My fourth descent into ADD

My Father, Edd Balagot, passed away on May 20 2010 after a long battle with cancer. We are having a memorial for him this Sunday, June 20, at 1 PM, please contact me for details. Dad has always been supportive of everything I do and was an inspiration to me as a human being. I’ve been taking some time off of composing and work and appreciate my friends, family and work being so supportive during this time. Below is his obituary which was published today.

Edgar Antonio (Edd) Balagot passed away on May 20, 2010.

Edd was born on March 12, 1950 in Chicago to Reuben and Lourdes Balagot. He was a 1968 graduate of Francis W. Parker High School and went first to the University of Illinois-Chicago and then to Goddard College in Vermont, where he finished with a Master’s degree in Psychology. After holding the position of co-director at Maple Hill School for some years, Edd returned to Chicago where he switched careers and raised his children.

Everyone who knew him will remember and miss his sense of humor, his love and talent for music, and his penchant for a good story that led to a lifelong affinity for comic books, movies, and novels.

Edd was preceded in death by his father, Reuben C. Balagot.

He is survived by his daughter Rowan, his son Jordan, his mother Lourdes, an entire extended family, and a very large crew of friends.

A memorial service will be held at 1 PM on June 20, 2010. Please contact Jordan for details at 773 742 4400.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to Rainbow Hospice, 444 N. Northwest Highway, Suite 145, Park Ridge IL 60068.

I need to write Britney Spears-type lyrics for a pop song, so I created a Wordle of all of her lyrics from 1999-2010:

The results were not that surprising, but it’s still helpful.

Wordle link:
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1920760/Britney_Spears_Complete_Lyrics
Vector PDF download

Another version with over 1000 words:
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1920824/Britney_Spears_Complete_Lyrics_2
Vector PDF download

I know I’m not the only one with this problem: You have this giant MIDI keyboard that doesn’t produce sound on its own, and most of the time, playing it doesn’t do anything. You have to launch logic, or mainstage, or ableton, or digital performer, open a new project, setup a new patch, and then start playing. In music classes, this can be a distraction, and compositionally, it can get in the way between you and your creativity.

I’d keep MainStage open all the time, but there are times when I don’t want a secondary keyboard sound when I’m using Finale or Logic. Ideally, anytime I’m not using Finale or Logic, I’d like MainStage to be running.

I’ve written a simple OS X application in applescript that checks every 30 seconds to see if Logic or Finale are running, and if they’re not, launches MainStage in the background. It takes up very little CPU and can run continuously. Here is the code:

If you’re on mac you can open that code in the script editor by clicking
here. (Thanks to Mac Developer tips for that trick.)

Download
I have created two downloadable versions, a regular version and a silent version that does not appear in the dock.

Note that the silent version is VERY silent, i.e. you do not see it in the dock, nor in the force quit window. A quick way to kill it is to run “killall applet” in the terminal, though this will kill other applescripts you have running as well.

A more precise way to kill it is to run this command in the terminal:
ps -ax | grep -i “keep mainstage”

Get the first process number listed (usually 5 digits) and then run:
kill XXXXX (where XXXXX is the process number)

You can point to either of these apps in your System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items to have them run automatically when you start your computer.

You should set MainStage’s startup action in preferences to “Open Most Recent Concert”. I have a simple concert with just a piano that I keep open.

Included in the download above are instructions on how to make the silent app run in the background again if you modify it.

Known Bugs with 1.0:
For some reason you have to force-quit the non-silent version, quitting alone does not work.

MainStage has an annoying behavior of grabbing focus once a concert has loaded. The script hides MainStage after it does this, but you will still see it briefly pop up when it launches.

The script will not launch Mainstage if you have Logic or Finale running but with no documents open.

The script may launch Mainstage at annoying times (such as shutdowns or software updates). I’d recommend just shutting down with mainstage running, and clicking “don’t save” if it asks.

Edit: This comic posted from Max below shows the same idea:

Science Fiction constantly imagines scenarios where a character time-travels on earth using a time machine. In most cases, the concept seems simple–a character uses a time machine and ends up in the same place on earth at a different time. The difficulty of time travel aside, how difficult would it be to end up at the same location on earth at a different time? And I’m even ignoring geological changes to the earth’s surface.
Let’s say you have a 3D coordinate system for the entire universe, and have compensated for universal expansion. At a given moment, you are on the surface of earth at a specific coordinate. But the earth is rotating every 24 hours. Its axis wobbles. It orbits the sun once a year. The sun is orbiting the center of the milky way galaxy. And our galaxy is hurtling through space at 630 km per second. Because of this, the earth travels 51.84 million km per day. (And we’re worried about an asteroid hitting *us*?)
Just by staying completely still on the surface of earth, you are traveling in a squiggly, rotating, wobbling, looping, swirling path hurtling through space generally pointed away from the center of the universe at a tremendous speed. Just once I would like to see a character finally invent a time machine, use it to go back just an hour, and end up thousands of miles from earth in space because they didn’t bother to compensate for that. As for people who accidentally time travel or cannot control the amount of time they travel…God help ‘em.

The first fruit of my labor at my new job–arranging, music programming and orchestrating for Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil–has been released. “Teufelskicker” (Devil’s Kicker) opened #4 in Germany last weekend, and the soundtrack CD is for sale. I am proud to share one writing credit with Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil, for track 15, “Heimlich Ins Einkaufszentrum”.

The mp3 download version of the album is on sale at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Teufelskicker-Original-Soundtrack/dp/B003DEN4TE/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1269214968&sr=301-1

Below is a time-lapse nature music video highlighting the MP3 “Age of Innocence” using my amateur photography of Los Angeles:

The extremely talented Ian Maksin is featured on this track, which is available for download here.

I did the music for Andrew Lehman’s “Neoteny and Human Evolution” video, RT ~10 mins:

Andrew reaches a very interesting theory towards the end of the video. Check out his work on evolutionary theory at Neoteny.org.

I will be uploading an edited version of the music in mp3 format soon.

I recently completed the score for the trailer to Yi Soon Shin, a comic by Onrie Kompan:

The mp3 is available here.

Please visit the Yi Soon Shin Website for more information about the comic, it’s very good!

Here is a demonstration of using both the Guitar Hero World Tour Drums for Wii and the Rock Band Drums for Wii to create a full MIDI Drumset:

Camille, the programmer of OSCulator, got his program working with the Velocity-sensitive Guitar Hero drums. Download OSCulator here:
http://www.osculator.net/wp/

I’m still using JunXion to receive MIDI from the Rock Band Drums. Check out my other tutorial for setting JunXion up.

I created a Logic environment with a switch that is triggered by the MIDI note that the Rock Band pedal is sending via JunXion. It transforms the closed high hat to the open one when the pedal is released. I’m also using another transformer to amplify the velocity of the MIDI drums by 30, because the GH drums are pretty quiet otherwise.

Download the Osculator file, the JunXion file, and the Logic file here: gh_rb_setup.zip

Props to Camille for his help, Maeve for me stealing back a loop from her song, and Samantha and Fred Tesche for Dark Matter.

I recently saw a demo of the incredible new iGOG drum trigger program on Create Digital Music. This is the best drum app for the iPhone I’ve ever seen, because it processes the microphone input at the same time you’re playing to determine velocity. The drums are multi-sampled and hitting different areas of the pads also causes them to respond differently (open/closed Hi Hat, Ride Cymbal / Bell).

iGog is developed by Wave Machine Labs, the same people who created the flagship drum replacement program, Drumagog. It is $5 and available in the iTunes store and also here.

I downloaded the demo and tried it out. The mic trigger mode is amazing! I made a demo of it on youtube:

It goes crazy when you sing into the mic too, which I forgot to demonstrate. The program saves MIDI, WAVs, and allows you to loop and sequence, so it’s a great program to have on the road or to create realistic sounding drum loops.

The only drawback with this app is that it requires headphones for mic triggering mode, and performance degrades in pad mode if you use speakers, which limits the possibilities for live performance. Mic triggering only works with one instrument at a time – it would be nice if, like Drumagog, it used frequency analysis to trigger multiple samples at once. Still though, for now the sequencing and looping make up for that.

With sequencing, I would like to see an undo function, or a track editor – once you’ve recorded, it’s added permanently, so it’s easy to mess up a good sequence with a bad take. If you’re recording on different instruments, then this is easy to fix later in the MIDI file with a piano roll, but it would be a handy feature on the road.

I always wanted to create a similar drum pad app using the iPhone’s accelerometers. I would have used the three axises to trigger different samples, so that you tap on the top for bass, side for snare, and back for hi hat. I’m pretty sure this app works better than my app ever would – it also works if you tap on the iPhone body. If they could combine accelerometer data into this app though and separate samples per axis, and also allow you to transit MIDI or OSC over WIFI, this would be the ideal drum trigger.

Still though, what an incredible app, and a great value for $5! In-app purchase of free and pay per download drum kits are also available.