melinthropy

I bought the new iLife when it came out, mainly so that I could try out the new GarageBand.  Sure, it has some other cool features, such as the auto face recognition in iPhoto, but I don’t take that many pictures, so I haven’t played with it much.  Anyways, one of the things in the new GarageBand that I was excited about was the Artist Lessons you can purchase for $5 each.  The Artist Lesson is where a well-known artist teaches you to play one of their songs on piano or guitar.  (There are also basic lessons for piano and guitar that are free with the new GarageBand, but I haven’t looked at those yet.)  I picked the Norah Jones “Thinking About You” advanced piano lesson.  Here’s what it looks like:

As you can kind of see, Norah walks you through each part of the song, playing and explaining the basic chords. The verse is cut into three different pieces, each with 3 or 4 different chords.  The next section goes through the chorus, and the last few sections talk (briefly) about soloing and embellishment.  

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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.

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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!

Weird Al’s White and Nerdy video

(This is higher res than the youtube version. I got it off Weird Al’s official site.)