Author: Zingblog 2

Folding Pentagons

I’ve been working on an origami e-book that is on track to come out this spring. (More on that in a future post.) One of the models in it is my Fivefold Rose, which I’ve updated and improved. It’s based on a pentagon and the question of how to fold a regular pentagon from a square has been an age-old problem in origami. I know a few methods for approximating a regular pentagon, and with practice I’ve gotten good at eyeballing it so it comes out every time.

I recently discovered a new method in an old book from Japan from the 60’s. It’s been on my shelf for years, and I was on the verge of throwing it away and thought I’d flip thru it to see if there was anything worth saving it for, when I came across this little gem in the back of the book in with the classic bases. It’s based on the trick that the cosine of and 18 degree angle is within one percent of a 1:3 slope.

I’ve digrammed my own version of it, revising the steps to be clearer and more accurate, and making the folding sequence of subsequent steps reduce rather than amplify any folding errors. It’s pretty easy to get a perfect pentagon every time. The diagrams are essentially the first few steps of the new Fivefold Rose, thru forming the pentagon and some precreasing for the base.

The center of the pentagon is the center of the paper, which is useful for some applications. The tradeoff is that top corner of the pentagon is truncated (although you could just as easily fold a slightly smaller pentagon). For this model it doesn’t matter, and for alot of my pentagon-based polyhedra it doesn’t matter either. In any event it could easily be adapted to making a pentagon with the apex at the center of the top edge of the square by first folding the two long diagonals that would form the top point of a star embedded in the pentagon. I’m also exploring another method that uses the trick of the cosine of a 36 degree angle is very close to 4:5.

I showed it to John Montroll, the only other person I know who cares about this kind of thing like I do. In is book Origami Polyhedra Design he has a method for folding a golden rectangle from a square. The first time I saw it I immediately though there must be a way to use that to make a pentagon. It’s been in the back of mind ever since, but now I can forget about it. John has solved the problem and come up with a really elegant, mathematically perfect method for folding a pentagon in just 11 steps. Blew my mind when I saw it. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait for his next book to see it.

Deep Freeze

This is the time of year when it starts to get hard to cope with the weather. It’s been a month since I’ve seen my lawn. The weather has gotten really cold the last few days, down into the single digits at night and only up into the teens in the daytime. My level of energy is really low these days. All I want to do is lie on the couch under a blanket and nap. I’ve fallen asleep pretty much right after dinner the last 3 nights. I guess it’s a natural reaction as a living creature. The instinct to hibernate so as to fast forward to spring. The good news my back is feeling better with all this lying around. The bad news we’re only halfway thru winter and tomorrow it’s back to the ol’ grind.

Ski Season

Got a chance to go skiing this weekend up in the Catskills. Combined it with a trip up to see Martin, which was most excellent. My mind was totally blown by a thing called Dinosaur Train.

The skiing itself was pretty good. It was my first time since I hurt my back last year, so I was really taking it easy. It was pretty cold and the mountain was way crowded, cuz like everyone else we picked a long weekend to go skiing. Jeannie, the kids and I all skied together as a family, staying mainly on green trails. After a few runs we found lift G, a detachable quad which can only be reached from above, not from the base lodge. So the line was much shorter there and the lift faster. This serviced the longest run in the place, the slow way down from the summit. The snow was great but there was one really windy stretch. We just did run that a few times until it was time to go. The good news I can still ski and the next day my back felt fine. The other good news is my new ski jacket is really warm.

List night we had more snow but by the morning it had turned to rain, and everything was covered with a thick crust of ice over a few inches of wet heavy snow. Like crème broulee. By the time we were done cleaning of the cars and driveway, it had turned to rain. By the time I got out of the train station in Manhattan it was windy and raining hard, and as I hit the street my umbrella tore right apart.

At least the days are starting to get longer.

New Song: WSFBPLAU

Where WSFBPLAU equals (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding by Elvis Costello. As with all my covers, I chose this song for a few musical and other reasons. First off, although it’s not exactly a holiday song, it’s about peace love and understanding so it’s seasonal in a more abstract sense. (I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince my kids that Imagine is not a Christmas song, although it comes up right after Happy Christmas on our John Lennon album.)

Back when I worked at Fox Sports and built their Fantasy Football app, I’d do things when I was testing it like draft a team mode up of all guys names Smith, or of the players with the longest names in the NFL to see if it breaks the software. Similarly, with music I’ve thought for a long time it might be fun to do a set of songs with really long names, like Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More, What Is and What Should Never Be, Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey, and of course the inimitable When the World Is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around. If nothing else, it points out the weakness of current technology, because (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding.mp3 doesn’t fit on the screen of my iPod, plus it’s out of alphabetical order and the non-letter characters come out all messed up.

The main reason I chose this song was to do a number with just voice and piano. I had attempted this with Making Miles on the last Buzzy Tonic album, but with that I ended up adding a rhythm section at the second verse and synth solo later. This one remains stripped down throughout. Usually the tendency is to go ballad. I once worked up a piano version of the Chili Peppers’ Knock Me Down that goes in that direction. But WSFBPLAU rocks out, thanks to a propulsive 8th note rhythm in the left hand.

I wanted to see how quickly I could make a song. I’ve been waiting for the MBox3 Pro to become available and did this song partly to fill the void. It took me four sessions of a couple hours each. The first session I set up the project and laid down a piano part. I hadn’t really worked it up, I just banged out the chords like when I sang. The next session I did the vocals, which went down after just a couple warm up takes. Then I went back and redid the piano part with a bit better voice leading and the aforementioned 8th notes in the left hand. The last session was to mix it and add effects.

So here you go. Happy holidays everyone.

Tafari

Here’s a blast from the past: a friend recently posted this pic, an album cover from the band Tafari from the early 1990’s, of which I was a member. Tafari was a summer party band and we were only together for a few months, but in that time we gigged out a lot and even managed to record an EP of four original songs. The set was mainly Bob Marley and Steely Dan plus a bunch of reggae-influenced originals and a smattering of other stuff in the summertime party vibe. It was a large group consisting of a singer, drummer, percussionist, bass, two keyboards, two guitars and a three piece horn section. We were kind of an all-start lineup of the Kenmore music scene at the time. Led by Jim Parry, members included Bill Ross, Joe Quebral, Mark Colecchia, Chris Sierzchula, Matt Cline, Mark Hofschneider, Dan Jablon, Paul Bernstien, and your truly. I had thought Martin had sat in on a show but he says no. We pretty much used the money from every gig to buy beer for the next rehearsal.

We did the record Wiser Than Forest of Owls toward the end of the summer. Matt Cline and I did the cover art. Somehow I lost my copy over the years. If anyone has one, I’d love to hear these tracks again. From what I remember it came out quite well, and I even player clarinet on one song.

Origami Site Update 2009–10 New Models

It’s been over a year and a half since my last update to my origami site. Since that time I’ve come up with over a dozen new models. Narwhal, Walrus, Elephant Seal, Turkey, Zeppelin, Dollar Pyramid and Sphinx, several Tessellations, Color Change Stellated Octahedron, Great Dodecahedron, Sphere, and more! So here you go. Enjoy!

Music Update 3: Recording Studio Upgrade

The big news recording-wise is I’ve made some decisions about upgrading my recording studio. This is part of a program of improving my whole recording process. I learned alot from making the last record, and the next one will sound even better. I feel like on Face the Heat I really got it together singing-wise, and the playing, recording and arranging were strong. And of course my main strengths of Rhodes, sax and synths provide a solid foundation to the whole sound. Mixing it down with Erik was a great educational experience. Among the things I want to improve are my bass playing (see a previous post), my guitar playing (more on that later), and my drum sounds. And I want to get some kind of preamp or peak limiter/compressor for the way in when tracking. Had a bit of trouble with clipping on the last set of mixes.

For the next record I’m going to do a lot more of the mixing myself. I’ve been reading an excellent series of books on audio engineering by Bob Owsinski. There’s a volume for recording, mixing and mastering. They contain a wealth of info are an exactly at the level I need. I’m looking forward to applying it all.

The audio I/O box is the heart and soul of the studio, the main thing to upgrade. I’ve been using an original Mbox, which has served me admirably, but has its limitations. The main ones are I can only record two tracks at a time, and I can’t upgrade out of ProTools 7. I might mention that I’ve been using digiDesign hardware and software for almost twenty years now, going back to the original AudioMeda and SampleCell cards on my Mac Quadra. But my Mbox doesn’t work in ProTools 8 and I never got the whole system quite working on the MacOS, so when I’m recording I have to boot in Windows.

After a lot of research, I’ve got my mind set on an Mbox 3 Pro. Hardware-wise the Mbox3 Pro looks like it has a lot going for it. It has 4 XLR inputs and up to 6 line/instrument inputs, as well as 2 SPDIF inputs for a total of 8 simultaneous channels. It also has full-on aux send/return loops for outboard FX. Best of all, it has a built-in “soft peak limiter” on the inputs. This supposedly impart simulated analog warmth and tape saturation on the way in, and if it’s any good ought to save me from having to buy an outboard preamp.

Software-wise this would allow me to upgrade to PT8 (and now PT9), which would open up a whole lot of new drum software and samples and high-end effects. On the downside, I have to upgrade my OS to 10.6 and may have to get a new version of SampleTank. So all of this software updating is nontrivial. On top of that it remains to be seen whether I can use my current MOTU MIDI interface in the then system.

The main trouble is the Mbox 3 Pro is not available yet. It’s release has been pushed back twice, from early November to mid-November, and now to the end of November.

There’s more gear upgrades in the offing. I’m thinking of getting an 88-key piano-style keyboard controller. This has actually been on my list for a long time, but as with everything, finding the time to do the research is the main obstacle. Every few years the product space has completely changed. I’m currently using my old Roland Juno as my primary controller, but it only has 61 keys, and while it’s great as synth, it doesn’t really cut if for doing piano parts. On the other hand, I just finished Karn Evil 9, which is a big a piano song as I’m likely to do, and I got thru that alright by playing some of the more extreme passages in a different octave and then transposing in software.

At some point I’d like to get a drum kit too, but that’s probably a way off still. Every new piece of gear takes time to learn and integrate.

While I’m waiting for the new Mbox and PT 9 I’ve started looking at Reaper, a FOSS DAW. I downloaded and installed it, and was happy to see it discovered my MBox, my MOTU MIDI interface and my VST FX. I’m thinking of doing a quick, simple project to put it through its paces. I have a song in mind, a pop song cover that’s under 3 minutes long, but is one of my all-time favorites, one of those that just stays with you.

Next up: Rocket to the Moon with guitars!!!