Needless to say I’m absolutely shattered. I took the ‘Extreme Rock’ class with sixteen students with fast fingers and loud amps!!! Good lord!! For our final performance we played ‘The Trooper’ by Iron Maiden and ‘Crazy Train’ by Ozzy Osbourne. It was awesome. They worked really hard and melted some faces with some great solos.

Couldn’t have done it without a great staff. Here’s a pic of me and fellow tutors having a well earned beer. From left to right. Me, Daniel Johnson (Level 1 guitar), Andy Moore (Level 2 guitar), Cath Stephens (Vocals), Jamie McCredie (Level 3 guitar)..Missing are Mathew Browell (Bass) and Ian Halford (Drums).

Everyone worked really hard and made it a great week for the kids. Now I need to sleep!!!

Chris’ blog CSS Tricks is one of my favorite blogs. He writes really useful tutorials and I’ve learned a great deal of cool stuff from him. Being a bit of a beginner at the Web Design thing having only been doing HTML stuff for a little over a year I was quite pleased (and a bit gobsmacked!) that what was a bit of an experiment learning jQuery turned into a full on CSS Tricks tutorial bonanza!!!

I couldn’t get it to work as a nav as my jQuery skills aren’t as good as Chris’ so again I’ll learn something from his tutorial. This is totally cool!!!!!

You can see the tutorial here.

The Transformer object

The Transformer object is tucked away inside the Enviroments ‘New’ file menu. Chances are you might never have actually used this as it looks a bit daunting if you don’t know what is is. It simply allows you to change or ‘Transform’ an incoming MIDI message into something else in real time. There is another version of this object called the Transform window which can be found in the main Window menu or inside the new ‘Piano Roll’ window under Functions. This lets you transform recorded MIDI.

For this tutorial we’ll be going for transform on input. So, open the Enviroment window by pressing Command+8. In the top left corner choose ‘Clicks & Ports’. When you’ve done this select ‘New’ from the menu and choose ‘Transformer’. Insert it between the ‘Input view’ and ‘Sequencer Input’ like so.

When you’ve done this double click it and a dialogue box should appear.

Tramsforming the MIDI

Now we need to turn our sustain pedal MIDI message into a ‘Note on’ message. Sustain pedal is transmitted as MIDI controller 64. It has a value of 0 to 127 like all MIDI messages including Note messages. 0 is ‘off’, ‘127′ is on. All we have to say is take anything equal to a Control message with a value equal to 64 and Fix it to a Note message with the note value C1 ( that’s where most MIDI Kick drums are mapped on the keyboard ). This is what it looks like set up.

Pressing the sustain pedal should now show up as C1 in the MIDI activity display in the Transport bar.

Load up a virtual instrument track and open your favorite drum sampler. You can now play the hi-hat and snare on your keyboard and use the sustain pedal as the kick drum. It takes a bit of getting used to and feels a bit lumpy at first but there’s always quantize!

Don’t forget to unwire it if your going to record say a piano afterwards as hitting the sustain pedal will produce a note instead. The Transform function in Logic is a very powerful tool but gets neglected as it looks a bit complex. Break out that manual and dig in as it can produce a lot of really cool effects and save unnessessary mouse editing. I use Fixed Note Length all the time to clean up drum parts. Humanize can also unstiffen quantized parts.

Enjoy!

Here’s a useful link if your programming any sort of Urban or R’n'B drums. At logic-cafe awaits a full set of Akai MPC groove templates. These are a really great resource for any programmer. The Akai MPC has become synonymous with the urban pop sound. This is mainly down to its unique quantize settings. Years ago I made my own set of these by painstakingly Recycling these grooves using a Urie click to get an accurate transient. You’ll notice it immediatly when you apply one of these suckers to your MIDI drum programming.

They even have a nice little tutorial on how to add these MIDI files to your quantize list if your unsure how to use them. Pro users only though as Logic Express doesn’t support the Groove template feature.

You can download them here.

They also have some rather cool Fender and Gibson guitar icons too.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited about my lovely shiny(matte) Mac Pro. With it’s lovely 8 core processor and more RAM than I need. But my god it’s been a trial. Lost serial numbers, mislaid installer CD’s, intaller patches, plugin wrappers, Logic validation issues and tranferring and testing 700 gigs of sample library has left me feeling a bit brain dead! I must of put my administrator password in about 200 times too!

I’ve acquired a lot of software since i got my old G5 about 5 years ago so I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. My much hammered Power Mac ended up with about 25meg of free hard disk and i thought it might be a good idea to upgrade. Also software has become more and more processor intensive and the old PPC 1.8 dual chip just wasn’t happy any more. I’d made a conscious decision to wait this time for things to get ironed out as it took a good year of problems going to OSX Tiger. But it seems I was wrong. Fantastic though the Intel chip is it’s been problematic getting some things to work, still!

Spectrasonics Trilogy for example now has to be wrapped and lauched outside of Logic! Amplitube (which i use all the time) just won’t pass Logic’s peculiar AU validater, even though the same version works perfectly on my Intel Macbook Pro.

I have to say Native Instruments were brilliant. I phoned to say I’d lost my Reaktor 5 installation CD. Within 1 minute of varifying my details a link appeared in my mail box to a download link for the installer CD. Can’t live without Reaktor! I love NI!

The thing I’ve been most impressed by is Toontracks DFH Superior 2. I’ve always used Toontracks stuff for drums but this is totally awesome. Those room mics sound killer. If your going to buy a software drum program you’ve got to consider this the only choice! Sounds like i work for them!

So with only a few more things to go hopefully tomorrow I can set about actually doing some music!

……and finish this website!

The basic premise is that every time you go to fret a note that is the same pitch as an open string you use the open string instead. This creates some really nice cascading runs. It’s also cool as you get some weird dissonance’s too. The idea is leave the open string ringing into the next note.

Below is a simple example of an Em one octave scale.

Now check out the same scale using this idea.

Notice how the fingering of the first three notes has been completely modified to accommodate them all ringing together. Get the idea! Remember to get your hands positioned correctly so you don’t choke any ringing notes.
Obviously the trick is to play in a key that contains a lot of these notes. G is going to work great as it contains all the open strings. C is also good, A and D work really well and Bm. Eb probably isn’t going to work too well!

Note in the tab below I’m using my middle finger to play the open string with a hybrid picking style. Don’t forget to start slowly and build the tempo up. This can feel really odd at first as getting your head round picking out open strings this quick can be strange, but keep going. Try it with loads of scales in different positions.

The second half of the lick has a little pedal steel move followed by some pretty staple country double stop ideas. Try to get some spank into it. Use your middle and ring fingers to pick the double stops.

This doesn’t just have to apply to country although it works best with clean sounds…or not, depending on your taste. Check out Brent Mason if you haven’t already. It’s quite frightening.

This was played on a Strat - Bridge pick-up with some slap delay and some compression.

It should sound a bit like this!

Here’s the tab. Enjoy!

I’m pretty busy at work and have to revamp the the studio but will try hard to make this a good resource for guitar tutorials and resources aswell as web stuff too!

Laters