Quick Peep (Oasis)

Fur Elise

I have been trying to play the classic piece "Fur Elise", by Beethoven, for almost a week now. Yes, you have heard it. Maybe when a car was reversing, maybe when a door bell rang, maybe when you were sitting in a fancy restaurant waiting for food ...

It's a soothing tune, composed to be played on the piano.

I don't think I have done justice to it. The least I can claim is to have captured my effort.

Packington's Pound (Better Recording)

This time I recorded the video and audio separately. I used my digital camera to record the video and my Sansa Clip to record the audio. Once the recording was done I transferred the video and audio to the PC.

I prefer to start the audio recording before the video recording -- with my rudimentary equipment I can't do both simultaneously -- and end the video recording first. So there are portions in the audio track, both at the beginning and at the end, which need to be pruned. Also after pruning, the audio overlay has to be done correctly so that both video and audio are in step.

I did the pruning with help of Audacity. The audio overlay was done with Windows Movie Maker (if you have Windows, you will have it). Overall the tools did a decent job.

There are couple of mistakes in the guitaring (I'm not telling you where).

At around the 30 second mark I start banging the guitar into the Clip Microphone, and that has messed up the recording a bit, towards the end.

Transferring Recordings to PC from Sansa Clip

Most of my guitar videos have awful sound quality. This is because, while recording, the camera sits a bit far off and its mic isn't too great. So for my next cover (which is not ready yet) I decided to do the audio part of the recording on my Sansa Clip MP3 player, instead of my camera.

Although the recording came out good, I couldn't find a way to transfer the recording to my PC. I wanted this so that I could do an audio overlay for the video. Googling didn't yield any results.

I discovered a solution by myself and it's documented here.

Transferring your recording consists of 3 steps.

Step 1: Change the USB Mode Setting to MSC

By default the Sansa Clip USB Mode is set to "Auto" and that always defaults to MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). When you are in the MTP mode you can transfer music files from the PC to your Clip. But while in this mode you won't be able to see any of your recordings.

By changing the mode to MSC (Mass Storage Class) your Sansa Clip will mount as a USB mass storage device. In other words, just like any other flash drive.

To change the USB mode to MSC do the following:

1. Go to the "Settings" page in the menu.
2. Scroll down to "USB Mode".
3. Select the "MSC" mode.

Step 2: Connect to PC

Pretty obvious. When you connect it, the device should mount as a disk drive and not a MTP device.

Step3: Transfer Recordings

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the drive which says "SANSA CLIP". Inside that drive you will have a folder called "RECORD". Anything which you recorded will be a WAV file within a sub-folder called "VOICE". You can copy this recording to your machine.

Note: I didn't see the songs on my Sansa Clip when opened in the explorer. My guess is that you will have to change the mode back to "Auto" to transfer music files.

Packington's Pound -- Video

I made a video of me playing Packington's Pound. The recording is pretty bad. Leaving the fan on was a mistake, but even if it wasn't who could have stopped the honks and the neighbor's TV. Side note: I should get better recording equipment.

Packington's Pound

I always wanted to play a classical music piece on the guitar. So yesterday night, when I couldn't go to sleep, thinking I was pretty good at finger picking, I started (trying) to play various songs provided at classtab.org; only to find I was quite inadequate.

Thus, I googled for "easy classical songs" and "Packington's Pound" came up. After one night and one day of laborious practice, I now know the notes of the song but I'm still very choppy (easy ... yeah right!) Maybe once I'm decent enough, I will put up a video.

Time Of Your Life -- Greenday

My attempt at playing Greenday's "Time of Your Life". No vocals -- my singing is worse than my 'guitaring'. I finger-pick the intro and the ending. There is quite a lot of background noise -- sorry for that!

Routine Post

• I have been having a nice relaxed long weekend. Yesterday and today, I have done nothing but stay at home, eat, sleep and play the guitar. It has been a long time since I completely lazed out on a weekend, and I was missing it.
• Songs which I have been trying to play (and sing along) are "Make You Feel Better" and "Desecration Smile". Both by Red Hot Chili Pepper and are beautiful songs. The chords are pretty simple. It's just that I suck at singing. Interesting side note: a few days back I thought I had "invented" a strumming pattern (rhythm) of my own, just to discover that it's actually the same as the one used in "Desecration Smile". Anu Malik, I empathize with you.
• I saw the movie 13-B on Saturday at PVR. Looks like the recession has hit the movie goers as well, because we booked the tickets on the same day (earlier you could never get weekend tickets, unless you were booking on Wednesday) and managed to get it! The movie is supposed to be a horror movie, but the director has tried to squeeze in comedy, songs, family-drama, sex and violence. It's three hours long and I actually felt that it was a good time-pass (although that could very well be because I was in a really good (crazy) mood). Is it scary? Nah.
  
• I'm having serious doubts about continuing my kickboxing classes. The pain in my right shin, from the last sparring session, is still there. The cuts which I got on my lips haven't healed, but have turned into mouth ulcers which hurt me with every gulp of water or food. The risk of injury weighs quite heavily on my head.
  

First guitar video

Tears in the rain, by Joe Satriani. Couple of mistakes in between and vehicles honking in the background. Love me oh internet world!

Virtual keyboard

My latest fascination these days is to play music. I own and am learning the guitar, but I'm also interested to play the keyboard (musical). Few days back I came across "Virtual Keyboard", which is a flash application which lets you play few notes. The nice thing is that the notes on the musical keyboard are mapped to the keys on the keyboard connected to your computer. So for example hitting 'e' on your keyboard produces a 'D#' note. So I wrote a small program in perl which takes in the notes and converts them to keystrokes. Being a touch typist I can play the notes decently enough.

eg: Notes for Clocks by Coldplay:

Eb Bb G Eb Bb G Eb Bb G Db Bb F Db Bb F Db Bb FDb Bb F Db Bb F Db Bb F Db Bb F Db Bb F Db Bb F C Ab F C Ab F C Ab C

Converted to keystrokes:

e u g e u g e u g w u f w u f w u u f w u f w u f w u f w u f w u f a y f a y f a y a

My shiny new guitar

I finally bought a new guitar. It cost me 5 grand with the cover. It's black and looks awesome.