My fourth descent into ADD

In the orchestration class I’m taking we have some very strict guidelines on how our sheet music should be formatted. I’m writing some scripts to detect notational errors in my scores based on these guidelines.

The first one I wrote detects if tuplets are marked below the staff. Our conductor requires us to have all tuplets marked above the staff.

This works on macs or linux (or cygwin on windows):

First export the file to a music XML file. File > Music XML > Export. Save it as test.xml in your home folder.

Then open up terminal and run this command:

tr ‘\r’ ‘\n’ < test.xml | egrep -i “tuplet.+below”

If you exported the file on windows, you can just run

egrep -i test.xml “tuplet.+below”

The tr command converts the line breaks from mac to unix for grep to output properly.

If you see something like “<tuplet number=”1″ placement=”below” type=”start”/>” then you have a tuplet below the staff somewhere, if you just see a line break then you don’t. I haven’t figured out yet how to have it tell you where in the file it is though. :/

Music XML is a powerful feature - it means you can mass find, manipulate, and replace elements in scores with a text editor if you search for the right things.

(Warning: Loud)

Seun Kuti is going on tour and coming to the House of Blues in Chicago June 20. You can bet I will be there. I have been a Fela Kuti fan for a long time, and saw a Femi Kuti concert a couple years ago which was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. Seun has taken over his dad’s Egypt 80 band and I can’t wait to see him.

Hmm, this is fun, I’ve added a new ’song ripoffs’ category.
Musiq’s “Girl Next Door”:

Beck’s “Debra”:

-edit-
Found the sample, it’s Ramsey Lewis’s My Love For You.

I recently heard Fort Minor’s Where’d You Go and thought it was pretty powerful and effective, until I realized it was the exact same song as Where Is The Love by The Black Eyed Peas. Same chord progression, same downtempo well produced beats, same simple female vocal chorus, same good slow rapping that overlaps with the chorus.
Original Where’d You Go:

Original Where Is The Love:

Some mashups from some others who have realized the same thing:

Better - how’d he isolate the vocals?

Worse pitch shifting and loop points, but uses more of Where Is The Love Chorus

Here are instructions on how to make a Music Staff Roller Stamp, a rolling ink stamp you can use to quickly draw a staff onto paper for jotting down musical ideas.

You can get all the hardware for less than $10 and it only takes about 2 minutes to make.

Materials:
1 brass door hinge post (~3 inches long)
6 small washers that fit on the post (~half inch wide)
5 thin large washers that fit on the post (~1 inch wide)
1 cork, cut in half
1 drill, to drill hole slightly smaller than hinge post in cork halves
1 ink pad
Plastic container to store the stamp (otherwise it gets messy)

Watch the video for building instructions. Leave your comments and questions here! I tried rubber washers and the ink sticks better, but the lines were too blurry and they were too flimsy. I tried smaller washers but they were too small for the cork. So far, the large metal washers work best.

Good god do I want this thing.

More videos here: http://letsmakerobots.com/node/112

That’s amazing.
On today, April 1, click on any featured video on youtube.
Rickroll FTW!

My friends Nathaniel, Charlie and I figured out a better way to map rex files into Logic using EXS 24 instead of Ultrabeat:
-Create a new EXS 24 instrument, open EXS 24 and click on edit.
-Click on Instrument > Recycle Convert > Slice Loop and Add Samples to Current Instrument.
Now everything’s automatically mapped to the keys. That’s way easier and you don’t have to deal with audio slices in your arrange window. There’s one bug where the slices start in the right place but end at the end of the whole loop, but that’s only if you keep holding down the key. Meh.
-Use Instrument > Save as to save the instrument as something else to be able to access it in other projects.
If you want to hear the original loop, you can export the rex file as MIDI in reason and import the midi file into logic and assign it to that instrument. If you’ve remixed the rex in reason, exporting the whole song and then assigning that midi track to the new instrument will work. Logic also automatically assigns instruments to your other tracks, so importing whole songs from Reason is pretty easy!
The method of dragging the rex loop into an audio track still works well if you don’t need the slices mapped to the keys. In both methods, changing the tempo will have the loop stretch to match (either as slices in a folder or as MIDI data triggering slices).

There are several ways to do it:
sudo shutdown -s now
Note: that opens up a terminal window with a warning and a copy of your entire ssh session.
You can also use:
sudo osascript -e ‘tell app “Finder” to sleep’

That one’s more stealthy.

Try this command when you’re SSHed into a machine:
osascript -e ‘tell application “Finder”‘ -e “activate” -e “display dialog \”Happy April Fools!\”" -e ‘end tell’