{"id":1398,"date":"2014-01-28T14:18:56","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T19:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/?p=1398"},"modified":"2014-01-28T14:18:56","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T19:18:56","slug":"snowmageddon-round-two-random-stuff-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/?p=1398","title":{"rendered":"Snowmageddon Round Two? (Random Stuff Post)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, we&#8217;re all waiting for the snow to start. We&#8217;re supposed to get anything from 2 to 6 inches of snow today through tonight, and as I&#8217;ve said many times, we don&#8217;t do snow well here. I&#8217;m staying off the roads today and tonight, so that means no piano class.<\/p>\n<p>Bummer.<\/p>\n<h3>If I Can&#8217;t Go to the Music School, Bring the Music School to Me!<\/h3>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to catch up on my Coursera classes: the Write Like Mozart class, and Pat Pattison&#8217;s Songwriting class, which I signed up for again last night.<\/p>\n<p>I signed up for his Songwriting class last year, but I didn&#8217;t have time to finish it. What I saw, I really liked. He gives a really good insight into how pro songwriters write songs, and how to improve my own songwriting. (Hint: it involves lots of practice, just like anything else.)<\/p>\n<p>I might also watch some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/results?search_query=max%204%20live%20tutorial&#038;sm=3\" target=\"_blank\">Max 4 Live tutorials<\/a>. That also looks really interesting.<\/p>\n<h3>Bitwig Studio<\/h3>\n<p>Bitwig Studio is coming out in late March for $399. The part that&#8217;s really interesting to me is the ability to run it in Linux. I think that&#8217;s a brilliant idea. But from what I&#8217;ve heard, there&#8217;s no ReWire compatibility yet, so that&#8217;s a big minus for me. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=XqnNkTvEJSk\" target=\"_blank\">This <\/a>is a good preview of Bitwig, and you can find more videos <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/bitwig\" target=\"_blank\">on their channel<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I wouldn&#8217;t mind demoing it to see what it&#8217;s like, but $400 is a bit steep for me after G.A.S. ate a lot of my money over the holidays.<\/p>\n<p>I probably shouldn&#8217;t buy another new instrument until I&#8217;ve gotten good at using the ones I already have.<\/p>\n<h3>Rewire and Vocaloid Editor<\/h3>\n<p>Speaking of ReWire, I finally found a VST that will let me ReWire the Yamaha Vocaloid 3.0 Editor into Live or Cubase. Cool! You can find it <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.yahoo.co.jp\/alipapa_p\/63025279.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> (the site is all in Japanese). Look for this text &#8220;V3Sync ReWire Synchronizer Version 1.3.0 \u00e3\u201a\u2019\u00e3\u0192\u20ac\u00e3\u201a\u00a6\u00e3\u0192\u00b3\u00e3\u0192\u00ad\u00e3\u0192\u00bc\u00e3\u0192\u2030&#8221; in the middle of the page, click the link, and install like any other VST. Point the Vocaloid 3 editor to the VST, and it should work.<\/p>\n<p>I know you used to be able to ReWire directly from most Vocaloid 2.0 editors. What happened with 3.0? I have no idea.<\/p>\n<p>Piapro Studio is a good alternative now that it&#8217;s at version 1.2. Now you can use sound banks from other companies, too, if you register your non-Crypton sound banks at Crypton&#8217;s Sonicwire.com website. I haven&#8217;t tried it yet, but I will soon.<\/p>\n<h3>Monitor Stand Update<\/h3>\n<p>The monitor stand is working really well. I installed it about a week ago, after letting it off-gas for a few days. It adds about 4.25 inches to the height of my monitors, so it took a few days to get used to, but I&#8217;m used to it now.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, just as I say that, I noticed a crack in the wood filler on the right side, near my heater vent. That&#8217;s what touch-up paints are for.<\/p>\n<h3>Slide Duplicating Project<\/h3>\n<p>This is a project I&#8217;ve been wanting to get back to for a while. I&#8217;m waiting on a Leica Screw Mount to Sony E Mount adapter, and then I may be able to make some good progress on it. I&#8217;m going to try what someone did <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fredmiranda.com\/forum\/topic\/1137072\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> and remove the FD mount from my Canon FL Bellows, then attach it to my NEX with a LSM to E Mount adapter. That should give me enough focal length to get the duplicate slides in full view.<\/p>\n<p>I hope.<\/p>\n<p>Or I can just throw the whole mess on the copy stand. But I&#8217;d rather use a slide copier, because I can aim that at Mr. Sun, and get natural daylight for copying the slides. Artificial light always has weird spectra, even light bulbs that say they are &#8220;daylight balanced,&#8221; only do so in a way that fools your eye. It does not fool the sensor or the software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;m waiting for a ton of snow to fall, I figured I might as well summarize what&#8217;s going on these days. I&#8217;m taking more music classes at Coursera; Bitwig Studio is coming out in a couple of months; I found an easy way to ReWire the Yamaha Vocaloid Editor into Live and Cubase; Piapro Studio now accepts non-Crypton voicebanks; the monitor stand works; and finally, my slide duplicating project is taking off as soon as some parts show up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[634,790,655,664,75,120],"tags":[796,801,814,904,791,804,792,903,735,742,812,813,697,815,669,744],"class_list":["post-1398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-diy","category-education","category-music","category-photography","category-technology","tag-ableton","tag-ableton-live","tag-canon-fl-bellows","tag-diy","tag-making-stuff","tag-max","tag-monitor-stand","tag-music","tag-music-composition","tag-piapro-studio","tag-rewire","tag-slide-duplicator","tag-snow","tag-songwriting","tag-vocaloid","tag-vst","category-634-id","category-790-id","category-655-id","category-664-id","category-75-id","category-120-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1399,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398\/revisions\/1399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}