Indeed

Things that seemed important enough at the time

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Soundtrack Pro

(again, still catching up)

We announced Soundtrack Pro last week at NAB, and I'm so glad that we're no longer in "super secret" mode :)

You can check out the links on Apple's site for the best information (much more than I would want to write here)...
Soundtrack Pro press release
Soundtrack Pro webpage
Make sure to check out the Walter Murch video from the second link (it's a really cool video), and go to the "Quick Tours" section to see videos of some of the features in action.

I flew down to Vegas on Sunday for the introduction, and then demoed the app in the Apple booth the rest of the week. I was happy to finally be able to talk about what we've been working on, and it was great to get reactions from people at the show.

So enjoy - check out the info, let me know what you think... I can't think of much more to say about it right now. Meanwhile, I'm back from Vegas (as of a week ago) - at work going about the usual business :)

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Winter Percussion takes 1st place!

(yeah, it's a week late... I'm catching up)

It's been a tough season for winter percussion. We chose some pretty difficult music, and had to rotate our staff around because of schedule problems. Since I was busy with work at the same time, I wasn't able to get to all of the rehearsals and rework the music as much as I would have liked.

It took us a while to get through the first cut of the music, and then quite a while to polish it and make the parts sound good together. The kids were playing music that is probably more complex than most things out there, and trying to balance parts between the pit and battery (as opposed to having one group play while the other rests). They were doing it pretty well, but they weren't getting credit for it.

Part of the problem for balancing the sound is that many of the instruments are really made for outdoor use. All of the marching percussion instruments are loud by themselves, and putting 3-5 of them together (per section) and sticking them in a boomy gym is going to cause problems. On the other hand, pit instruments are pretty quiet (comparatively), and can't reach a volume even close to what the drums can. Because of this, the drums (bass drums especially) have to play REALLY soft while the pit plays REALLY loud - just to try and get a "balanced" sound. It works, but I feel bad for the drummers that don't get to play to their full potential.

Drumlines usually practice full strokes - where the drumstick goes from vertical (for snares and tenors) down to the drumhead - usually referred to as 12 or 15 inches. That would completely drown out the pit, so instead they have use much smaller strokes - only getting to about 3 inches away from the head at the highest point (in our case). This could be made somewhat better by using 'indoor' mallets - which don't make as much sound for larger strokes - and we'll probably use those next year.

For this year though - we just made due with what we had. After getting lots of comments from the judges the previous week, we spent a lot of time working on the dynamics - mainly bringing the battery volume down so it would work with the pit. We also added lots of extras to the show - trying to play up the "insanity" theme of the show. It was pretty fun to add the things, since we were already playing the music well. There were new visuals, facial expressions, jokes, acting moments, and other random things to try and help get the point across.

And... it worked! They performed their show at championships REALLY well, and they finally got credit for it. They got first in their division (which is really second, since it goes: champs, 1st, 2nd, ...) - which actually matches what we got last year.

The staff was pleasantly surprised, and I'd imagine the kids were as well. It's been a fun (and challenging) season, and I'm glad they got recognition for their hard work before it was all over.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

And finally, some free time

My busy schedule has finally eased up a bit, but only after it got worse in the past couple of weeks. Work has been busy with our new software release, and Winter Percussion has been taking most of my remaining time (more on these later).

So today I finally have some free time, and I can start catching up on emails, cleaning the house, and getting back to things that I've been putting off. Sorry if I haven't been too talkative of late - hopefully that will be improving... :)

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Lego Star Wars

I still don't have much free time these days, but I managed to spend some time playing Lego Star Wars after I bought it a couple of weeks ago. It's a pretty fun game, but short. You play through episodes 1-3, and I got through the EP1 levels the first day I had the game.

After getting through all of the story levels, I'm going to play through in 'free' mode, where you try to collect all the hidden items, using any character you've collected so far. Some of the stuff is kind of hard to find, so I'm glad I found a walkthrough on GameFAQs.

It's kind of funny that one of the main things that you have your Jedi characters do is collect "money" (little round LEGO pieces). Sometimes they are just sitting around for you to pick up, but usually you get them by killing things, pushing buttons, breaking stuff, destroying plants, etc. It all seems a little un-Jedi-like to me :)

 
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