Chase Farmer

If you’re anything like me, you’re always trying to get better at the things you love. For me day in and day out that is programming and playing music. In an effort to improve these skills, I try to learn at least a few new things a week that are outside of my knowledge base.

Recently I was looking for some advice on how to ramp up my coding skills. I found this Stack Overflow question that had some great pointers. The tip about studying patterns really stuck out like a sore thumb to me for some reason. I know these patterns but how come I don’t ever actively consider them when I’m writing code? Or is it something that just radiates in my subconscious? I mulled it over for a couple days and tried to figure out why it was bothering me so much. It finally hit me at the coffee shop this afternoon.

I haven’t been properly laying out a strategy to begin my projects. When it comes to programming, I’ll draw a wireframe and then just start banging out the code. Sometimes I’ll layout a skeletal class or two but this is pretty rare.

With music, it’s usually worse. I’ll just find a tone I like and start noodling until I find a melody or riff I can start off with. Then begin to build from there. I always thought the best way to write music was on an impulse and I thought it worked best for me. Clearly I am not a fan of having restricted structure. For some reason I always felt it inhibited my creativity.

After carefully considering both of these points, I realized I’ve been doing it all wrong this whole time. This is one of the biggest reasons I think why I never end up finishing my side projects. I can finish songs and I can write a 500 line class no problem but I’ve never built a finished product that I was proud to present to the public. This realization was very demoralizing.

So how am I going to fix it? My number one goal for this year is to focus. When I make music, I’m going to lay out a plan for achieving the sound/emotion I want to portray and I’m going to stick to that path. If I have an idea I want to program, not only am I going to wireframe it but I’m going to write skeletal code and develop a schematic for the whole build. Of course these plans will be changed and adapted along the way but they will help me focus on achieving my goals instead of always half assing it.

I will release an EP this year and I will finish at least one open source project. I’m not a believer in talking about it ruins it. I will achieve these goals.

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream, not only plan but also believe.” – Anatole France

Wildlife Control have created an incredible music animation using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the SoundCloud API. The JavaScript and math required to put this thing together are quite impressive. The whole experience definitely made the song more enjoyable for me. I urge you to go look at the main script file, beautify it and enjoy. At first I thought they were probably using Popcorn.js but after reviewing the source, definitely not. They provide a great explanation over on their blog of how things work that I have pasted below. Check it out here.

We were tinkering around with the SoundCloud API late one night several weeks ago and realized we could use the timing events and track comments to make something cool. At the time, we were thinking it would be a quick little animated ASCII thing. After digging in a little more, we decided to go way bigger.

You can think of this video as a scripted visualization. Although the story is linear, certain elements are random, making each viewing unique. The scenes are rendered on a “pixel” grid of HTML divs. Every time we get a playback timing event from SoundCloud, we check if a new sixteenth note has passed, and if so, the JavaScript renders the appropriate sprites on the video frame. This keeps the action precisely timed with the audio. The sprites are JavaScript objects that specify which colors to use and how to arrange them. Since we need to keep things lightweight and efficient, the general strategy is to break the scenes down into reusable pieces and animate them on the fly using math.

To make it a little more interactive, we display the SoundCloud comments right on the video on the same pixel grid. You can connect your SoundCloud or Facebook account and post your own comments and see them on the video while it’s playing. We are very excited that this is possible. Gotta love SoundCloud. And math.

So yeah… this is what happens when drummers write JavaScript.

Source: http://wildlifectrl.com/post/14266142693/analog-or-digital-video

 

 

Over the past couple years, SoundCloud has steadily become the go to tool for sharing audio on the web. Today SoundCloud launched a new venture entitled SoundCloud Labs, which allows users to become more acquainted with the platform via various applications that have been developed internally with the SoundCloud API. SoundCloud Labs currently contains access to 4 different applications including Social Unlock, TakesQuestions, Importer and a Gmail plugin with many more to follow. Although these apps are very minimal in what they do, it is a great way for SoundCloud to showcase their platform and spread ideas to help grow their community of developers and musicians.

Review

As you can imagine, the importer and Gmail plugin are relatively straight forward. The importer allows you to upload songs to SoundCloud via a URL, email, or by calling a private line to record. The latter is extremely nifty. No longer will artists be calling their own voicemails to record song ideas. You could also easily replicate something like this using the Twilio API. The Gmail plugin simply takes SoundCloud links and converts them into audio players directly in your inbox similar to the way YouTube videos are automatically embedded. Only downside is you need a Google Apps account instead of just solely a Gmail account.

TakesQuestions is a simple Q&A app that allows you to ask someone a question with an audio recording and they answer back. You record your question right in the the browser and then it combines the audio of the recipients response into a nice module for showcasing on the page.

Social Unlock is pretty much exactly as described. You share to unlock a download. So far Twitter is the only platform integrated though. Let’s walk through a simple setup of this to show you how easy it is.

First we go to the site and connect our SoundCloud account.

After we connect we’re ready to create our first promotion. Our tracks are already available and now all we have to do is fill in a few details and create our theme.

Now we just hit create promotion, change the theme to our liking, we’re provided a URL and its ready to go. This app could help you spread your tracks quickly if executed properly. The only downside is that any SoundCloud player shared on Facebook is automatically unlocked and you can download the track if its available. Another example of this would be the new Manchester Orchestra album stream in which you have to build a puzzle to unlock. Simply embed the link on Facebook and you’re no longer facing any sort of challenge to listen.

Another recent tool created by SoundCloud developer Lee Martin, is the premiere app. You will not find it on the labs but this open source tool has been making its rounds for several albums over the past couple months with bands like the Beastie Boys and the Foo Fighters using it to debut new music.

These apps seem to be just a little teaser of what’s to come in the future. Definitely looking forward to see what SoundCloud comes up with next.

If you’re a music geek like me, every day you’re looking for new ways to find tunes. Checking Twitter, scanning Tumblr, RSS Feeds, Last.FM scrobbles and inevitably hitting play on that YouTube video you’re not so sure of in your Facebook news. All of this produces so much noise though and its hard to really filter down to the stuff you actually want.

I have found that I discover most of my favorite music from some of my closest friends in every day conversation. Unfortunately over time your friends always grow apart from each other and you find yourself trading new finds less and less. Luckily we now have these massive social hang outs online that allow us to engage in ways with our friends that we couldn’t even do when they lived close to us. I love Last.FM for music discovery but the main problem is that not all of my friends use it and they won’t for some reason. Out of all the networks that have popped up in the past few years the only one that I can reliably find the majority of my friends on is Facebook. Unfortunately Facebook is still highly lacking in the awesome music applications category right now that allows sharing with your friends.

So how do you take the features Facebook already has and make it into something useful that your friends can share music with each other through. On top of that how do I get the best music recommendations from my friends and their friends I don’t even know. I decided to start a secret Facebook group on the premise that most people don’t want to share what they’re listening to on their stream but if its a private group geared towards music then they have no shame. I then encouraged the 10 or so friends I added that I knew had similar tastes to add other friends who love music. 30 days and 125 interspersed friends later we got a pretty sweet thing going here. About 5-10 posts a day with some sort of link to music. Needless to say I’ve discovered quite a few awesome tracks that are right up my alley that I had no clue about and probably would have never found otherwise.

About 4 months pass and everything is going great. I asked people to only post 1-2 links a day max and we were trekking along having some great conversations, sharing past show stories, and building a tightly knit community of music lovers. Then came the problem, too many links and no way to listen to them all in a given day. Especially as the group started to expand I could see this becoming a problem. Once again too much noise that inevitably I needed to be able to sort through to get what I wanted. I spend enough time doing that already through out the day. I knew though that this time around though the noise was a lot more refined and worth fine tuning. So naturally having a bit of understanding of the Facebook API I decided to take advantage of all this great data.

I decided to build a mini application that allows you to simply up vote or down vote a post that somebody made in the group and also tallies likes/comments to add to the posts score. In part 2 I’ll show you how to build something like this on your own using PHP, Javascript, and the Facebook Open Graph. In the meantime go start your group, add some friends who like the same music as you, and then encourage them to invite friends with similar tastes. Below I have shared what I posted as the rules for the group and it seems to be working relatively well.

A place to share/discuss music we love among friends.

Since not everyone on facebook likes good music. Thought it would be a cool idea to start this group of friends and share shit that we don’t care for our whole stream to see or just share some new hot shit you found but don’t feel like posting to your stream.

A couple things to clarify that I have been asked ..

1. Invite whoever, all I ask is they like good music and want to share with friends or people they have never met. I believe groups of friends share the best unknown bands. Genres don’t matter, if you think its good then post it.

2. If you post something, try and add at least a link for people to listen to

3. Try not to spam the board, 1-2 links a day is enough from an individual. (would like this to last not for you to share all your favorite bands in 2 days)

Enjoy and start conversation!

NOTE: Its probably a good idea to edit settings of the group and turn off notifications and emails when you join.

NPR has released a very engaging series on the future of music and technology that explores a lot of the ideas that I had been considering as of late. Live music collaboration over the web was one of the topics they recently touched on. They describe how two artists that live on separate coasts of the United States have been able to collaborate due to new technology that has surfaced in the past couple years. Recently an online service similar to the one that I had in mind has launched in beta but the services sound very promising.

Dan Zaccagnino is co-founder and co-CEO of Indaba Music, an online community that allows musicians to meet and collaborate with fellow musicians. He says there are about 100,000 people who have joined the service.

Once registered, a musician can look for others to collaborate with asynchronously. For example, a bassist may upload a bass track and search for people who can fill out his rock song with guitar, drums and vocals. Those musicians can then record their own tracks for the bassist and upload them to the same recording “session.”

“It’s really supposed to be a flexible platform for people to collaborate however they want to,” Zaccagnino says.

Zaccagnino demonstrated one session started by a synthesizer player in New York. The keyboardist found a drummer online — both lived in New York, but the two had never met before — to lay down a beat. Other players then joined the session: a guitarist from the U.K. and vocalists from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Now all they need to do is figure out how these artists can release their music together and reap the benefits of their collaboration. I have taken a gander at the site myself and plan to start using it although I currently have a project going on locally, exploring all music avenues in life has been something I have been very keen on for some time. Its very easy for one to get engaged into their current band but I think without exploring other avenues of music that do not fit the band, one can become very frustrated creatively. Sometimes some of my ideas just don’t fit within the confines of the current group I am collaborating with. This service will hopefully provide a way for more musicians to explore these creative avenues that otherwise fall into the abyss. I’ll follow up with my thoughts on the service in a few weeks after I have collaborated in a couple sessions.

I can listen to music all day and have various creative thoughts but its not until I actually play myself that my ideas come together.  Tonight I picked up my guitar while feeling uninspired and 10 minutes later I had a new riff and a solid idea for a web service for musicians.

Too often musicians find themselves stuck at a point where they either don’t have time to play with other people or simply can’t find the right people to adhere to their style.  With the availability of inexpensive recording equipment for computers and the simplicity of recording programs, musicians can post a track online they recorded minutes after it’s finished being rendered into an mp3. Where as 10 years ago, 6 months after an artist went into the studio you would finally hear their tracks.  Why not create a service where people can collaborate their music in the “cloud”?

For example, I lay down a 30 second guitar riff that I enjoy but I have lost all creative energy to continue the riff that I started.  I go to this online music service, upload my riff and await for submissions of people adding on to it.  I have the ability to accept the addition, add it as a maybe, or just flat deny it.  As the first uploader, you act as the decision maker as to what you add to the original piece.  Then you leave the maybes accessible to other artists to see if they can add something to make the maybes come to fruition.  After this process goes on for a period of time, you have a full song.  Once the song is done, all of the registered users who added on to the song are credited for the piece.  Then the song is then served up for download on the site which the song writers then receive royalties from each song they participate in.

With bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead releasing their material in separate tracks which allows other people to remix the tracks however they wish, this could also evolve into a remix service for established artists.  A lot of new technology has surfaced recently that allows for mixing of tracks through web interfaces which will eventually allow users to manipulate tracks solely through the web.  Although the power of software such as Pro Tools is a long way away from approaching the web,  I could see people getting highly interested in recreating others tracks simply by adjusting timing, volume, pitch, and tempo.   Once the tracks are remixed, if people enjoy the remix and download it, then the user gets a small piece of royalties and the rest will go to the artist.

In the next 10 years, it would be amazing if musicians could collaborate live over the internet but until then this would be a step in the right direction.  One of the best indie releases in the past 10 years was done through a collaboration of sending tracks back and forth online, The Postal Service.  Programmers do it, people remote in to the office everyday, why shouldn’t artists be next?  I’m surprised adobe hasn’t released an interactive feature of their software suite that allows for live collaboration.  With all of the recent online music infused start ups, I haven’t seen one that is trying to cater to tapping into all of these social networks of musicians and their friends that play music as well but live in different areas of the world.  This would be a perfect way to break out into this area.