If you have visited this site before you will have noticed that I have recently changed the design to The Morning After, which after a lot of research I found to be, together with Arthemia, one of the best free Wordpress themes around.

The only thing I wasn’t very happy about The Morning After is that unlike Arthemia, the automatic thumbnail generation in The Morning After wasn’t complete. Therefore, since I had some experience setting up other blogs here and here I decided to create a customized version using a script called TimThumb which works very well for automatically resizing images to create thumbnails in Wordpress. The advantage is that now all thumbnails are created automatically, including the ones for the featured and latest post.

Just download the zip file with the modified theme from here. The folder named “scripts” is where the TimThumbs script is stored. Once you’ve copied the files to your Wordpress installation you must make this folder and its subfolders writable, some people recommend using 777 ftp file permissions but I find my installation works fine with 755. In order to make the thumbnails work you have to create a custom field named “thumb” and give it a value of the full path to the image you have uploaded.

Finally, a little tip for the correct visualization of the Thumbnails. If you go to the wp-content/uploads folder in your wordpress installation you’ll notice that when you upload a file it is stored in the original size and 3 more sizes, each one is easily recognized by the size information appended to the file name, like “…/mypicture-300×200.jpg”. I usually copy the path from the link from the wordpress writing window but if you use one of the resized pictures Timthumb will stretch it to make the latest post thumbnail and it will look bad. To make sure this doesn’t happen just remove the “thumb” custom field size information from the picture path to “…/mypicture.jpg” this will ensure that TimThumb will use the original image as the source for the thumbnail generation.

The start window has some buttons from where we can load kits, save a project and export. If we click on the upper left corner button a little popup window comes out. The first one is used to navigate between the different sections of the program, the one on the lower left corner are the song controls, with play, stop and tempo buttons.

First thing we do is in the Home window press the Load button. That takes us to a screen where we select a sound kits, there’s plenty to choose from ranging all sorts of styles, from Hip Hop, Drum’n Bass, Funky, Jazz, etc. There are also artists’ kits and with the help of a software called BeatPack that we can download from the company’s website for free we can import our own kits. Each kit is limited to 16 sounds what somewhat limits the possibilities of the application.

The Pad matrix is very intuitive to use

The main windows from where we are going to work are called Pads and Sequencer. The first one shows a nice matrix of 16 buttons with a graphical style that imitates an Akai beatbox and makes it very intuitive. You press and it sounds, easy. The responsiveness is good and if you press play and record we’ll hear the metronome and we can start creating loops immediately.

The pattern sequencer

Once we are satisfied with our first loop we stop and head to the Sequencer window. This Sequencer has two levels of resolution, a pattern and a note one. The one we see first is the pattern sequencer. Initially it will contain our only pattern and we can change the loop settings to control the length of the song. For each bar just pressing on the same row as a pattern will switch it on or off to copy it across the song. By clicking on the first box of a pattern row we’ll zoom in to the note sequencer and from there we’ll be able to edit the 16 tracks in that pattern, sound by sound and to delete or add new notes according to the quantize level. Now, if we want to have slightly different versions of the same pattern we only have to click on the bottom popup button bar select “pattern edit” and “duplicate pattern”. That’ll create a new pattern track that from the main sequencer window we’ll now be able to see and edit.

Let’s go back to the Pads window. Now that our song is taking shape now we’ll want to do a bit of mixing and FX. On the left side there’s a number of control buttons. From here the first thing to do is choose the pattern we want to edit by pressing the “pattern” button and locating the one we’re interested in. Then on the “mixer” button we can select any of the sounds and adjust the volume and pan and very importantly, the output bus, by default all tracks are sent to the FX 1 bus. There are only 3 buses to choose from the main out, FX 1 and FX 2, so this is somewhat limited.

Pressing on the upper left button the popup menu appears and we head to the FX screen, which is divided in two identical halves. The left side is for FX 1 and the right one is for FX 2. By clicking on the bypass button we’ll activate the effect. We have no way of changing the order but the available effects sound good and are fun to use. There’s a delay, an EQ, bitcrusher and a filter.

From the pitch editor we can create simple melodies

Melodies, let’s say we have an amazing rythm track and want to add a little melody. Just create the base pattern on the sequencer or with the pads and then go to the sequencer window, click on the pattern editor and on the lower popup control choose “step editors” and click on “pitch” in the following choice of buttons. Now we’ll be able to control the semitones from the root note we want each note to sound like. We won’t be writing a symphonic orchestra arrangement this way but for electronic music bass lines and simple melodies it should be fine.

Export, now from the upper popup menu let’s select “home” and there first “save project” and then “export”. That’ll give us the option to export as a .wav or a Midi song and save it locally in the iPod/iPhone. Next with the help of the Beatpack tool we’ll be able to retrieve it to our computer.

Conclusion, I think this is to date the most powerful tool to make serious music in the iPod/iPhone. Its interface takes full advantage of the touchscreen. The kits are good and for the price it would be worth to buy this just for the sounds. If we add a sequencer and pad controls then it is a clear choice.

However, there’s loads of room for improvement. I would be delighted to have it include some simple synth to make bass lines and melodies with and a few more FX sends and even insert effects with more effects to choose from like compression, reverb and distorsion. The biggest inconvenience to stop me from using it more is the choice to only export to a stereo .wav file or a .mid file. I’d love to have the possibility to do a multitrack export to quickly add it to our favourite sequencer. The only option we have is to download the drum kits to our computer and use the MIDI export, takes a bit more work but is more flexible.

All in all a highly recommended music tool.

Below I’ve posted an audio example song just a few bars long that I created as I was learning to use this tool.

Download audio file (20091029 – any given day.mp3)

I love reading books in the iPod touch. It had always been quite annoying to try to read books in the laptop so I mostly used it to read nonfiction books such as technical books that not necessarily have to be read from start to finish. One of the first things I did with my iPod was investigate into which was the best software to read pdf’s and ebooks.

I installed two:

First, Stanza, a free app that comes with a great online library and is linked to the Project Gutenberg and therefore we can downloads thousands of classic books for free straightaway. It is also linked to other online bookstores where we can buy loads of books.

The second one was a PDF reader, GoodReader, which was for a limited time offer of $0.99 was an irresistible temptation and works like a charm. It even gives you the possibility, if the pdf formatting allows it, to extract the text from the current PDF page into text so that GoodReader makes the text formatting perfectly fit the iPod screen, The navigation is easy with the touch screen.

Last friday I went to the coach station in Puebla to take a coach to Acapulco for the weekend. Yes, nice . I made the reservation on the phone and they gave me a code to get the tickets once at the station. Usually I would have used my mobile phone for this but this time I had my iPod and was eager to use the Evernote application. Evernote is an very good application for storing all sorts of notes and I recommend to everyone.

So I created a new note with the iPod app and saved it as one of my favorites by pressing the little star to the left of the title. I made sure that the note was listed in the favorites, which according to Evernote documentation that forces the note to be saved also locally and therefore accessible without a connection. Once at the queue just before it was our turn I pulled out the iPod to check the code, went to the favorites and instead of the code all I could see was the typical “loading” sign of a turning circle just like the one you get in your browser while a website is loading. Thanks to the people from the coach company they let us board just using my id without a problem but what if that information had been more important? I’ll have to find a reliable application instead of evernote, don’t want to be left without my notes everytime I’m offline. Just beware of using Evernote offline for important information.

Quite predictably, as soft synths became popular and computers more powerful there’ve been many attempts to emulate the sound of the Minimoog. Some better than others. The ones I had used before are the Arturia Minimoog V and the GForce Minimonsta. Both are excellent and sound great but what just I discovered is that the MinimogueVA is my favourite and it is free. Yes, completely free. I’ve never used a hardware Minimoog so I can’t really compare it to the original but since I have a soft spot for vintage synth emulations and I’ve played a lot with my hardware Korg MS-10 all I can say is that I love the MinimogueVA. It is lightweight in terms of space, requirements and processing power but is a monster in terms of sound. It even comes with 128 excellent preset sounds. I also want to thank its creators Richard Brooks, Glen Stegner and Gunnar Ekornås for their excellent work.

Note, if you feel like creating your own sounds or editing the existing presets the FAQ section of the MinimogueVA website is where the controls are explained. However, if you’re interested in learning about the original Minimoog you can download the original Minimoog manual and some sound charts from here.

I’ve read in some blog that it’ll let me use it from here without the VPN for like a couple of weeks and then I’ll have to either use the VPN again. If that doesn’t work I’ll setup a VPN server at home remotely.

My first impression is amazing. I first did a search for Oasis but nothing came up but then I searched U2 and a whole list of songs showed, played one. Then I searched for Radiohead and as we speak I’m listening to Pablo Honey full, in excellent quality as far as I can tell with my 12€ earphones! This is awesome!

Why did it take so long for the record companies to think of this service?

That’d mean having to remix the whole song in a very tight deadline. When I first made that song two years ago I didn’t know a great deal about mixing and was never happy with the results and always wondered how my old songs would sound now.

That project was originally created in Apple Logic Pro. However, as I’m working away from home all I had was a laptop, a basic out of the box Dell I bought a couple of months ago with Windows XP which I’ve never used for music related stuff. I managed to get the master files and after a quick internet search found a sequencer I had already investigated but never got round to use: Reaper.

I only had two days to finish this project:

• The first day I installed Reaper. The interface reminds that of similar products so as it was very intuitive I started grabbing the files and putting them to separate tracks and saved the project.
• The next day I put the original song on a separate stereo track and used a spare track to mark the different parts of the song as “Verse 1″, “Chorus”, etc and with a little patience I started reconstructing the original song and tweaking the levels a little. I felt that the song was lacking a lot in texture as I used a few guitar amplification simulators in the original mix I downloaded an Amplitube 2 demo and used it mainly on the guitars and the B3 solo.

In the end all I used was Amplitube, a bit of compression, reverb, delay and some tracks grouping. Reaper did an excellent job in rendering the song. The built-in compressor and reverb plugins behaved remarkably and the overall result can be heard below together with the original mix. To monitor the mix I used my 10 euros Sony earplugs that I use for my MP3 player. I’m not claiming that this is an awesome mix, but good results depend more on our ears than on how much we’ve spent on the equipment.

All in all it took me approximately less than 5 hours. You can check the results here:

Now’s The Time Of Your Life (Instrumental Remix)

Now’s The Time Of Your Life (Original Mix)

Three factors where key to this:

• A tight deadline, I set myself two evenings to do this job. The first one to install the sequencer, give the manual a quick read and dump the files from the DVD into separate tracks. The second evening was the reconstructing the song from the samples and the mixing.
• Lack of choice. This can be an advantage. I concentrated on getting results instead of complaining about not having all the tools I wished I had.
• Relying on my ears, I didn’t try to copy the exact sound as that would’ve been impossible given the limited equipment and that I was not entirely happy with the original mix. Instead I tried to remix it and create a nice sound. I didn’t even use EQ. What I learnt from last year’s course was that the most important part of the system we work on is our ears.

BTW Reaper is a very good sequencer, I haven’t properly had the chance to test it thoroughly but it’s very promising. Stable and sounds nice.

I tried again the next day. However, that time I was able to add all the tracks I needed. This is how I found out that the parameter Max. Number of Audiotracks can be modified at any time but is only taken into effect after restarting Logic.

Then I discovered ZoneScreen. It’s a free Windows software that installs a virtual display driver in your Windows PC that can be selected from the “Display properties” dialog. I’ve tested it with Windows XP SP2 and worked without any issues.

With this software the task of extending the windows desktop into another system, like Mac OSX or Linux is simple using a trick. These are the steps:

1. Enable Zonescreen virtual driver in the source Windows PC to extend its desktop into the virtual screen created by Zonescreen
2. Start some VNC software, like RealVNC, in server mode. This will start sending over the network the complete screen information, even the part that is not currently visible
3. In the destination computer, the one that acts as the additional screen, start a VNC client, such as RealVNC (Windows) or Chicken of the VNC (OSX)
4. Scroll to the virtual part of the screen created by ZoneScreen’s driver. Done