Giant Origami Santas

My friend Brian Webb has one of his origami designs featured in a new storefront display here in New York. Brian sez:

If you happen to be in NYC, stop by the Uniqlo store display at 546 Broadway, New York, NY 10012 USA. There you will see huge versions of three Santa models. The display is based on Santa models by Edwin Corrie, Noriko Nagata, and Brian K. Webb (me).

The project was put together and installed by Mona Kim.
http://monakimprojects.com

There are a few pictures of the display on my Flickr site.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bkwebb/5237424883/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bkwebb/5237424613/

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.

Music Update 4: The Question of Electric Guitars

So you wanna be a rock’n’roll star
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
And take some time and learn how to play
And if you make the chart
In a week or two the girls will tear you apart

If you’ve been following this blog (it turns out both Captain Hammer and the LAPD read it), you know I got me an acoustic guitar about year ago and have good fun and success in learning how to play it. I seem to have settled into a mode of mainly the folk and rock songs that are good to sing and play rhythm to. I even wrote my first song on guitar a while back and want to put it on my next records. It’s called Rocket To The Moon, and is an uptempo pseudo-punk number (although it has far more than three chords. Eight or nine I think.)

So I’ve been thinking about how to record this song. At one point I had hoped to get it done by Xmastime to submit to NASA song contest for the final space shuttle flight, but that’s looking unlikely right now due to repeated delays of the ship date for the mbox 3 pro. In the interim I took a look at Reaper, the FOSS DAW, but ran into so many issues with the setup I decided to punt for the time being and go back to the original mbox with PT7 to record my last song on the old rig.

It’s a short cover with a long title. I’m trying to do a really stripped down arrangement with just voice and piano and get it done quickly. But it turns out it’s not so easy to have a simple arrangement and make it come across with power and emotion. So I’m kinda woodshedding it now. Still hope to have it done in a couple of weeks, and by then the new box will be out and it’s on to the big upgrade.

Meanwhile in guitarland, Martin lent me a guitar mutli-FX box and amp simulator. I have an old electric guitar and I hooked the two of them together and gave it a whirl. The box is fun and interesting, and has a lot of cool sounds. But the interface is obscure and I don’t have a good handle on how to do more than move thru the presets, adjust the input gain, and select an amp simulation. This gives a good amount of range in available sounds, but there’s a whole effects block I haven’t cracked, with reverbs and tremelos and wahs and flanges all kinds of groovy stuff. Martin is coming for a visit sometime soon, so hopefully he’ll have the time to show me how the thing works. The other issue I have with the effects box is so many of the sounds are heavy metal megadistortion. I’m mostly playing rhythm and strumming, so this is completely wrong. I just want to embiggen my sound a bit. I wouldn’t mind getting a kinda slinky 70’s sound like George Harrison or David Gilmour either.

My electric guitar is an old Guild with dual humbuckers,. It’s okay but not great, so I’ve been thinking of getting a new one. I was also thinking of selling it and thought I might get a couple hundred for it. Then I went on ebay and saw the same model listed at $450 up to $1100. So I guess I should try and find out how much mine is worth.

Picking out a new guitar is a daunting task, cuz it’s not really my area and there’s just so many choices. I’ve been looking online and checking out the guitar section every time I go to Manny’s to see about the mbox. I’ve divided the product space into three main subtypes: Gibson, Fender and other. They seem to go from $300ish to as expensive as you wanna get. One friend thinks I should check out a Telecaster and another recommends Paul Reed Smith guitars. I’m leaning towards a Gibson GS, partly cuz I like the look and partly cuz of the humbuckers. I really need to just go to a music store one day an play some guitars. I tied to a couple weeks ago when I had a day off from work, but I ended up going to buy a snowblower instead.

So for now I think I’m gonna punt on the whole electric guitar thing and record Rocket to the Moon on acoustic and build the arrangement around that. I have another song ready to go after that called Seven Is Magic, an instrumental which I’m gonna do with a sax quartet. I might rename it Sea of Tranquility (or Valley of Serenity) to fit in with the whole moon concept.

I also came up with a bass part for RTTM. Remember what I said about the bass being easy? Well the only thing that’s really hard for me is fast repeated 16th notes on the same note. This is not a pattern I usually favor, but it seemed like I should try it for this song. It didn’t really work so I said to myself what would John Paul Jones do? So the new pattern is based on a rotation of fast moving riffs, a la Good Times Bad Times or Dazed and Confused.

Practicing the Poetry of Curly Braces

For all the pressure and tumult at my job that last few months, here’s one good result: I’m writing the best code I’ve ever written. I feel like I’ve leveled as a programmer (this seems to happen every 6 mos. to a year with me as I integrate things I’ve been learning) and can now do up to 186 points of damage with a single line of code.

I just spent the evening finishing off a huge feature set that had been my main focus the last 2 months or so. Tonight it was just cleaning up code finishing off a few loose ends, but I was able to sit back and look at my code and say, woah, that’s beautiful.

It’s a bit like Denny Diaz says about the mu chord: you have to practice it until you can do it without thinking about it. So it’s been with me and lots of best practices and design patterns that I used to work hard to implement and now they just sort of come to me as my first idea on how to approach things.

A few specific things I’ve really been focused on down in the details dancing with the devil. One is to never repeat any code. Ever. Everyone copies and pastes blocks of codes, and I used to be much more tolerant of it. Now whenever I temped to do that, I look at the block and make it into its own method and call it from wherever I was going to paste it. The other thing is I’ve been breaking methods up and writing shorter and shorter methods. I’ve had as a rule of thumb that if a method doesn’t fit on a screen its too long. Now I’m thinking more and more that in many cases over half a screen is too long.

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!!!

Again With the Turkeys

Let’s see … a few things. Yesterday was our big deadline at work, the release of v2.2 of out software. We almost made it, but our QA guy was hung up by our server going down all the time the last few days. Meanwhile the last bunch o’ weeks of working extra hours while trying to keep everything else going have caught up to me and I was kinda under the weather yesterday. I’ve been watching some Galactica to unwind a few nights over the last few weeks, TV as a sedative. Everyone says BSG is awesome, but I’m not so sure. For one thing, it’s very dark, gloomy and humorless. Not very entertaining in the sense of providing entertainment. Second, EJO is great as Adama, but the only character with any personality in the whole show is Starbuck. Everyone else is just in the situation, and pretty dark and gloomy and humorless about it. Third the pacing is very slow, like a soap opera. A lot of inconsequential stuff happens every episode, and some of it moves the Big Plot forward a degree or two. Lastly, the genius scientist and his imaginary Cylon girlfriend are just too much! Still the thing is strangely compelling, and I expect I’ll be making my way thru the series just to see what happens.

The big thing we accomplished around the house last week was to paint the ceilings downstairs. They kinda did a crappy job when they built the house and it always bothered me, but it sometimes takes a while to get around to things. It’s a big room that includes my studio and our family room and Jeannie’s office (the size of all 3 bedrooms plus the hall and bathrooms and part of the kitchen), and it was a big job. We started Friday night and did most of the rest Saturday night, and finished Sunday afternoon. It’s the only way to fit in a big job like that. And of course that’s probably part of the reason I’m so burnt out right now. Still, we’ve been meaning to get around to it for a long time, and it’s much better than it was before. Cross another item off our hydra-headed todo list.

But you came here to read about turkeys, and by that I mean origami turkeys. In between everything else, I taught my Turkey at the Origami USA Special Sessions Saturday at the museum. I get a lot of great feedback on this model. I taught it last spring, but decided to it again this fall because of the tie-in with Thanksgiving. And I’m happy to say it went over quite well. It was a good group and they all did great at the model. Including one kid about Lizzy’s age. Wow.

I hadn’t folded the model in about a year couldn’t really remember how it went. It’s a pretty complex model (probably over 100 steps once I diagram it). As luck would have it, Friday at work our servers crapped out so I had some downtime and was able to fold a few attempts and get as far as the base. When I taught the class they were all advanced folders and got the idea of free-form sculpting the details from the base, so that wasn’t a problem. Still it’s good to work it out and take it to the next level. Absolutely necessary for diagramming for a book. Along the way I got some of the previously improvised parts a bit more formalized too, particularly in the tail, so I feel a lot better about this model then I did before. The only thing left to work out now is the head. Now if I can only find the right paper I can make an exhibit quality version.

I had some time a the end of my session so I taught my Walrus. (I usually bring whatever new models I have to these things to see what people think of them, and there were some requests to teach this one.) This is the kind of model I really like. It’s only 20 or 30 steps, but communicates so much, and not being so hard, a much wider range of people respond to it. This one will definitely get into my book. The slate is already pretty full for my first book and most of the diagrams are drawn, but I guess there’s the potential for a follow up. I only wish diagramming didn’t take so long. Recently people have been sending me email asking to make youtube videos teaching my models. I guess I should be grateful they ask, but I have to tell them no. Boy, why doesn’t some one volunteer to help diagram for my book? I guess that’s why we need diagramming software. And so the circle of futility is complete.

Here’s a crease pattern for the Turkey Base. Probably not enough detail to figure out how to fold the final model, but enough for the basic layout. Hint: it’s a modified bird base.

Music Update 2: Karn Evil 9

Here’s a new recording, a cover of Keith Emerson’s Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression, originally off the ELP album Brain Salad Surgery.

If you know me you know that Keith Emerson had long been one of my big musical idols. As a kid I was really into synthesizers and admired his pioneering synth work, although in those days most of his piano stuff was way beyond me. When Lizzy was a baby I quit playing in bands and had a big hole in my life. I bought a piano (up until that time I only had synths and my Fender Rhodes) and decided to finally learn how to really play, to get to the next level on piano as opposed to “keyboards”. I played a variety of stuff but focused mainly on jazz, and eventually stride, because without a rhythm section you can get across a whole song in a stride style. In the rock/pop realm there are only a handful of musicians who write on piano and have stuff that’s musically interesting and hangs together without a band – Lennon/McCartney, Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder, Randy Neuman, Joe Jackson and a few others.

And then there’s Keith Emerson. Emerson Lake and Palmer were pretty much the prototype for a large swath of subsequent prog rock, and at the heart of it is Keith’s keyboards. I set out to learn a few of his big pieces, and they are head-and-shoulders above anything else I’ve studied in terms of imagination, complexity and difficulty. So I thought it would be a good idea to really work up a few and learn his secrets. I mastered three: Take a Pebble, The Endless Enigma, and Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression. Here’s one aspect of it: his music sounds high energy because it takes a lot of energy to play. He loves fast tempos and wide melodic intervals, so your hands are really moving a lot. Better be warmed up before you break into one of these numbers.

My version is a bit different, hopefully somewhat my own. I memorized it long ago and since it’s drifted from the original, so some parts are condensed and others expanded. Also, I play without the bass and drum accompaniment. Perhaps the biggest change is I use a Rhodes rather than a grand piano, to bring out the jazzy aspect of the piece. Although Emerson is widely regarded as a classically influenced pianist, he also has great jazz chops and sensibility, and was a big disciple of Dave Brubeck among others, and some of his best stuff is as much jazz as classical. I’ve often wondered why he didn’t do more in that direction. After all other prog guys Bill Bruford have tried their hand at it to the point where you could make the case that there is such a thing as British jazz. I guess once you’ve conquered arena rock there’s no great compulsion to stow the cannons and go for something more intimate and subdued.

(Aside: I read in the news recently that Keith survived some alarming emergency abdominal surgery. Stuff like that reminds you that everyone’s human. I wish him a speedy and full recovery, and hope to see him touring again before too long.)

My version is a bit more rubato, and perhaps not quite as strident or uptempo. The method I used was to record to a click track, merging together multiple takes. Once I was done I felt it sounded a bit stiff, so I ended up going back in and penciling in tempo changes to simulate the kind of feel that I give the tune when I play without a click track. That turned out to be pretty successful.

As far as the mix goes, there are actually six piano tracks. I triple tracked the part with three different samples, each in stereo. The main track is a straight-up Rhodes. Second is a Rhodes with tremolo and other effects, mixed to the left to provide some sonic motion. Third is a grand piano, mixed to the right and way down low, almost subliminal, to provide a bit of plonk on the low and trinkle on the high notes, just a bit of general attackiness. I put the effects on a bus rather than as channel inserts, to try and unify the sounds as one voice. I’ve been reading some books on mixing (more on that in another post) and got some ideas I wanted to try. The effects chain consists of some pretty heavy compression, followed by a really short delay and then a plate reverb. The return is mixed in just enough to add some presence without sounding overly processed. Then, since I’m not doing a legit mastering step for this song, I threw a limiter on the main bus on the way out. I think it came out quite nice.

Origami Great Dodecahedron

Way back in April I folded a Great Dodecahedron, posted the crease pattern, and promised pictures as soon as I got around to it…

Way back in April I folded a Great Dodecahedron, posted the crease pattern, and promised pictures as soon as I got around to it. Well I completed the model a long time ago, but only took pictures this weekend. I realized I haven’t updated my origami gallery in over a year, so I took photos of a bunch of models. Expect a major update to my origami gallery soon. But meanwhile, this shape deserves a special callout cuz it’s so cool.