Posts by JT
A New Musical Dawn
Well, maybe not, but this is still pretty cool news. I just set up a new music section, and it’s actually hosted entirely by Bandcamp. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re a startup that streams, hosts, and sells (kind-of) music for independent artists.
The way my Bandcamp site is set up, you can download the Ditties, and the other random songs I’ve posted here, under the “album” called “Unfinished Business.” You can stream and download individual tracks, as well as entire albums there. And more interestingly for me, if you feel compelled to pay for any of the content there, you can. That’s right – download all my music for free, or name your own price if you wanna help out. Also, for you audiophiles, the music is available in a ridiculously varied collection of codecs and bitrates, all the way up to completely lossless.
So go poke around, and let me know if there’s any way you think I can improve the offerings over there (or even if you think I should scrap it altogether).
Lesson Learned
For those of you who may recently have been met with an obscene (and terribly-designed) spam page, or a static “under contruction” page here, my apologies. This site was hacked over the weekend, and it took some time to get it back in order. I can’t yet say for certain it won’t come back to bite me again, but I have taken measures to prevent it from ocurring again.
A big thank you to Bluehost, whose tech support seems to get even better every time I call up. I’m never on hold very long, and every tech I’ve ever spoken to there has been helpful, knowledgeable, and generally intelligent. And thank God they keep backups, because I would’ve been in real trouble without them.
In that vein, just a quick PSA. If you’re running a WordPress-powered site, make sure to a) always keep a backup of both your WordPress directory and database, and b) always upgrade quickly to the newest version of the software. Apparently, a vulnerability in my outdated WordPress install was probably the root of my woes, and don’t I look stupid now for not having prevented it. So, please, do better than I did, and keep on top of it.
Whoops
OK, so I’ve got this blog, here. And it hasn’t been touched or updated in about three months. And I’ve offered no explanation. Whoops. Simply put, life has just started getting in the way of producing these ditties every day, and it seems kind of silly to make them sporadically, since the whole game was that I needed to make one each and every day. It was an ongoing challenge, and it’s what made it fun for everyone.
So, that said, I’m not going to make the claim that Ditty a Day is dead forever. It’s just on a temporary hiatus, until I find myself with some more steady time to actually devote to making it a regular, ongoing thing again. Sorry if you enjoyed hearing the ditties – they’re still here, for your repeat pleasure, and there will probably be more in the unspecified future.
In the meantime, though, please enjoy this clip, showing just a little bit of what I have been up to recently. (And come see the show on November 7, if you’re so inclined! I’m the MD!)
Melodyne
I’m pretty sure this is the coolest, most mind-blowing thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve never used Melodyne, but evidently the public beta of the newest version is now available to existent users. The idea behind the new Direct Note Access is that Melodyne listens to polyphonic audio sources, picks apart the individual notes, and then lets you edit the whole thing in a fashion much like that of a MIDI piano roll.
This is just so cool. It also means that you can use sampled loop libraries in an entirely different way now. For instance, I don’t play the guitar, but I’ve got lots of strumming acoustic loops that I can use. However, these are loops tend to be stock chords/voicing/progressions. But apparently, you can change all that now, and use the timbre and feel of a sample and mold the pitch independently. It also means that spot-on guitar track you recorded without noticing the E string was flat is now usable again. This is blowing my mind.
Ditty a Day #30: Ellen
I just heard that Ellen DeGeneres is the replacement for Paula Abdul on American Idol.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
