressure I need to get on a finish a few things..

I am a great believer that making songs is 95% about rewrites, and rewrites, and rewrites…. and having the strength to ‘kill your darlings’ - which is how they describe the (necessary) process of whitling down ideas to only the best ones.

Anyhow, the 3 songs I put in this year are : Boomerang (a fun Indie track about how you have to ride your luck, a bit in the Hoosiers area); You Are The Reason (a song about how special someone is to you, particularly your children) [previously titled ‘You Are My Stardust ‘], and Just A Man (well, not my best effort lyrically, but I like playing it on guitar).

I will be posting the songs on my site in the next few days. These are only ever rough demos to get the song heard (and maybe then covered!), and not finished items - because I don’t profess to be able to create any final masterpiece! I figure I am old enough now that I shouldn’t don’t need to be so embarrassed about my (pretty poor) singing and lyric writing any more. All I can say is thank goodness for Melodyne, which is a FANTASTIC piece of software. Without it, I would never post anything that had my singing on it.

Right, back to work doing skins and screenshots for Mixtikl.

I keep wanting to get around to trying a technique I call “sloppy copy”. This is basically having an audio track going in the background, and using an audio to MIDI plugin to then extract some MIDI information from it. I then want to feed that into noatikl to get it to compose around that data. At the back of my mind is that I want to try this with some of my guitar work. However, I think this could also be fun with other tracks, and it would be interesting to see what noatikl could come up with!

The interesting thing about this technique is that it is really nothing at all to do with copying (i.e. a one to one process). It is more a case of indirection, where the underlying element can be used to create a one to many relationship.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to trying it….

Ever since intermorphic.com launched noatikl and liptikl in early December and got its store online Xmas eve, it has been busy moving things forward. There is always too much for it to do, and what Pete has been able to do with the software is simply incredible. Fingers crossed that some of the stuff being worked on now gets out of the labs sooner rather than later….

This new release is a big move on from V1 - because of the scripting capability and allowing MIDI input to control it.

The product now includes a “trans-generative music engine”, which simply means that the addition of scripting and MIDI input to the generative engine has given it a whole new depth. Allowing internal or external direction for a generative music engne means the output can have a much greater sense of structure imposed, and this is helpful to give the music more topology….

I am looking forward to using noatikl to generate alternative harmonisation for some of my guitar pieces. When doing a song, I always try to record my guitar to MIDI. That way, I can have a record of the notes I played, useful if I ever want to try to orchestrate it. Anyhow, I want to take one of these MIDI files and then see what noatikl can compose around it… It is just a case of me getting time to do it.

You can find out more about noatikl here: http://www.intermorphic.com/tools/noatikl/

http://www.mobilegd.com/events/mwc-2008-antix-porting-solution.html

Having seen a few demos in my time, and someone sent me a link to this one. What impressed me about this was how powerful a technology demo it was (from UK-based Antix Labs - http://antixlabs.com. A mobile version of Sim City (a well known branded game) was running on PC, and this was sent via bluetooth to a Windows Mobile phone. OK, so far so good, and pretty impressive.

The game was then bluetoothed from the Windows Mobile phone to a Symbian phone, and then played on that!! Wow!

What I found so impressive, was that this was the binary of a branded C++ game (not a Java game) that ran on 3 different platforms - yep, you heard me, the same binary!! I.e. not a different build version for the operating system. Now, maybe someone has seen a demo like that before, but I never have. You could just see how this could set the mobile gaming scene alight.