Idea: Parts of Songs

Image by Rafael Amado Deras via Flickr

When people practice an instrument they spend a lot of time playing along with their favorite songs. Learning to play songs you like is challenging and rewarding, the perfect way to practice. My experiences learning bass and guitar consisted a lot of sitting at my desk with my instrument and fumbling around with my mp3s to play along with them.

When you are learning how to play a part in a given song (the guitar part in stairway to heaven, for example) having the actual guitar part is obviously important. But what about when you have the song memorized and you are focusing on playing it well? I've found that when you reach this point having the guitar track playing actually gets in the way. I want to hear what it would sound like if I was the bassist in Red Hot Chili Peppers, not how it would sound if there was one awesome bassist and one crappy one.

Do you think there is a market for music with the different instruments removed? It would be like Karaoke for the rest of the band. I could also see it being useful for bands who want to do covers of songs, each member of the band could get a version of their song without their instrument.

Is there a way to do this automatically using existing songs? I know the band Girltalk is able to lift the vocals right out of songs to do mashups.... There might be some interesting legal issues to sort out though.

Anyway, my hope with this blog is interact with the people who read it, so instead of messaging me directly ya'll should leave comments! Lets get conversations going!

Idea: Portable Interval Trainer

Image via CrunchBaseI have a job! I'll be joining the Jones Day Patent Group in New York City. Looks like my wandering days are over for now.

Yesterday I was driving in my car thinking about training your ear. At music schools they use programs like the 'EarMaster' to train you to recognize intervals, chords, scales etc. This is really tedious but a vital skill to aquire if you want to compose music (anyone that has tried to use Reason or Garageband without music theory background will probably agree). Training your ear is tedious and requires hours of listening and distinguishing notes, but the software out there makes a relatively entertaining game out of it, so it's not so bad.

I realized though that I really want to be able to do this training any time, not just when I'm in front of my computer. What would be ideal is a program for an Iphone or even the DS or PSP. This would be such a good way to pass the time on a train (I'm thinking ahead to my commute from Fairfield to NYC) or on the road or wherever. Someone make this plz! And if this is one of those iphone apps that makes the creater tons of cash, all the better.

I hate you

Dear guys who robbed my house,

Not cool.

-James

P.S. Why would you steal my bucket of change but not my laptop?

Project Idea: Piano Minigames

One reason I decided to start a blog was to catalog my ideas for projects, businesses, and hobbies. Often when I find a new obsession (my current one is my new MIDI keyboard) I come up with tangential ideas or tools that I wish already existed or have other complementary thoughts. It was my hope that actually writing them down and creating some kind of conversation about them would help me to actually follow through with some of them (the conversation aspect is making the assumption that someone reads this blog... which is a questionable one). So without further rambling here's the project that I would love to undertake if I had infinite time:

I'd like to have a way of quickly creating different minigames that used my MIDI keyboard to help practice different concepts as I learn to play piano. The minigame I'd love to have right now would be something like Paul Nelson's epic 'Math Arena' game except with cords on the keyboard. Play something like that for a few hours and you'd be able to move quickly and confidently between the different chords no problem. But as I continue in my practicing I'm constantly facing new obstacles and coming up with new 'ideal' mingames to overcome them - what I really want is a sandbox type environment that would make it easy to create new minigames as I go.

Thinking about it, I feel like this would be a perfect project for Python. I know it has a PyGame module specifically made to create games with, and I'm sure it has a module for interfacing with a MIDI device all ready to go.

MAN this would be such a cool project... maybe I'll just take a week off after my trip and lock myself into my room and do it. What do ya'll think? Is 2k9 the year of the piano minigame?

P.S. I know what you're thinking: "But James, you already made a post about the dream to-do list project, what about that!" Don't worry, I'm still working on it. I've actually made a good deal of progress on it, I now have the site working with a database so I can edit the list from the site itself. I took a break from it to try and create the website at my job (qcllab.princeton.edu), which is an ongoing project. I'll try to keep you guys abreast of that as well.

Trippin' w/out the drugs

Here's a list of sweet tricks to get your brain to hallucinate without resorting to drugs... Or maybe we should think of these as gateway hallucinogens - paving the way for our youth to move on to harder and harder drugs! BEWARE

Hacking Your Brain [Via Boston Globe]

If anyone wants to try some of these with me, let me know. I think I have a fake arm that would be perfect.

Arriba Aruba!

Lots of stuff going on lately, here's a quick update!

I'm leaving for Aruba early Tuesday morning for a week, which is good because I need to show off all of the weight I gained in the past few weeks.

Finally got a keyboard and reason going, so hopefully I'll be able to start making some music for The Oversight Committee. If anyone knows good tutorials or resources for Reason or just composing in general I'd be interested. If I could choose one hobby/skill to be awesome at, it would be this, hands down.

I willfully submitted myself to the torment of going into the crawlspace underneath my house over the break. That is really one of the worst places, ever. Besides the dust and fiberglass I had to deal with Indiana Jones style spiderwebs everywhere. Worth it though, because now we have internet everywhere in the house - only took 3 routers and hours of debugging and research. Nothing is EVER easy when it comes to home networking - I'm still pulling out my hair trying to get NAT to be open so that we can use XBOX live properly.

My new athletic obsession is climbing, having discovered that I have free access to the climbing wall at Princeton. I got a sweet fingerboard for XMAS too, only problem is I don't have any place to mount it in my house... I guess I'll just save it until I move somewhere.

I'll put up some pics when I get back ya'll, have a good week!