I think i was in grade 11 when i fell in love with bass guitar. A friend of mine introduced me to Blood Sugar Sex Magik on a school bus trip and that pretty much changed my life. I remember scrounging up the $30 or so to buy the bass guitar songbook for that album, borrowing a bass for the summer and teaching myself how to play.
I immediately got into all the bass virtuosos, including Victor Wooten - who is probably most well known for his work with Bela Fleck & the Flecktones. He is also probably the most impressive slap bass player i have ever heard, thanks to his mind boggling use of harmonics & ‘double thumbing’ technique .
Last night i had the opportunity to check him out @ Lee’s Palace in Toronto and was completely blown away (no big surprise there). Lots of great funk/soul jams and some seriously inspiring solos. I definitely want to start using some of his bass tricks in my own playing if i can.
I brought my SLR camera down and took some shots of the show - check them out here.
Inspired by one of my favorite podcasts, Macbreak Weekly, i’m going to try to post a new pick each Friday. This week my pick is a great piece of software called Jing Project. There are a tonne of video / image screencap software tools out there that i have tried - Skitch, iShowU, ScreenFlow, dockdrop - the list goes on. The problem is i have my screenshot app, and my screencast app which is somewhat cumbersome and sharing my content is a little tricky sometimes, particularly for video.
This is where Jing comes in. Jing solves the problem of being able to show people what you are seeing and/or doing on your computer very quickly. It’s insanely easy to use, on the mac you invoke Jing by pressing SHIFT+Apple+1 which brings up a cropping mask that you can move & size to the area of your screen you wish to capture. Then it’s just a matter of picking your format - image or video.
Jing can then automatically upload the content to a destination of your choice (i.e Flickr for images) and a nice little touch is it will even put the URL of your content on your clipboard so you don’t have to go find it yourself. Now you just share that link with co-workers / friends / family and the whole process can take seconds quite literally. Did i mention it’s free?
I have been trying to find an easy to use drum synth for quite some time now for my home studio. The thing that has been really frustrating for me is drums. With the tools i have now, I pretty much had to write my music around the short list of drum loops i had available. However, this past weekend a friend of mine who is on the bleeding edge of all this stuff introduced me to Addictive Drums. This is the best drum plugin i have seen ever - bar none, and here’s why:
It’s MIDI not loops, so any drum beat imaginable is possible
The samples used for each element of the kit are the most authentic I’ve ever heard
The control you have over each part of the drum is amazing (pitch / compression / EQ…)
This is going to make it a whole lot easier for me to come up with sketch ideas for my band.
For the technically savvy crowd with iPhones/iPod Touch’s, what a great way to add some fun to the Starbucks experience. Combined with this feature you’ll be sure to see me ordering a Tazo Chai latte on my iPod Touch in the near future.
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