Musical Guest: Jason Mraz

Lyrics: Open up your door and then breathe free. Look at all the beauty and you’ll find that the earth and the sky is yours.

The Lesson: Turn off the TV, put down the video game controller, and go outside. I’m blessed that one of the words that Junior is proficient with is “outside”, and we have spent a lot of our time this summer outside.

Musical Guest: Will.I.Am

Lyrics: There’s nothing I can’t achieve, because in myself I believe.

The Lesson: Know that you are wonderful, beautiful, and special, and you can do anything you want to do.

]]> http://www.kettlepot.com/2011/07/29/lessons-from-the-musical-guests-on-sesame-street/feed/ 0 http://www.kettlepot.com/2011/04/27/we-are-augustines/ http://www.kettlepot.com/2011/04/27/we-are-augustines/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 04:51:45 +0000 kettlepot http://www.kettlepot.com/?p=430 The last week or so, after 70 days exploring other creative outlets, I’ve found that my focus has been drawn back to photography. I revived davidmonnerat.com, and will be posting my more of my photography-related posts on the blog over there. I’ve been reading some of the photography blogs that I used to frequent last year, finding inspiration.

As I found myself drifting deeper back in to photography, Chase Jarvis, one of the photographers from the “popular” clique that I still kept tabs on as I let most of those connections go, announced that he was doing another Chase Jarvis Live session, in which he  was going to do a photo shot for a band called We Are Augustines. I knew nothing of the band, but I know that when Chase does a photo shoot live, it’s always classy, informative, and generally mind-blowing. Chase was kind enough to link to the promo video for the band and their new album, Rise Ye Sunken Ships.

I was intrigued. And I tuned in.

The first hour or so was Chase interviewing the band, mixed with them playing some of their songs. It was a wonderful combination, and hearing some of the stories that were the inspiration for the songs on the album were, well, inspirational. It must be such a wonderful curse to be able to turn the negative, profound things that happen in one’s life in to a poem, a story, or lyrics. It’s something that I’ve not been able to do, even as the last few years have, in addition to the great joy, included much sadness for me.

Bill McCarthy, the lead singer, came across as a simple guy, sensitive, and sometimes profound. He talked about his brother, who suffered from mental illness and wound up taking his own life, and when he went in to a song, you could hear the emotion in his voice. I though on a few occasions it was as if when his mind pulled up the lyrics for him to sing, he was reliving different moments, and how painful it must still be.

I was impressed with how grateful they were of Chase’s time, and always the class act, I was equally impressed with how respectfully Chase treated them. Halfway through the live shoot, in between any of the photographic action, the cameras and the microphones captured Bill walking up to Chase and thanking him, it was…genuine. I don’t know, it’s not something you often see. In a world of egos, and celebrity, it was refreshing and inspirational to see how really, really grateful folks can be when they share a piece of themselves.

I started the day not knowing what an Augustine was, and ended the day impressed with who they were as people.

Not a bad day.

–

creative 365 – no. 78

in any case, the real version of this song is beautiful, and i think Ben is a severely underrated musician. “Brick” wasn’t the only song he wrote, you know. you should check out his stuff sometime, maybe watch a video on youtube, or one of his live performances. maybe even a version of “The  Luckiest”, sung with the West Australian Symphony.

on the cover itself, it was all done on the ipad. i’ll blame the bad vocals on the microphone on the iPad, not my voice or my lack of training. the instruments (primary piano, some light accompanied acoustic guitar) are, again, smart instruments in GarageBand on autoplay; all i had to do was hit the right keys at the right time. i found two issues with doing longer songs in GarageBand on the iPad. first, i did some splitting, copying, and pasting for the piano pieces. when the song is short, there is extra space on the right side of the composition for me to tap and then hit Paste. however, once the song was up to 80 measures or so, there was no extra space on the right. i thought i had reached a limitation of the tool, but i figured out tonight that you can move your maker to the end of the song and hit record, which will extend past the 80-whatever mark. then i simply dragged the junk at the end over and made room for the copy/paste job.

second, after i added the piano and guitar, i recorded the audio. however, randomly the recording would just stop. thankfully, it actually did record, but the stop seemed very random and, therefore, unmanageable. i reboot the iPad a few times, which seemed to work for a little bit, but then it would act up again. what i wound up doing was recording a phrase or verse, then hit stop, and then start up again before the next phrase. but even then, sometimes it would stop after a few seconds. very frustrating, but made it through. still, pretty amazing to be able to put together a song with an app on an iPad.

The Luckiest Cover (Ben Folds)

i love Beethoven.

i know, i know. all the cool kids say that these days. it’s pretty much Lady GooGoo, Ke-dollar-sign-ha, and Beethoven. wait, maybe it’s Bieber, not Beethoven. no, i’m pretty sure it’s Beethoven.

what’s not to love? his music is gorgeous (i’m listening to it right now). oh, and the fact that he composed music after he went deaf? i mean, that says something, right? you’re kind of meant to do it if, after the universe afflicts you with something that should separate you from your craft, you keep on doing it. that’s beyond just being skilled, that’s darn near divine.

sort of related was a story i heard recently of Grant Achatz, a Chicago chef specializing in molecular gastronomy (cooking with science) that was diagnosed with tongue cancer. somehow, the chemotherapy and radiation didn’t completely destroy his taste buds, and he is thankfully cancer-free and still doing crazy stuff with science and food.

seriously, though, a composer going deaf, and a chef with tongue cancer.  Nature has a cruel sense of irony, threatening to take core tools from artists to see how they will react or adapt. perhaps these examples serve to demonstrate man’s ability to overcome obstacles, or maybe that gifts bestowed on us from a higher power are absolute.

maybe it’s about purpose. these guys were meant to do what they do, and no obstacle could stop them for their purpose. my purpose is to be a generalist and, thankfully, the biggest challenge before me is a lack of inspiration, a lack of talent, and a lack of motivation. i have my senses, and my wits, and my stunningly good looks, though i’m not sure how they apply, specifically, to any of the crafts to which i am exploring. it doesn’t hurt, though, to have those looks to get a free cookie from the cashier in the cafeteria now and again. (thanks, Brad!)

i digress, as usual.

i’ll write some other night about the plight of the generalist. tonight, though, i am inspired by people that overcome fundamental challenges to their crafts and their purpose. i’m grateful for what i have, and the perspective of knowing that whatever challenges i think i see before me exploring my many interests, that there are people out there that ran in to a mile-high brick wall and simply climbed over it. my walls aren’t nearly as high, and recognizing that, i think, is the first step in getting over them.

you can follow Grant on twitter at @Gachatz. Beethoven is not currently on the twitters.

Without music, life would be an error.
Friedrich Nietzsche

i think this my second official music post, but it’s been so long that it feels like my first.

my first musical post was a cover of The Decemberists’ song Down by the Water, accompanied by my beautiful wife. that also happened to be my first post of the create365 project. we put the song together in Garageband; my first real experience with the program, but i really dug the interface and, for all the problems we had, those problems were mine, and not the software’s.

lo and behold, there is a version of Garageband for the iPad, as well. it’s certainly trimmed down but, at first glance, it looked like it was still functional for creating a song on the tablet. so, tonight, i gave it a shot. i took advantage of some of the “smart” instruments that are included and, after picking a key (E-minor), i played some simple chord progressions. i added additional instruments, trimmed, and pushed it to iTunes.

all told, this took about 30 minutes. it has an acoustic guitar, piano, and drum track.it was actually pretty simple to put together, and i’m excited to see what else it can do.

enjoy.

1_26 in E-minor

without getting too wordy tonight, because i certainly could with all of the inspiration and information in that one podcast, i wanted to write about something that i picked up on from the writers of Winter’s Bone, Anne Rosellini. when asked about having their budget constraint affected their writing and how they dealt with it, Anne responded by saying that her co-writer and director Debra Granik reminded her to “embrace [their] limitations, and let the budget inform the script.” she gave a number of examples of the creative ways they overcame the obstacles that the reduced budget presented to them and, in the end, their creativity in both the screenwriting and in the execution of the film was rewarded with an Oscar nomination.

i really like the sentiment. it’s not new, of course…it’s probably as old as creation itself. say, i don’t have a knife but i really want to eat that wooly mammoth, i’d better think of something if i want to eat. last year, it was a common theme from the photography voiceboxes…”it’s not about the gear.” of course, it was said by established photographers with tons of expensive gear and loads of loyals followers that generally reserve any negative comments, and i think that makes the statement lose some of its luster. “it’s easy for you to say that all it takes is an iPhone and a dream when you go back to your $5000 DSLR.”

but i think the Winter’s Bone examples demonstrate that it’s less about what you don’t have as it is about understanding what you do have and what you can do with it to tell the story.  creatives find a way to tell a story, even with imposed constraints. stop saying “i didn’t get that shot because i didn’t have XYZ lens” and start saying “since i didn’t have XYZ lens, in order to get the shot i had to improvise ABC.”

every project has constraints, and the creative problem solving aspect is often the most important talent you can bring to the table. if you realize that, and if you’re truly creative in solving problems and focusing on getting the story told, the end result of those efforts is often a truer representation of the story. and sometimes, well, sometimes your efforts get acknowledged.

tools used: garageband, a guitar, mic, firebox.

this was the best of the takes we did in the time we had. lessons learned include finding a different location with less echo than our canyon of a living room. making sure junior is occupied to minimize distractions. and making sure the mic is turned on on the camera so we can more easily sync the audio (hence no video track here, just the audio).

i’ve (obviously) had no vocal training, but i’m married to someone who teaches that sort of thing, so we’re hoping this will all get better as we do it more, but for a first attempt at anything like this, i’m okay with the results. and it was a lot of fun singing with my wife.

so for #1 of 365, here we go…

Down by the Water Cover

update:

i wanted to come back in and add a little more to this post; namely, some of the lessons learned.

first, there is an interesting article on the psychology today blog on the science of success. in it, the writer states:

Start any new project by saying  ”I’m not going to be good at this right away, I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s okay.”

that’s obviously the case here. the result is far from perfect, but my goal is to learn and get better.

next, singing with my wife is one of the coolest things ever. she’s very patient with working with someone who has (obviously) never had any lessons in this sort of thing, and was very helpful in getting me this far.

in the room for improvement category (ha, a pun), the room we were in was not right for a number of reasons…primarily the echo from the large empty space and high, vaulted ceilings. if you listen, you can also hear other sounds in the background (junior and a xylophone), so a location with less outside noise would also have been preferable.

on the technical side, i started off the morning recording separate tracks for the guitar, my audio, and the wife’s audio. but we ran short on time so we just did one combined recording. that meant we had to have the mic a little further back to get the three components, which introduced more echo from the room.

i was also recording video to go along with the audio, but the auto-shutof engaged on the shotgun mic attached to the camera, so we had no reference audio track on the video, so i decided to scrap it since synching the audio and video manually would have been too challenging to finish in the time we had. (adding “check audio on camera” to the pre-recording checklist for next time).

overall, it was a fun project and a good learning experience for the start of the new 365 project. more to come!

the gear

• Behringer C-1 Studio Condenser Microphone
• PreSonus FireBox 6X8 Firewire Recording Interface
• MacBook Pro
• GarageBand
• Adobe SoundBooth

my biggest concern was the FireBox. it’s a few years old, and i wasn’t really sure it would work on the Mac–i only had a few months experience with it, as it was. however, a quick check of the presonus website pointed me to a software bundle that included the mixer and control software, along with a firmware upgrade for the box itself. the firmware updated without incident, and i installed the Mixer and Control tools by dragging them in to the Applications folder. the FireBox itself has it’s own power adapter (which i found after searching ever storage box in the basement), so that was plugged in, along with a firewire cable to the laptop and the microphone using an XLR cable. at this point, everything was connected, and it was time to pull up GarageBand.

with GarageBand open, the first step was to change the audio input which, by default, is set to the built-in mic on the laptop. in the GarageBand menu, select Preferences, and go to the Audio/MIDI tab.

with everything properly connected and powered, i had a new option in the Audio Input drop down for the FireBox. once i selected it, i was prompted to confirm that i wanted to change my audio driver, which i confirmed.

a few seconds later, and the Audio Input was changed to the FireBox. i left the Optimize setting for minimizing delay when playing instruments live since i’ll likely be recording tracks one at a time and want to make sure i reduce latency as much as possible.

with the input changed, i created a new song. before i recorded anything, i noticed that on the bottom right of the screen, the Input Source had a number of options in the drop down list. i left it selected on Stereo 1/2, although since i’m just using the one mic, i should set it to Mono 1 (confirmed here).

after that, it was just a matter of hitting the record button and speaking in to the microphone. i did wind up going in to FireBox Control and enabling the +12dB gain option to up the signal a little bit going in to GarageBand. i remember having to do that on my old system, as well.

i’ll do some reading on the FireBox Mixer, too, although it’s interface is a bit more complicated.  who knows, i may not need it at all, but that’s the point of the exercise!

finally, junior and i did some recording playing with the different options. at one point, he repeated my “test, test” which was both hilarious and amazing. i did manage to capture a “dada”, though, right before he tried to eat the microphone, which i include for your listening pleasure.

test, test, dada, test test