I ran across this video on youtube. Check it out! She types in a melody, and these machines that shoot balls into the air landing on a marimba, along with some wine glasses and percussion, improvise on it!
The really cool thing is you can actually go to the website here and interact with the machines playing the music! You type in your melody (which I did horribly, because I thought I was in “practice” mode, but apparently I wasn’t — I guess you only get a second to “practice”), then you see the thing playing your melody (and its own variations) live, and then they send you a video of it. How cool is that!
So, after I read a review of it by David Pogue, I went out and bought… The Flip! If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a video camera that’s smaller than my cell phone, runs on AA batteries, and has a little USB plug built right into it. It was so easy — I opened the package in the car, put in the batteries, and started taking videos before we even made it home! (And we only live 5 minutes away from BestBuy!) Then I got home, took a couple more videos, and plugged the Flip into my MacBook. It opened up a little window where I double-clicked on the Mac software, and I could immediately see the videos I had taken, and could easily save them to disk (or even trim them down first). Then I opened up iMovie on my Mac, which I’ve never used before (I don’t have iLife ‘08 yet — I have the old version.) and put together a little movie. The sound track doesn’t go with it at all — it’s just the first thing I could find that I had recorded in Garage Band (it’s me on the vocals). So about 20 minutes of editing, adding in the music, and exporting to a web-friendly size, I had this little video! It was fun. The Flip is so small, it will fit in my pocket or pocketbook, so I can take random video of things I find interesting. (Yes, this was an uncharacteristic random purchase, wasn’t it!)
Just a quick update on Mr. Fish (aka Shadow). Apparently he felt his little fishy life was complete after such a great song was written for him. He has left us to swim the fishy heavens. And for the record, I cleaned his tank last weekend just like I said I would.
I’ve recently completed a project for a friend of my mom’s. I knew years of my mom’s bragging about me would eventually come back to haunt me, and here it was — my mom’s friend, Robin, a science teacher, who had heard all about my genius, super-incredible, awesome musical talent, asked me to help her finish up some science songs she had been recording. I had just bought my new MacBook and had played with Garage Band a bit, but I was wanting a reason to play with it some more, so I agreed to help out.
It was a lot of fun, although I couldn’t use Garage Band’s loops in most cases since she had guitar, drums, harmonica, and vocals pre-recorded and mixed together already, and I couldn’t get Garage Band to really lock onto the beat. So I had to play a lot of it myself — I did keyboards (midi keyboard), bass lines (midi keyboard), flutes (midi keyboard), and some goofy sound effects through garage band. I also recorded vocal harmonies. Overall it was a lot of fun, and it came out sounding pretty good. The songs were very amusing, and educational! They cover arthropods, echinoderms, phloem, and more… And they’re very very catchy so John winds up singing them all day after I work on them.
I had thought about posting a song or two here, but they’re Robin’s songs that she intends to sell, and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to post a snippet of it. So instead, I recorded a Melinda Weathers original song, “Good Morning, Mr. Fish”. (And yes, I seriously sing the chorus of this to my fish when I feed him in the morning. And yes, I’m insane. I had to write the verse and the rest of the words this morning when I decided to record it.)
(Click the play button to hear it…)
All the instruments are coming from Garage Band. There’s drums, a bass line, piano, and some synth stuff, and I didn’t record any of it. Well, I did have to play the synth melody, but I used Garage Band’s built in musical typing (where the keys on the mac keyboard represent keys on a musical keyboard) instead of hooking up my midi cable to my midi keyboard. And I transposed the piano and bass lines to go along with my chord changes.
I gave back the condensing mic I was borrowing already, so I recorded this with my Karaoke Revolution USB headset. I’m currently pricing condensing mics since I already have a USB pre-amp and phantom power supply that Robin bought for me as a gift for helping her out, but I havent’ picked one yet so for now the USB headset did pretty well. Also I didn’t really want to spend that long on it, so I only did a couple takes and left the out-of-tune bits alone. I figure when the record companies call, they will want me to re-record in a studio anyways
So anyways, Garage Band is a lot of fun. Everyone who has a mac should try it out (It’s part of the iLife suite that comes with every new mac). I recommend the on-line iLife tutorial. It’s very easy to put pieces together and make fun little songs even if you aren’t genius, super-incredible, awesome like I hear that I am from my mom’s friends
I’ve already sent this out to a bunch of people, but I wanted to post it here because I find it so amusing. I’m afraid I identify with quite a bit of it!
