Click Tracks, Awesome Mashup, and More

Learned my lesson the other day that any on-the-fly recording I do should either be done with a click track or edited in Abelton Live (Live has a fantastic warp tool) afterwards. Otherwise the tempo just goes everywhere. Still posting this just for posterity:

Kitchen Song of Storms by esbie

A while ago, Phil and I made a papercraft keyboard cat. Pic below and the instructions are online here

Btw, the keyboard cat you see here is chillin' in Phil's new Paul Mccobb dresser thing.

I'm going to be entering yet ANOTHER remix contest, this time for Little Boots' "Earthquake". So, while I was downloading all the stems (unrelated: why on earth did they split up the stems by stereo left/right but not by individual instruments? how annoying ~_~) I was listening the the electric guitars and realized that it the chord progression was eerily similar to a very famous song... can you guess? Here's the elecguitar stem:
Elecguitars RIGHT by LittleBoots
Any theories? Well, fastforward 5 hours and I went from the elecguitars stem to this!
Earthquake vs. Otherside Remix by esbie
Red Hot Chili Peppers FTW. Turns out the two songs are only 2 semitones away from eachother, so I warped, transposed, and edited it all in Ableton. Matching tempos was actually not an easy feat... it's now obvious to me that RHCPs don't use click tracks either ^_^;;

This mashup was also difficult because I only had stems for one of the songs (Earthquake, naturally) and so that forced me to use all of Otherside's voicings. Since both tracks have a lot of bass, I had to make sure only one bassist was playing at a time.

Unfortunately I won't be submitting this remix to the contest because of inherent copyright issues (sry, you can't dl this remix from the soundcloud player either), but it sure was fun to make!

APE + Roomba

Last weekend I went to the Alternative Press Expo 2009, where I got to see lots of indie comic book artists showing off their stuff. Way cool.

Also, I shot a video of my roomba, since my mom was curious about it

Tricky Tricky Remix Completion!

I like Royksopp's music, so their remix contest was a total 'yes please, sign me up'. The original track is called Tricky Tricky and you can listen/download it on Soundcloud. My remix turned out pretty eclectic and unfocused, but eh, music is music.

Tricky Tricky (Remix de Esbie) by esbie

Also: since I've only had this mac for a few months, this is the first time I've had to compose on it.  Let me just say that Logic Pro and I don't always see eye to eye, so this remix took longer than usual. Anyone have a DAW on mac that they know, love, and would recommend? I'm open to suggestions.

Some stuff I thought about while making it:

• The original has 2 different chord progressions, one major, one minor. If you take a hard look at the track stems they gave out for remixing, you'll find they never gave us the stuff in the major progression. That blows. The major progression was my favorite part. So you'll find I tried to do a lot of recreation of that section (ie, a lot of my remix is also major)
• I absolutely loved the synth lead that came with the track. I harmonized it, used it in different instruments, and transposed it into a major key.
• at 143bpm, Tricky Tricky was definitely a track that could be taken at half tempo. 
• Karin Deijer-Andersson's voice is awesome. In some parts I vocoded it and pitch shifted it. Although in retrospect I liked her original voice more :) The lyrics are not bad as far as lyrics go. And "over and over" is easy to exploit with musical word-painting
• I had to EQ the bass frequencies like crazy... too many of my samples had a lot of low end rumbling

If I could do it over again... I'd do an entirely acoustic version. Mostly because I added the violins towards the end and realized that was my favorite part. Ah well, maybe next time.

Basically Famous

Hey so if you haven't seen my facebook wall recently, my friend Jason Turer put up a trailer from a student film he produced a couple years back... and I'm in it! I'm playing a character named Mary who thinks her roommate is crazy for hearing weird noises at night. The best part of this is that Jason put the trailer on IMDB! Yes folks that's right, I'm now considered an actress on IMDB ^__^ do you think I should fill out my profile? (Although in all seriousness there are hundreds of Sarah Browns there). Go ahead and clickthrough to see the trailer on IMDB (oh and warning, it's a little cheesy :P)

Back from summer vacation

Hey! After an unusually long hiatus, I'm back and ready to blog. I'm coming to you from my new apartment in Sunnyvale, CA where I now work fulltime for Palm, making webOS media apps.

I was shopping in SF on Valencia the other day and I found this adorable music box where you can compose your own music (provided it's entirely in the key of C major). I promptly bought it and of course the first song I made with it is a zelda cover. enjoy ^_^

Goron Music Box by esbie

Something not technical

I was playing my mom's keyboard last week when I realized that I don't know any songs for piano. **Mary Had A Little Lamb does not count.** I took piano lessons for years and years when I was younger, yet here I am struggling to remember even a single song. I finally did remember a song, but was one I had written my freshman/sophomore year of college. Surprised that I remembered all the words, I thought I'd keep a record of it on soundcloud.

A Slow Release by esbie

I don't consider this a finished 'piece' because it lacks polish, but it's interesting if only because the song is so different from what I normally work on.

Ichigo Flock Simulation

These guys above are way fun to play with! (those of you in an RSS reader will probably have to click through.) Click on the stage for more boids.

I started this project with Phil a while back and have decided to stop working on it, at least for now. Ichigo was my introduction to programming in Actionscript 3.0 but also turned out to be my introduction to boid theory. Every boid above has several forces that influence its interactions, including:

• alignment: heading towards the mouse cursor
• cohesion: heading towards the center of the flock
• separation: maintaining ample distance from flockmates
• steerResistance: momentum that provides resistance to turning or stopping
• randomness: some slight randomization of their movements

Our codebase allows flocks to collect Collectables, avoid Obstacles, and even merge with other flocks (although the above demo doesn't show this functionality). Eventually I hope to add more support for dynamic sound generation via flock behavior as well. This was meant to be a game prototype, but as you can see, not a lot was implemented except for the core functionality :P

One of the trickier bits during the process was telling the boids which direction to face. Simply pointing them in the direction of their velocity vector resulted in boids that could instantaneously flip their faces from back to front or left to right. Not only did we end up interpolating the sprite's rotation, but we also programmed each boid so it begins to turn only if its new velocity vector is at least theta degrees away from its old velocity vector. This last adjustment resulted in more flock-like and fish-like behavior.

The public build is here, and the source code is of course up on github if you're curious.