It Stings (Revised) by  medwardsmusic

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Lee Bozeman (Luxury, All Things Bright & Beautiful) has just put out an EP entitled Mea Culpa under the moniker Orient Is His Name. I had the privilege of contributing to one of the songs on it. Definitely check it out. It’s available for download here:

http://orientishisname.bandcamp.com/

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Ornaments is a Christmas album project dreamed up by my friend Jeremy Cordy. He approached me in early November 2009 with the idea of gathering the various musically talented friends we had to try to put together something beautiful. I couldnʼt be more pleased with the results.

Comprised of almost entirely original songs, the project was an attempt to fill a few gaps in the Christmas music we were used to hearing all the time and explore some different scenarios and ideas.

Download: Ornaments.zip (51.8 MB)

B-Sides: There are some songs we didn’t quite finish in time. As they get wrapped up and released I’ll update this post with links.

• Santa Claus Is Coming To Earth – Justin Edwards
• Chanson Pour Noël – Justin Edwards

Download the updated notes pdf: Ornaments Lyrics and Notes (160 KB)

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Genetic Engines demo by medwardsmusic

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YouTube – Sunny Day Real Estate “7″ 9-29-09 Jimmy Fallon Live.

Simply wonderful. Glad to have gotten to see them again. One of my favorite bands.

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A couple of posts ago I posted a song that had stuck with me from a film I saw in Kenya. I made a lo-fi cover of it on banjo. Enjoy!

Signs of Spring cover (Lo-fi) by medwardsmusic

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Buy Snowy EP (2007) from iTunes, Amazon MP3, or eMusic.

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Once upon a time I was a sophomore in high school, living in Nairobi, Kenya. Television in Kenya was, to this American boy, an irrational mix with no rhyme or reason. Sunset Beach, WWF, failed tv shows (Meego?), strange commercials, and obscure movies. It was surreal to see captial-a American television in a foreign context, like eating McDonalds on Mars or something.

One movie that I encountered on Kenyan television was the film The Last Butterfly. The film is about a french stage mime, Antoine Moreau, who is compelled by the Gestapo to put on a show for the children of Terezin, a “model” concentration camp set up to trick Red Cross observers about the true nature of the camps. Antoine gradually becomes wise to the truth of the situation and where the “transports” were really taking the Jews. He then sets out to stage a show to end all shows, in (suicidal/martyring) protest.

It is not as intense of a movie as, say, Schindler’s List or The Pianist, but it is very good. I bring it up because in the movie there is a bittersweet song that caught my ears at the time and I wanted to post the lyrics here. It’s called Signs of Spring.

Come and I’ll teach you to smile up at cloudy skies
Just listen to me and I’ll help you see
Life with lovers’ eyes

Rain just means that sunshine must be on its way
Lovers know the darkest hour comes before the day
Lovers have no fears of what the year ahead will bring
They know the cold of winter is another sign of spring

Even in the dead of winter I hear some bird sing
For cold and snow, as lovers know, are only signs of spring

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I recently started using SoundCloud to host music files, collaborate, and share music. I’m creating this post to test out the SoundCloud widget. Check it out:

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I haven’t gotten to play with Logic 9 (part of the new Logic Studio) too extensively yet, but here are a few initial reactions:

1. Looks pretty much exactly the same.

2. There is a light/white box around the part of the window that has focus (arrange vs. mixer vs. media/library/bin). Logic 8 lightly shaded the top but now it’s a fully surrounding white rounded-edge box. I guess it’s not that different but it’s perhaps more noticeable.

3. New icon in top right for Notes. I find myself putting lyrics or mixing/recording ideas into TextEdit documents all the time, so to have a dedicated area for “notes” in Logic is long overdue and very welcome. I approve!

Besides, if you collaborate with anyone else and share projects, it makes a lot more sense to attach your comments to the project than to an email or whatever.

Click to enlarge

4. The improvements to Take folders is great. Finally being able to drag audio around without flattening/splitting-up multiple takes is long-overdue. Why didn’t they allow for that in the first place in Logic 8?

5. Creating sampler instruments out of audio regions. In the past year or two I’ve been getting really into sampling sounds for songs. This was always a tedious process of bouncing a sound, importing it, dropping it onto an EXS24 instrument (unless there was an easier way I’m not aware of). Not that hard but time consuming meaning you’re being less creative and doing more grunt-work.

Now you can do all that in one step. This makes me so incredibly happy.

Creating MIDI instruments out of audio regions is easier than ever.

6. Flex-time. AWESOME. I haven’t done anything crazy with it yet, but even just dragging stuff around you can tell that this makes editing the timing of tracks soooooo much easier.

I’ve gotten pretty good at recording drums to metronome over the years, but there are always some hits that are off. The process of chopping, x-fading, and dragging those clips around was so annoying. Now it’s so much easier. Woohoo!

They give you 6 flex-time “modes”:

• Slicing – for drum slicing – preserves speed
• Rhythm – for “non-monophonic sources” like rhythm guitars
• Monophonic – good for vocals, melodies, bass lines
• Polyphonic – most straining on cpu. Complex sounds.
• Tempophone – to do retro tape-warping effects.
• Speed – just flat out changing the speed of the clip. Nothing new here.

7. There is a preference so that if you right-click on the arrange it opens BOTH the tools and options. So I can switch to fade/scissors/flextime tool OR the contextual options for doing stuff to a region. Big win, in my opinion!

Right-click context menu allows for both “Tools” and context-sensitive choices.

Concluding thoughts:

Overall, it’s not a big shiny diamond-coated upgrade, but there are some very solid new features that make me very happy, even if you could argue that some of them should have been part of Logic 8.

If I think of anything else I’ll be sure to update this post. I haven’t gotten to test it much in different situations or workloads so I don’t know if it’s more stable. Supposedly it is.

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