My brother started it. He has a page on Soundclick "Delmarj". I have all these midi files lying about that I haven't done much with in a while. Recently I had to reinstall Garage Band v1 and Reason for another audio editing project. This got me jonesing to do some music. So I whacked out a couple of old tunes to start and then just now did a new one in Garage Band. It's cliché and derivative but it works for me.

This is great. I can finally make some half way decent music pretty easily and quickly for animations or whatever.

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=872491


If anyone has music they like to share or a band to promote, Soundclick is free and has unlimited uploads. For the free account you are limited to 128kbps mp3's, 10mb each. If you pay the $29 for the year you can upload high quality mp3's.

p.s. The sub heading is sarcastic. I obviously don't have incredible musical talent.

-vern

Hey, you could pass "Bang!" off as flamenco guitar.

Everybody has to visit this site. The music, despite Vern's protestations, is actually good, but the "liner notes" are fabulous. Right up there with the notes for the Florence Foster Jenkins record, or the best of PDQ Bach, or Tom Lehrer. I think this is what writers call "reverse English."

I enjoyed "Bang" and TISA exhibits sound musical sensibilities. No subtitles, no sarcasm.

Wooohooo! Thanks!

Next up... THE GRAMMYS!




You should have seen me the other night. I have all these old midi files but they are "stuck" in a dead application called "Musicshop" which no longer exists and there are no tools for conversion. Follow along now as I relive the nightmare that IS Vern's World;

I have a copy of Musicshop on my ancient old crusty Mac. This is older than the OTHER old crusty Mac I just retired. This thing runs OS 8.5. It's a Power PC but not a "G" anything. The mouse is the ORIGINAL gray Mac mouse with a FREAKING RODENT TESTICAL... or "ball". No lasers in this bad boy.

So I fire up this machine not even expecting it to start. Hook up the network... that took a bit of fiddling since I didn't have Apple Talk turned on for the newer machines. See I planned to copy the files to my "newer" Mac and install Musicshop there and save out all my music as general midi files so I can load them into Garage Band and Reason.

So far so good... uh... until the installation of the software... it's on... floppies. (Floppies are these small square plastic "disks" that hold computer data.). Besides the fact that the software is on floppies... I have absolutely no idea where in the heck the floppies are. They have to be at least 10 years old by now so they might not even work. So... on to my alternate plan.

I have a copy of Cakewalk Metro 4. Very old. For some odd reason I thought it would open Musicshop files in the original format... I was wrong of course but will get to that later. First, I had to find the installer for that. After wasting time searching for it I find it in the logical place, in my CD case of software disks. An actual CD! So I install it... uh... where's the FREAKING SERIAL NUMBER DAGNABBIT! After another 20 minutes of searching I find the number. Of course this means running in mac classic. Successful installation... uh... no... when I launch it it asks for "The name on line 15 of the Metro users manual." WHERE'S THE FREAKING MANUAL?!?!

30 minutes later I find the manual... <sigh>. I am exhausted at this point but refuse to give up. I enter the name from page 8, line 15 of the user manual... It won't launch. I Don't have OMS installed in classic. Has anyone worked with OMS before? It's not fun. It doesn't like Apple Talk and it HATES Mac Classic. So I go through the whole process of installing OMS in classic. Finally get Metro 4 installed.only to discover Metro 4 won't open Musicshop files. It only loads the midi files. I had been exporting midi from Musicshop and they had the Musicshop icon which led me to believe it was opening native Musicshop files. At this point I am about to scream but it's like 3 in the morning and my neighbors have a new baby, so I decided to struggle with the dang malfunctioning mouse and the ancient computer to save out all the midi files (can't use a different mouse. All of my mice are USB. This is an ANCIENT computer that has no USB.)

It was too frustrating. It was agony. So back to Musicshop One more try. Find the dang floppies. The serial number is suppose to be on disk 1. I found all 4 installation floppies... No serial number... but wait.. these were the installation disks for version 1 of Musicshp. I needed the install disks for version 2. Another 30 minutes searching for floppies.

Finally found the dang floppies. Found the dang serial number. Installed Musicshop. Exported the midi files.

The song "Bang!" was the result of all that work. It was the first one I "converted" using Garage Band... <sigh>



-vern

Were those 3" or 5" floppies?

My favorite is TISA. I can still see your animatics from that short in my head.
While listening my daughter Julia (age 9) spontaneous critiqued, "I like that one".

I asked her what she thought of 'SMA'. She says, "I like the other one better".

So there you have it.
Very nice work Vern.

Rodney,

I hope the title of "SMA" wasn't too offensive for your 9 year old.

When I upgrade Garage Band I plan to start making my own Apple Loops (can't with v1). Then I can record my own "sounds" from around the house, plug them into the loops and create some... interesting soundscapes. Apple Loops have become VERY popular in many music applications. They aren't limited to just GB. They are AMAZING. The loops can be time scaled without pitch change, pitch can be changed without effecting time. The latest version of GB has an "Apple Loops utility" to help with creating the loops. I can't wait to play with that. Apple always seems to come up with new technology that spreads like a virus.

MJL,

Musicshop is 3" floppies. My ORIGINAL copy of "Musicshop" was called "Music Construction Kit" and it ran on an Apple II... it used 4" floppies which had to be swapped out constantly to save files. Had to enter notes one at a time using the keyboard... no mouse. I was able to save those files to the current mac OS using 3 different older macs each with different OS's and drive formats and open them in the new Musicshop. That was many years ago when I was very much younger and had more patience.

-vern

Nah, she didn't see it. Not on her radar.
She was busy playing in the room and just heard your music.

Vern,

Can I use Caffiend in my student film? I think it would be a really good fit.

Absolutely! Go for it dude! As long as I get credit.

-vern

WoooHooo!

I found the original Rebirth RB-338 file that is the "base" for the song "Caffiend". I exported the file to an aif and then did a lot of stuff to it but the original Rebirth file is pretty darn close. Rebirth is free now http://www.rebirthmuseum.com/ so you could play around with the original file if you want. You could change the tempo or extend the length, change the patterns etc. I highly recommend Rebirth. It's a lot of fun to play with. I don't think it runs on OSX but it might run in classic. I haven't tried it yet. I run it on XP.

http://www.lowrestv.com/misc_stuff/caffiend.zip

-vern

You'll definitely get credit, I'll even burn you a DVD. How do you want to be credited?

Original Music by Vernon Zehr.

Works for me or whatever you want. ... doesn't have to be special. It's nice to know it's going to get used for something creative.

Feel free to use any of my music for your school projects in the future if... you're really desperate.

-vern