WorshipGuitarist

I bought 4 GB of RAM from Other World Computing for ~$100 last week, and my machine has been screaming fast. Installation was very easy. You just take the battery off, remove 3 screws, out with the old, in with the new. It took less than 10 minutes from shutdown to startup.

I ordered a 200 GB 7200rpm hard drive with a 16MB cache (read: big and fast) yesterday, so should be able to pop that in this weekend. That installation will be a little more time consuming, as I’ll have to clone the contents of my current hd to the new one before I put it in. Over a USB 2.0 connection, it’ll probably take a couple of hours. =/

Once that’s done, though, I’ll be ready to do some serious recording. I still need a hardware interface so that I can use a microphone and record my actual amp, rather than rely on emulation software. I’ve got my eye on the Apogee Duet, which is supposed to be unreal. It’s pricey, but it looks like it’s the best portable firewire interface on the market - and it’s designed for the Mac.

In other news, I’ve been working on a design for my upcoming non-wordpress site, which still needs a name. I’ve got a couple of possibilities, but I’m not 100% yet. Stay tuned.

Back in August, I posted a tab from Song of Hope by Robbie Seay Band. Well, there was a pretty huge typo in there. A couple of the notes at the end were off by a fret. The crazy thing is that nobody pointed this out. I mean, that post has been viewed over 800 times - did nobody play through it? If you did, did you just decide that I’m a moron or something?

Anyway, it’s fixed now. I’d like to thank Mike for pointing out my mistake.

I think I may have mentioned before that I hate the WordPress editor. Well, I really hate it today. Seriously, I was ready to punch something this morning. It just did not want to let me fix that tab. I just need to bite the bullet and buy a new domain and Ecto or something.

Later. 

My wife has a small photography business and I have been working on a website for her to display her stuff. We just got Adobe Flash CS3 and I’m trying to learn the ins and outs of it so that I can create a decent photo gallery for her. Some of it is pretty simple, but some of it looks pretty intimidating - like all the ActionScript stuff.

Anyway, does anyone have any experience with this? Any advice, tips, tricks, book recommendations, etc would be greatly appreciated. 

I’m trying to think about some good names for my new site. I want it to be short, memorable, and somewhat guitar-related. Any ideas?

Apparently, I went over 20,000 hits a couple of days ago and never even noticed. How about that? Well, thanks for coming around and seeing what I have to say. I will probably start looking into something else with the blog thing in the near future - probably moving away from the wordpress.com domain. I’ll let you know when that happens.

What is the deal with the WordPress editor? It seems like every time I click “Save and Continue Editing” it gets rid of all my HTML formatting. Then I have to go in and reinsert all the spaces between paragraphs and make sure that everything lines up. It seems like I always forget about one paragraph, so I have to go back and do it again.

My last post took me about 15 minutes longer than it should have because of this. It also didn’t recognize the command for the audio player until the third time I typed it.

I’m just about ready to buy a domain and hosting from somewhere (GoDaddy.com maybe) and just doing my own thing. It can’t be that hard. 

Does anyone else have the same issues? 

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been tasked with the role of hall monitor (covering teacher bathroom breaks, etc) during the administration of the Stanford 10 test. Yesterday, I created a little playalong track for my private guitar students, who have been working on playing pentatonic scales over chord changes. Thinking about practicality, I used the I-V-vi-IV progression (G-D-Em-C), since my students are all church kids who play in the student worship band. This is a clip of what I came up with:

I created this in GarageBand with my mac on my lap without actually playing anything, which was handy since I was outside and somewhat mobile. I used loops for everything. I had to do some pitch shifting to get the bass and guitar parts to line up, but it’s a fairly simple process as long as you know how to count half-steps to add up to larger intervals. For example, -3 = down a minor third, +4 = up a major third, +7 = up a perfect fifth, etc.

If you want a longer clip to practice over, click here to download the long version.

Let me know if it would be helpful to post a brief tutorial on how I did this.

I can breathe a sigh of relief - the new MacBook Air is not a reason for me to have buyer’s remorse. Sure it’s a lot smaller, but it’s also less powerful than my Plain Jane MacBook. It’s also about $700 more expensive. Did I mention that there’s an option to add a (slightly smaller) solid state HD for the low, low price of $999!?

Anyway, it looks cool, but it’s not for me - thankfully. 

Well, we’re doing one of those standardized test things at school this week, and since I don’t have a homeroom I get to be a monitor. Basically I just sit out in the hallway and wait for a teacher to need to use the bathroom. Fortunately, our school has wi-fi, so I get to sit in the hall and screw around on the internet while I wait for the Macworld 2008 keynote to start.I need to work on some accompaniment tracks for my guitar students, so maybe I’ll open up Garageband and get a jump on that. 

I have decided that I would much rather spend $50 on a new drive than $250 on a new iPod. I don’t really need a color screen, and I really have no desire to watch video on a 2″ screen - my vision is bad enough already. So anyway, I was looking for a replacement hard drive for my iPod this morning on teh intarwebs and came across this article.

It seems that many people have had a lot of success with getting their iPods to work by simply slapping them around a little. I tried it myself this morning and it’s currently syncing up with my laptop. Usually, it doesn’t finish (it freezes up at around 1200 songs), so we’ll see how it goes.

659 and counting, so far so good.

Man, I really don’t want to buy a new iPod. I guess for some people, $250-400 is not a big deal, but I’m a teacher and my wife stays home with kids. Stuff like this is really a luxury. If you’re a regular here, you might be saying to yourself “didn’t he just buy a new computer?” but you have to remember that I had to save for months and sell off a lot of equipment to buy that thing. Anyway, I guess I’m kind of a cheapskate.

Up to 970 songs now - looking good.

Church services went ok yesterday. We dusted off God of Wonders this weekend - it’s been forever since we played that little chestnut. The little guitar solo thing in there is pretty fun to play. Here’s the whole set:

(C - D)You, You are God
(G) God of Wonders
VIDEO/WELCOME
(A) Here is our King
(A) Hallelujah
(A) Made to Worship
MESSAGE BUMPER
MESSAGE
OFFERING SONG - (B) Sweetly Broken
ANNOUNCEMENTS
CLOSING SONG - (A) Hallelujah

We’re supposed to be auditioning a new drummer this week, so we’ll see how that goes. Supposedly, he’s a guitar/bass player who also plays drums. The “jack of all trades” thing kind of thing tends to set off my alarms, but who knows?

Crap - stuck at 1301. Looks like I’m buying a new drive.