I wrote a song ...

... and I don't think it came out too bad:

Click here to listen

For this, I used my trusty BR600. This machine offers good recording with minimal hassle.

The drums are completely "analogue".

I used a separate track on the BR600 for the hi-hat, snare and bass sounds.

The "hi-hat" is me tapping a plectrum half way between the stereo mics on the 8 track.
The "snare" is me clapping.
The "bass" is me tapping both of the stereo mics with my fingers at the same time.

Over this I put a simple guitar riff using the unit's "Crunch" guitar effect (P05).

After these were recorded, I used the A-B loop functionality to listen to the above composition repeatedly. This allowed me to start formulating vocal melodies in my head. As these came together I threw some words in.

Tracks 5/6 and 6/7 are used for stereo vocal recordings. I used both of these combos in recording a simple vocal harmony for the track.

Once I had all of the tracks recorded separately, I again used the A-B function to listen back to the full "song" a couple of times and to adjust levels. When I was happy with these, I bounce recorded all tracks to 6/7's Virtual Track 2. Using a stereo track here meant that the exported .wav file was in stereo.

I think it came together quite well. I'll definitely be working on more tracks in the future and probably be using the BR600's digital drum kit.... I've never actually used its mastering functionality, so it'd probably be a good idea to take a swing at that too :-)

Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Tomorrow's post will be on steam engines! (Trains)

I tried to get things going ...

... by writing one blog post every day for the rest of the year.

I watched Julie & Julia last night.

While the movie's subject matter had little to do with anything in my life, I find myself in a similar predicament to Julie - I'm pushing 30 and feel like I've gone nowhere.

As motivation, I, like many thousands of others, have decided to use a blog to focus my daily endeavors. My steps towards becoming the person I really want to be.

I've really no idea who that person is, but I'll start by detailing a few interests.

1. Music - I can't imagine life without it. I wish I could spend every day playing music and that this could keep me in food.
2. Computers - For the guts of 20 years I've spent 6.5 of the 7 days in a week on a computer. I love em and loath em. I've begun to feel that I use the internet much like others do soap operas - I read about other peoples' lives and I live my own through their exploits. I've been trying to cut down, but working in IT doesn't lend itself to getting away from them.
3. Beer - Like most Irish, I've a massive fondness for beer. I've toyed with home brewing and would like to venture further into this in the near future.

This reads more like a personal notepad than anything else, but fuck it, I gotta get organized.

This is the plan for each day:

1. I will cover at least one topic from the above 3 headings.
2. I will set the following days topic(s)

Tomorrow

I will talk about writing a song.

I finally resolved my RT2800PCI Wifi Disconnecting Issue in Ubuntu 12.04 ...

.... by simply following this post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11858549&postcount=9

Much happiness after months of my net connection dropping every few minutes.

Luckily, I use my Ubuntu partition for mostly dev work, so rarely needed much internetting... This most likely means that I'll never code again, now that I have free access to youtube whenever I want it :'(

I figured out how to have `make` stretch my CPU's 8 cores!

While trying to build OpenCV from scratch, I continuously ran into compile errors.

These would happen ~5 minutes (25%) into the make process.

Using an i7 CPU, I wondered why the compilation was taking so long for a relatively small project. I checked the output of "top" and noticed that the load was hovering around 1, which for an 8 core processor is nothing short of lazy.

A short trip to google told me that the following will let me tell "make" how many cores I want it to use.

make -jX

e.g. make -j8 allowed me to use all 8 cores and therefore cut the compile time accordingly.

SCORE :D

Using Vim Tabs Instead of Multiple Vim Instances

... I found out that you can open multiple files in tabs with one instance of vim, instead of across multiple instances of vims in different terminal windows!

vim -p *.py

Will open all python source files in the current directory in tabs inside vim.

gt and gT will move forwards and backwards in your tab list.

If you want to create a new tab with vim already running, use the following command:

:tabnew

Yeow!

Slow SSH Password Prompt

... I finally solved a small, but annoying issue I'd been having with SSH. I think it'd been happening since our newer VMs started using Centos6 instead of 5.

It was taking the guts of 10 seconds for the password prompt to appear whenever I  tried to SSH into the server.

I found that this was caused by some sort of reverse DNS lookup being done on my host.

Arsebiscuits to that!

Make sure that GSSAPIAuthentication is set to no as follows in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

GSSAPIAuthentication no

Then restart your sshd service.

... I am dying.

Finished work, went to the pub for one and then on to a mate's gaff for what turned into "The Ryan Dunn Drinking Game". This simple affair involved drinking every time Ryan Dunn appeared in shot during Jack Ass 3 and lead to extreme inebriation in a very short space of time.