John Lagomarsino
Video · Photography · Music · Motion Graphics

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  Apparently, a vulnerability in my outdated WordPress install was probably the root of my woes, and don’t I look stupid now for not having prevented it.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.

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!)

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.

I just heard that Ellen DeGeneres is the replacement for Paula Abdul on American Idol.

This one comes from the bizarre story of a pizza delivery man who decided to use a customer’s son as ransom. If the pizza place had a jingle, this would be it.

Here’s a ditty that is at once two firsts (confusing, no?).  It’s the very first cover ditty, so sorry if you were expecting originality. This is the theme to the best children’s show to ever air.

Also, this ditty is recorded and mixed entirely on nothing but an iPhone attached to a Blue Mikey, using the FourTrack app. Kinda cool that you can now use your phone to track and mix a decent-sounding 8-layer song. I’ve got some nifty video of the recording, which I’ll post later.

I don’t even know.

One more missed connection. I really couldn’t resist this one.

EDIT: I must be illiterate or something, because the listing clearly says “Dixon,” not “Dixie,” as this ditty goes. I thought it was a strange play on words…