The tenancy on my house ends at the end of June which means that I’m going to have to leave all my friends here and move back to my parents in Reading, which I’m not overly happy about to be honest. Since my degree course finished I have been hard at work getting the Ebullient studio and live albums completed, the live album is currently about 90% complete, and the studio album is taking a little longer than we thought.

Im back in the studio this week with Andy Reader and Chris Sands from Ebullient tracking the guitars, which has so far been going great using two different ProTools rigs allowing the both of them to work on tracks at the same time via Wi-Fi. Things are moving along but a little slower than we need really. Chris is off in Japan at the moment for a TV follow up on his hiccups, and Andy is at Download 2010 which does give me a little amount of time to start mixing the tracks so far.

I’ve been looking around Lincoln for jobs, however I’ve been coming up short so far I really want to be able to stay in Lincoln and do an MA in Digital Media, and stay with all my mates here as we’ve become pretty close over these years. I will be back I think, unless everyone moves away from here to where I am

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When a singer comes into your studio with maybe not a fantastic voice, but they can sing pretty much in tune and time with everything else, do you get them to record and record and record until you have enough parts to make up a whole vocal from the parts? In the past this was never really possible, yes you could splice tape together which took hours and hours and was an art in itself, but artists from that era trained their voices, or their ability with what ever instrument they played to make sure it wasn’t needed. Why do we not think about this anymore? Where has the performance gone?

When we use a DAW such as ProTools we have the ability to use plug-ins for all sorts of things, EQ, compression, gating, effects, you name it there’s probably a plug-in for it. One such plug-in that has become more and more widely used in recent years is the pitch correction plug-in whether it be Antares Auto-Tune, Celemony Melodyne, or just Logic’s built in pitch correction. These plug-ins are used most often to correct a vocal line to bring it to “perfect pitch”, which is normally done by the engineer during the mixing stage. Why do we as sound engineers feel the need to fix everything? I had a copy of Antares Auto-Tune a while ago and I don’t think I actually used it on a final mix once, why you may ask, well personally as a musician I think it takes the human out of the human. Correcting something to be “perfect” to me takes the character out of the music, and surely that’s what it’s all about, the character, the essence, the performance.

Imagine you had a permanent Auto-Tune or Melodyne built into you with no way to turn it off, would you really be happy walking around day after day talking in perfect pitch, singing in perfect pitch, and even sounding exactly the same as every one else out there? I think not some how, so why oh why is it done so often these days, when back in the 60′s-80′s, even the 90′s to some extent was it ok to be slightly out? I think it’s because it kept the human factor in the music, and that is what has changed about music today, it’s nothing to do with the audience wants to hear that in perfect pitch, or that it’s more pleasing to the ear, in fact it has nothing to do with what the audience want at all I don’t think. I think it’s more to do with what we as listeners have been brain washed into thinking is the right way for something to be heard and personally I think that’s wrong.

As a ProTools engineer, and as a musician with everything I record whether for myself, or for other artists, I never take that human factor out of the music unless they say to me that they want the vocals correcting, or the drum track in perfect time the entire way through, or maybe that guitar didn’t quite come in on the beat so can it be nudged slightly, but with every edit I make I always try to keep as much of the way it was played as I can. That way it keeps that character, that essence, the performance of it being played by a human player and not just a sequencer. Humans make mistakes, machines don’t when it comes to timing, you ask a drummer to keep a 4/4 beat going playing 16ths on the hi-hat, and at one point, they WILL go out of time due to fatigue, they loose track, or because they are just human. Computers can’t do that, they can’t purposely go out, they are designed not to, and yes you can put swing on something, but that’s still programmed, it doesn’t quite sound natural.

Where am I going with this? Well You could see this as a stab at Auto-Tune, or Melodyne, but it’s really not, they are great bits of software, or “tools” don’t get me wrong, but in my opinion they are not used as “tools”, but more of a way it is done and has to be done. Why are rock, jazz, or blues all but dying out? I think it’s because artists are not as good as they used to be in the past, artists rely on these so called “tools” to fix their problems, “Oh it’s ok, that can be fixed later with Auto-Tune” I hear all to often by singers, and I think to myself, well no wait a minute your meant to be able to sing that part, it’s your vocal after all, why can’t you sing it right in the first place? Most of the time, the answer is simple, we have the “tools” to fix it so why bother getting it perfect in the first place.

Music as a true art is dying, and it’s a sad state of affairs we are moving into when artists rely on these “tools” to give them that “perfect performance”. So is the true art of music dying? Well I think so yes. Welcome to the digital era I guess…..

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We have to find and enter a remix competition that actually exists. This means that by entering a contest of our own choosing we are in effect making our own brief to the assignment by using the conditions for the contest as the parameters of the brief. Along with creating the brief from the contest another advantage is that most, if not all of the available contests supply raw audio files, AKA stems, of the original track to work from. These could include the drum parts, guitar parts, vocal tracks, synths, or whatever else the original artist used in that track.

I had already chosen to go down this route of using an existing contest as the vehicle for my remix. Being a big fan of Celldweller (Twitter user name in the title) I have known of FiXT Remix for a while which hosts regular remix competitions for Klayton’s (Celldweller’s) work. I have worked on a remix for “Switchback” in the past which is an earlier Celldweller track, and recently with the release of the “Wish Upon A Blackstar” album chapters new competitions have opened up, one being the “So Long Sentiment” contest which is what I think I will use for my remix.

During the process of doing this remix I plan on making use of SoundCloud to host my remix when it is in a state I’m ready for the world to hear, and will most probably embed the audio into a post on here also. I’m really looking forward to doing this project however I am still debating whether to use ProTools, or Logic Pro 9 as they are both very capable DAW systems however I’m sure once I look into the features I will be using the most it one will win over the other, currently my bets are on Logic Pro 9 which I’m not as familiar with, as it has a much larger selection of instruments out of the box.

I will most likely be making use of my Spectrasonics virtual instruments rather heavily as I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to really get to use them, and possibly actually get around to using the Native Instruments Komplete 6 pack I have had for a while and still not installed. Throw in some weird and whacky effects such as vocoders, time stretching, and whatever else I can think of at the time, and this could turn out to be pretty interesting.

So until next time….

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I’m certainly glad I did as I’ve learnt so much this week, met some great people, and realised how much fun development of software is, even if it does have it’s plain irritating moments too.

When I first arrived on Monday at 10am I was introduced to everyone again which was great as I’d completely forgotten every ones names, and no doubt will forget a few again. I got a desk next to the main iPhone developer there and started to continue working on my app. It wasn’t before too long that Max the developer there suggested I work on the actual game logic and forget about the GUI for now, I took his advice and began working on the logic which in this case is a version of Conway’s Game of Life which will run the GUI and the sound engine when that is implemented.

Luckily I had access to an Open Source version of the game logic I was going to be using, however this was written in Objective-C and for a desktop platform so my first job was to re-write this into Objective-C 2.0 and also port it across to the iPhone platform. This took the best part of a day and a half as I’ve never used Objective-C in any way so this was a great learning experience for me!

Once the logic was coded I had to prove that it still worked. Before I started working on any of this I had already begun working on a test GUI for the app so was going to use that to test the logic, however this was advised against by Max and it was decided to test the logic I would use good old printf to output to console and forget the GUI elements for now.

For some reason my brain just would not engage on how to output the grid which is stored in two arrays to the console, my dad sat down with me one night and helped me to think logically about things again, when he did I realised pretty quick what I was doing wrong and had the output going to console.

The next job was to get a simple GUI working with a sample set of cells which I wrote some utility methods to do some of the work for me. These utility methods take a grid location and then convert those into screen co-ordinates for determining the location of some sprites on the screen. Up until this point I had been using a single sprite object and either add it to the layer or removing it, the problem with this way was that each time the sprite was placed each sprite used another chunk of memory, which there is precious little of on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Max told me about the AtlasSpriteManager in cocos2d-iPhone 0.8.2 and said that I should use that instead.

While saying this he also suggested I upgrade to the cocos2d-iPhone 0.9-Beta 2 framework to work with as AtlasSprites had been integrated with Sprites. We had a chat about it and I decided to give it a go. This began the headache of re-writing about 30% of the code I had worked on to make use of the new changes between the frameworks, I started a new project to do this just incase things didn’t work as planned ao I didn’t have to revert my code back to the previous version.

After spending a morning converting all my code it was working as before so I started to work on the sprites. This took most of the afternoon as I was pretty much on my own as Max didn’t know what did what in the 0.9 release the documentation for cocos2d definitely came in very helpful at this point! By the end of the day I had a working prototype working with the test cell setup method I had written when using console.

My next task was to make each cell in the grid I’d created respond to touch events. This required me to subclass CCSprite in my own sprite object, there was very little documentation about creating touchable sprites in the documentation or on the wiki site so I was going it pretty much alone on this, with only help from the forums for the older AtlasSprite way of doing things. I hit a lot of stumbling blocks along the way and after a day of trying to get this working and even with Max’s help still could not figure out what wasn’t working, I decided that the best course of action would be to revert back to using cocos2d-iPhone 0.8.2 as there are a lot more resources available for help, and if I need to ask Max for help he has used the framework.

As I had a copy of my 0.8.2 code on SVN I checked that back out and got about to re-writing it using my 0.9 code as a guide, this didn’t take too long as after a week of developing I was getting a much better understanding of the way things were working and what did what. After about an hour I had the code to the same point as my previous 0.9 code and everything was working. I tested everything was still working on both my iPhone 3GS and The Pavment iPod Touch 3rd gen, which to my joy everything worked with no problem.

At this point it was Friday evening, I had made a lot of progress and then gone backwards, then forwards again. I don’t see this as a bad thing as I was using a BETA framework which has not been adopted by a lot of people so I really was working on the breaking edge of things, the decision to revert back will hopefully mean that things can progress much faster from this point onwards. When the 0.9 framework has been used more widely I will look into moving my app back across to that as it was marginally faster.

My next task on the app is to create a few variables to store the previous state of a cell, then only redraw the AtlasSprite for that cell if it has changed from it’s previous state, as currently every cell is being redrawn in every step of the grid which will start to cripple the frame rate when there are a lot of cells in the grid at one time. I’m currently working with a 16 * 24 grid which is splitting the iPhone screen into 20 pixel cells, while this is ok for testing the eventual goal is to have a much finer cell size making the GUI look more impressive as generations increase.

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I have started to get the hang of using Xcode after using it for a longer time now. I’m not overly keen on the Interface Builder however as I’m using Cocos2d-iPhone I shouldn’t need to make much use of Interface Builder. I feel that after really learning how it all works and what does what then it is a really powerful tool, however currently it just seems to be quicker for me to hand-code what I’m trying to do. This could be a stupid idea on my part but only time will tell.

My application has started to take shape finally after a few weeks of sitting in a state where I could register taps on the screen as screen co-ordinates in console, which seems to be pretty much game development 101 sort of stuff. Now moving on a bit from that I have (with a bit of back down to earth help from my dad) managed to get a virtual 20x20px grid working in my touch layer of the game so that a touch within a certain 20x20px cell is registered as one location on screen, for example, if a user touched the screen at screen co-ordinates (3,19) then that would be cell (1,1) in the console, however if a user touches (25,19) then that would be grid cell (2,1).

This has taken me a while to get working as for some reason I completely forgot that screen co-ordinates are only numbers, and there can only be a certain amount of pixels on the screen, once my dad had reminded me of this fact I was away and could finally get my grid working. Currently the only thing it can do is log the start location, end location, and also track a drag through the grid cells to the console.

The next step for me is to get a 20x20px sprite to stick to the location where the user has tapped but to use the grid cell as its reference, for example, if cell (1,1) is screen co-ordinate (0-19, 0-19) and a user touched (13, 5) then the sprite would not use (13, 5) as its anchor point, but instead will use (0, 0) as its anchor, sprites should anchor from the bottom left corner using this method. Once I have a single sprite working I will then look into getting multiple sprites working at once, and then onto tracking a drag work either placing a sprite or removing an instance of one depending on where the user has dragged their finger.

Once I have this working I’ll actually get around to posting some example code in a short post soon.

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I’ve had a pretty decent time this Christmas, I’ve met up with a few old friends, still need to see one of them, done a bit of work but not enough I’ve really fallen behind on that, and I’ve also messed with my server to aid in development stuff. So I shall address these things in order (if there is such a thing).

Christmas

I suppose it’s only fitting to put this section first as it is probably the biggest thing that’s going on at the moment. I returned home to Reading to my parents house for Christmas on 17th December, I had a meeting in London on 18th December with The Pavement to discuss an iPhone app which went pretty well, I do think I shall be around London a fair bit in the coming months. I got back to my parents finding it had snowed while I was away which was great but it did play absolute havoc with traveling which was great fun!

Moving on a few days I met up with a few friends, spent a day in Reading in Starbucks which was probably a mistake as I came home with a coffee high which I admit was great fun.

Along came Christmas day and I come downstairs a little late I admit due to going to sleep later than I wanted, open the usual presents of clothes, sweets, and some cheques which is good, and then while tidying up my dad turns around to my mum and said that he was certain there was another present for me, I was confused to say the least. He runs off upstairs and then comes back with a moderately large sized present, I was just lost at this point, start to unwrap it and notice a bar-code with the code A1297 under it, I knew I’d seen that code before and it suddenly hit me that it was an Apple code the brown box confused me but I was sure.

I opened the box to find a brand new Apple 17″ MacBook Pro which just took me completely by surprise. I was not expecting to get a new machine for Christmas but it turns out the my parents took pity on my MacBook Pro slowly dying on me. After all that surprise we sat down for a meal later that day which was awesome, I want another one!

Development and server

During this holiday I left Lincoln with the intention of doing as much of my uni work as I could, as it happens I’ve done nearly nothing towards my uni work. This has annoyed me as I had it all planned out, and I have a lot to get done including my first two chapters of my dissertation, and my live production writeup, oh for the want of more time to get this done!

I have started to re-read my “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″ book to try to get around my head how certain things work in the language. I have also bought another iPhone development book called “iPhone Game Development – Developer Reference” which is a Wiley book. I’ve had a read of a few parts of it and so far I’m pretty impressed with it, we shall see if it actually helps me or not however, I am thinking about getting a few more of their books as they are pretty good.

To make sure I don’t loose any of my development work I’ve spent some time on setting up Subversion on my server along with Mantis issue tracking software, this should enable the guys at The Pavement to help me out with some of the stuff to do with the project, and also so I don’t need to constantly make sure I have all my code with me wherever I am. If I can access my SVN server then I can access all my code. I’ve managed to setup Xcode 3 to work with my SVN repos so I don’t even need a separate SVN client.

I’ve also had a bit of a mess about with updating the server, but for some reason updating Apache, and PHP managed to break the entire server so I had to restore from a backup image. All sorted again now, and all updated with a little more speed added for fun.

Well I think that about ends this stupidly long post, hopefully the next one will actually have more of a point to it

Adam

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I had a meeting with the MD Andy of The Pavement in London who I’m working with to get this application built. They are acting as the client for this project however this project wasn’t originally a dissertation project. I’m not completely sure how many details I can actually give away about application itself as this is a real app, and will be available on the App Store in 2010 hopefully.

The meeting on Friday really cleared everything up in my mind, and also gave us some very interesting ideas. I’ve received a pre-release copy of the content for the app, which I’m still unsure whether to call it a game or not. The application is going to be music based which will more than likely involve me having to sample certain aspects of some recordings, or even having to get some custom made sounds that I can sample from the musicians in question.

I’m looking into a few different frameworks to build this app/game and I’m thinking that I’m going to end up using Cocos2d which is an OpenGL ES 2d game framework. Cocos2d has features such as touch/accelerometer support, sound support, tile map support, particle system, among others but most importantly the whole thing is Open Source. I’ve been playing with Unity Pro and Unity iPhone recently on a machine one of the staff at uni has lent me, however the licenses for these products are pretty expensive so I wouldn’t be able to continue to develop apps after I leave uni without buying my own licenses.

I know there isn’t much actual information about the application here, however I’m not completely sure on how much I can say just yet. I’m having another meeting with Andy on Friday 18th December so will find out just how much I can give away then. I also don’t want to give away too much of the concept we’ve got. I may do some mock visuals soon.

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So with that handed in and completed via Blackboard I’m back to working on the actual app, only to realize later that evening that I’d only seen two files in the uploaded files section, another lot of panic occurred and I decided to check and see what files I’d uploaded. Well it turns out that Blackboard in its absolute brilliance didn’t upload my time scales and risk assessment section to my proposal. Great I can’t upload it now, I hate the stupid uploader for Blackboard, you HAVE to click add another file to upload even if your not uploading anything else, absolute crap! Oh well I just hope without it I can get decent marks.

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The written test consisted of 6 questions, these varied from how to setup the consoles for a live event using a monitor desk, and FOH desk, all the way to what colour the power plugs are for certain phase power. This was pretty easy as it was mostly just common sense, some of the stuff in the test I had read the morning of the test while doing some research anyway so it was completely fresh in my mind.

The practical test for me consisted of setting up a channel of the desk to take an input from an SM58 mic. I then had to test the monitor wedges were all working correctly, and then send the mic channel back to the correct mix group so that the vocalist could hear themselves through their monitor wedges. Once this was done I still had about 3-4min of time left so I got a “bonus” section. I had to assign a graphic EQ to the vocalists monitor wedges and take out all the high end, leaving just the low end. I did this pretty quickly also without any problems, I still had extra time so I was asked to assign talkback to a button of my choosing on the user defined key section, I assigned button 12 to use an unlatched talkback button, tested it and passed that section with still some time to spare.

I couldn’t actually get any higher points, and I came out of the test with a 95/95. The marking scheme for my university is anything above 70 is a 1st, and 95 is the highest 1st you can possibly get at Lincoln. I’m REALLY pleased to have come out of the test with the highest 1st you can get at the uni

Just have to setup a show at The Engine Shed now, and then write a 2000 word assignment on live sound production, and this unit will be over

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Ever since the iPhone was released I’ve been fascinated by it, I skipped the first version when it was released due to the price, and also due to the not great software implementation. When the 3G came out I started to rethink, did a bit of research, and got hold of an unlocked iPhone 2G (1st generation) with the latest software version 2.2. I got a fair amount of use out of the phone and after watching the Apple Keynote when the iPhone 3GS was announced I decided there and then to get one. I ended up getting the 32Gb 3GS about 3 days after it was released on a 24 month contract with O2.

I’ve been looking into iPhone development for a month or so now and this project coming along has been a real push into making me take the plunge and get started. I’ve spent money on books to get going, and have also joined the uni iPhone development team (myself and some lecturers). Joining the team means I have access to the iPhone developer account features, such as testing on my actual iPhone rather than just in a simulator, it also means I can get access to all the developer connection forums and support.

So that’s where I am currently, I should have a better idea of what I’m going to be doing during this week.

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