While Debbie sat in the kitchen marking exam papers yesterday afternoon, I sang a song into Garage Band. Then I drew some very rough pictures with a biro. Then I put them all together into a video.
I’d been working on this for a while. I finished by adding the vocals, when I realised you could plug a Rock Band USB microphone into a Mac, and it would work.
I’ve thought for a while that Christina Aguilera’s song deserved a fast, loud, and slightly caustic rock version, and I finally got round to finishing one.
I must give credit to Clem Snide for their slower alt-rock version. Mine is faster and more dissonant. One influence is the faster old Placebo songs, which is why the vocals are distorted they way they are (also to save my blushes).
I’m sure lots of people have done similar - I’ve deliberately not sought them out.
All my own work, except for the basis of the drum patterns, which are Apple loops, modified to fit the song.
The video’s cobbled from pictures found among the tubes, along with a few personal friends.
I have downloaded an album that excites me enough to blog for the first time in ages.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was released in 1973, the same year I was born. It certainly wasn’t my parents’ kind of music, so I wasn’t exposed to it.
When I started paying attention to music, it was pop; Smash Hits fare; and Smash Hits certainly didn’t want anything to do with a bunch of boring old middle class hippies from 10 years ago.
Then later on, as I drifted into whatever John Peel told me to like at the time, it was either hip hop, electronica or punk-derived indie that I listened to. All of these were in stark opposition to what Pink Floyd stood for in my mind.
So I listen to the original Dark Side of the Moon with hostility. I’m a bit mellower about it nowadays, but I still balk at the tempo, the “soulful” solos, the gospel backing vocals, the saxophones… Perhaps these were OK in 1973, but ever since they’ve been a grating cliché.
But! It has some great songs on it, and I know that because of the Easy Star All Stars’ magnificent cover version of the entire album.
Now the Flaming Lips, with their friends Stardeath and the White Dwarfs, Peaches and Henry Rollins, have released their own version. I found the link to iTunes here. I think it’s incredible. I have to admit I followed that RapidShare link first. But it’s good enough that I subsequently bought from iTunes.
What I love about it is that it’s so raw. It’s fairly obviously recorded as a live session, rather than a carefully controlled set of overdubs. There’s excitement in the performance. Notes are fluffed, timings are loose, it’s organic and beautiful.
I particularly love Money, in which a synth sub-bass loses its tuning as the song goes on, playing in unison with the guitar that’s doing the main riff, drifting in and out.
I’ve not enjoyed an album this much for ages.
We are currently enjoying the beautiful Cape peninsula of South Africa. I’ve been blogging offline (that is, writing a diary into Notepad++), and I’ll be gradually transferring that into a proper blog, which you can find here at our travel blog pages.
Enjoy!
Did I mention we went to Mexico over Easter.
No? I must have done, surely?
Well anyway, I was on the beach looking for a specific song on my iPod, which I didn’t find. What I did find was an incredible ska version of the Third Man theme, which had been loitering on there unnoticed, nestled among the other stuff on the Trojan Ska Boxed Set.
I kept wanting to play it to people (without actually approaching them physically bearing a CD or shoving earphones in their ears), so I finally got around to bunging it on YouTube with a carelessly thrown together video.
The Third Man theme holds a weird place in my heart. I saw the film in the Electric Cinema when I worked there. That music gets into your head. Then I heard it several times in Japan, where it’s a common choice for lifts and upmarket department stores, which is pretty surreal.
Look, a blog post!
But it’s not a proper one. It’s just solicitation for sponsorship, because we’re doing the Two Castles Run again, like a pair of idiots.
Here’s the link, in case the widget up there doesn’t work: http://www.justgiving.com/jhdp_2castles2009
Conservatory Daruma - (Flickr user ukslim).
The fact that both eyes are filled in tells you that a wish came true.
Leamington needs a Mexican restaurant. Yes, it already has one — Chico’s — but last time I checked it wasn’t very good. I wish them well, and a little competition would surely spur them to improve.
In the meantime, we felt conflicting emotions when we saw that Tarkos (nee Tarsus) kebab shop had closed down, to be replaced by Salsa, a Mexican takeaway. Tarsus was the default kebab shop when we were students. Tarkos made fabulous donners, but Sakaraya is closer to us and does an excellent chicken kebab, so we hadn’t given them much custom of late. But a Mexican takeaway! New dining opportunity!
On Friday, we resolved to try it out. We walked over, rather than phoning for a delivery, and ended up ordering nachos grande, some spicy lamb meatballs with rice, and a beef chimichanga, all to share.
Everything was delicious. The sauce with the meatballs was especially good. We had been cautious not to order too much (with Chinese and curry, it’s easy to end up with way too much food). In fact on this occasion we could have managed more, so perhaps a starter each and some side dishes would have been appropriate.
All in all then: good news.
Then, on Sunday, we peered at an A4 notice taped to the inside of the premises opposite our house. “Casa Rico Mexican Takeaway, opening soon”. They’re like buses, I tell ya. I hope they’re successful enough that someone expands into a sit-down restaurant.
Remember ambient dub? ‘course you do!
Now I come to think of it, I should have strapped a couple of mini maglites to my ears.
So in my previous post, I explained how my Mac Mini died, just as I was feeling proud of my neat desk area.
I bought it in 2005 when they had only just been released. Since it proved itself incapable of running the GarageBand music software it was supplied with to any reasonable performance standard, it’s main purpose has been to download, rip and store media.
A great deal of our TV watching is streamed from this machine (onto an original Xbox running XBMC). I synchronise my iPod frequently, to pick up podcasts. Not having it is a nuisance.
The Mac Mini makes a good, if expensive, home server because it is unobtrusive and quiet.
Still, looking at the uses, I thought it was a good opportunity to save some money, and have some fun building a quiet, small, neat home server using those PC-compatible mini-ITX boards you can get. If it ran Linux I could get away with something fanless and low-powered.
I specced up a mini-ITX box. With the inevitable spec creep, it soon passed the £250 barrier.
Then I remembered the iPods. I looked into various ways to integrate iPods with Linux. There are some promising freeware applications, all of which had minor issues which would require effort to overcome. I want to be able to continue to plug my iPod in before my morning shower, and return to find it synchronised without having to type anything. iTunes runs under WINE, but not without effort, and nobody seems to have got it to synchronise. VMWare, also, doesn’t seem to be iPod-friendly.
All this seemed to be leading me towards running Windows on my Mini-ITX box. I shuddered. If you already run Windows, then you might tolerate the flaky implementation of iTunes within it. If you need to run iTunes, buying a copy of Windows specially doesn’t make sense.
With their iPods, Apple were strongly pressuring me towards MacOS.
Then I remembered my external drive. It’s an Iomega, in a nifty case that echoes the design of the Mac Mini, such that they stack up and look like they belong together. As such, it came preformatted in Macintosh HFS+ format. I remember thinking at the time, I should reformat it to a more ubiquitous format, but I was lazy and did not. You can’t read *that* from Windows. Even in Linux it’s not all that solid.
And so it was, that I regretfully admitted that Apple has boxed me into their ecosystem, just like Stallman warned me, and that to fight it would require effort. The easiest solution was to spend my way out of it and get a new Mac Mini.
Debbie allowed it, since it was her easiest route to seeing Lost on time this week, and since the Apple Store is affiliated to the BA Miles Store.
I ordered it on Sunday evening, it reached me today: post-haste, not erewhile!
Actually I’m quite looking forward to seeing whether this one can record more than four bars of mic input in GarageBand without the app crashing.