Category: In the life

  • It’s about rescuing the ones you can.

    Many of you know we sup­port and foster for CaliC­an Res­cue. This short video helps explain why.  

  • Goodbye Apple. Hello Alberta School of Business!

    I guess it’s about time I men­tion it broadly, rather than simply hint at it or just let a few folk know. As of the end of the month, I’ll be leav­ing my very cool and amaz­ing world-class fam­ily at Apple retail and join­ing the team at the Alberta School of Busi­ness at the Uni­ver­sity of…

  • Lesson One: Major Scale

    Ok, this may seem a bit weird to reg­u­lar read­ers of my blog, but I’m going to be archiv­ing my course­work in my Berklee/Coursera pro­grams on this blog. Per­haps someone else will get some value out of it, or offer hints or sug­ges­tions for improve­ments. Either way, it’ll make it a very easy ref­er­ence to me…

  • (TYPE A OR B) WeeklyBeats9

    Weekly­Beats sub­mis­sion for week 9. I may have gone over the top on this one. Intro is very heavy handed. Exper­i­mented with the new Z3TA+ synth for iPad, as well as the cur­rent stable; Thor, Sun­r­izer­XS, Nave, and a little Magel­lan. Lots of pans. Some com­pres­sion. A big exper­i­ment in many ways.… I hope you enjoy!…

  • WeeklyBeats7 — Cold Night

    Cov­er for my latest sub­mis­sion to Weekly­Beats 2014. Wanted to go for an atmo­spher­ic sound again, some­thing more ambi­ent. Maybe this worked. Maybe not, but it came out as a com­plete unit. Also tried stick­ing to a small ‘band’. In this case used instru­ments from SampleTank: Blue Phaser elec­tric piano, Xpander Phat synth pad, Cos­mic…

  • Cool Thing: A browser based Theremin

    Well, it’s not really a Theremin but more of a sound toy. Yes, it’s a great dis­trac­tion and some­thing to piqué the curi­os­ity of your cube­mates. HTML5 based, it’s a very cool imple­ment­a­tion. The author states he’s work­ing on an update that will allow you to play along with your own music.. cool! Check it…

  • WeeklyBeats5 — The Conversation

    My latest sub­mis­sion to Weekly­Beats 2014. Had a lot of tech­nic­al chal­lenges with this one. Slower beat required more con­sid­er­a­tion of instru­ment selec­tion and place­ment. Also had to get vari­ous samples to sound ‘good’ at this beat and dis­covered the mud­di­ness that can be intro­duced by tweak­ing the sample fre­quency. Not a great tune, but…

  • Setting up the Gadget

    In my pre­vi­ous post I talked about the Gad­get synth suite by Korg. Well, I kinda flailed around until I got some­thing I liked. Per­haps I should have watched this You­Tube video on it before flail­ing and I may have made bet­ter progress. Learn from my mistake 😀

  • Gadget and Claire

    This week’s Weekly­Beats cre­ation — I had no idea what I’d be doing this week. Then Korg went and released the cool Gad­get app for the iPad and I knew I’d be using it. A few hours later, some futz­ing around in Gar­age­Band for the drumkit, gui­tars and mix, and it’s done. Thanks to my drum­mer…

  • Flightline

    The latest image for an upcom­ing com­pos­i­tion exer­cise with Weekly­Beats. It’s fun to make the music AND envi­sion an album cov­er for the tune. Image cap­tured with my iPhone and edited with my iPad. Flight­line should be is live on the WeeklyBeats.com site Janu­ary 12th around 5pm MST now.

  • Tonight’s Project

      Christ­mas Present. Met­al Earth 3D laser cut Atlantis mod­el. Fun to assemble.

  • New Pandemic scenario covers 2013 events

    Cool! The developers of Pan­dem­ic have freely released a slight mod / scen­ario to their amaz­ing coöper­at­ive board game Pandemic. Scen­ario 2: … cov­ers one of the more not­able events in the US this year: the Gov­ern­ment Shut­down. It intro­duces some new ele­ments and changes the way you play Pandemic. Will you be able to save…