We had the opportunity of playing a bit with the (already) world famous Tenori-On (that strange new instrument build by Yamaha and designed with Toshio Iwai) at turnkey when we went to buy some picks for my new precious.

It is quite strange, but I could describe it like this: it looks a lot like a toy, and acts as a mix of Etch A Sketch¹, ableton live plus a 909-style sequencer. But it is best that you try it by yourself or watch a video or something at youtube for understanding what I mean.

The other interesting thing is this interview with Toshio Iwai that mr.doob found. Apart from explaining about the design process behind the Tenori-On, he also makes some interesting comments about music and sharing the creative intricacies of the songs:

I really hope people will share their own creations via the Internet or via the SD card for example. One of my dreams for Tenori-On is that people will create their own music using the instrument, put the file on the computer – a very small file compared to an audio file – and then e-mail this to a friend. This friend, using their own Tenori-On, can then play back the file, listening to this piece whilst viewing all the actions and creative steps that occurred in its creation. This means we’re not just sharing the final piece of music, we’re sharing the patterns and the interactivity.

I think you could replace Tenori-On with tracker and it will have almost the same meaning, don’t you think?

Another sentence that I like a lot is this one:

The reality right now is that many people, including professional musicians and kids and simply passive listeners, have the chance to create their own music.

Leaving aside the fact that he’s obviously speaking about tenori-on, I think it’s a very interesting proposition on its own. We have been given the chance to create new stuff and express our own ideas thanks to the increase in computing power but only a few of us are trying to do anything at all.

I really believe it’s important for people to practice and experiment what they can do in the creativity fields, but traditionally we are told from an early age in life whether we are good for art or not, which is pretty dumb. One may show a certain innate aptitude (or lack of it) at childhood but it doesn’t mean he/she likes it or that he/she can’t gain skills in that field if need be.

So I’m all for things like the Tenori-On and in general every tool which enables us to play and see what can be done – we may learn new things and maybe we’ll create something cool too, while not being a passive listener any more. Interactivity is the key!

¹ Telesketch for us the Spaniards

Most of you know about the famous tune for Dope by Jugi, whose filename we mistakenly assumed was simply DOPE.MOD (mainly because we ripped it directly from the demo). If you ever tried to open it with a tracker you could see it wasn’t a normal 4 channel mod but a 32 channel one.

It is probably due to the fact that the song was originally composed with Fast Tracker. And it wasn’t titled dope but Onward ride instead. The best of all is that I found another shorter version which sounds neater and more solid than the demo version, maybe because its title is Onward final version, probably.

Both songs are listed in scenemusic, the long demo version here and the shorter final version here.

Since scenemusic follows such an stupid rule as to force people to register to be able to access external mirrors for downloading the songs, I have decided to give you the direct links to the mirrors in the hope that they rectify and make it easier for people to enjoy scene music. Here they are:

• Onward.xm – onward final version
• Dope.mod – onward ride original

But there’s still more! It seems that Jugi contributed with a remix of this song to the Assembly 2004 Instrumental music compo, but it didn’t qualify. In contrast with 2007 edition, where even the non-qualified songs were distributed, that year only what was shown was distributed, and so the song is not in Scene.org ftp.

It wouldn’t be a problem if scenemusic had linked to some decent hosting or something, but we are left with the knowledge that there’s another version of Onward (Onward with the popcorn) and I personally I’m unable to download it from the horrid free downloads page scenemusic links to, even less listen to it.

If some nice guy or gal can download it or finds it anywhere else it would be nice to listen to that remix :-)

Oh and I also tried to look for jugi on irc but ircnet decided that my entire ip range was banned because of something about a blacklisted spam mail proxy or something and I’m unable to connect even if I reset my dsl modem. Anyway, enjoy that little jewel and see you next year! :-)

UPDATE 12th January: Found this page from mod soul brother with information about jugi and a compilation of his mods in zip format. It hasn’t got the Onward with the popcorn version, since it’s an mp3 but I’ll keep looking for it anyway ;-)

… and most probably, sore fingers too!

What’s all of this about?, you may be asking yourselves…

When I arrived home on Thursday there was a little surprise waiting for me… an amazing electric guitar, thanks to mr.doob’s spot-on ideas for Christmas :-)

It feels somehow coincidental because while being at Spain I was wondering about how could I bring my Spanish guitar with me to London, but I thought that maybe it would be more convenient to buy another one here and avoid all the annoyances of travelling with a guitar¹.

Since the first and last time I had played an electric guitar was in the BASS essays for Breakpoint 2006 (which I think that was in fact the last time I played a guitar) I felt quite clumsy, and almost unable to do any barre chords, but I’m taking it easy, playing a little bit every day; I mostly play until my left hand finger tips begin to hurt a little bit too much, that’s the sign it’s been enough for the day.

It is superb to learn how to play guitar nowadays and with a good broadband connection. When I used to practice with my Spanish guitar, all one could do was to buy some handbooks (selected amongst a very limited offer) and hope they were useful, or share photocopies of chord tables. In contrast, I have found several sites with loads of information and guitar lessons, including videos and audio samples of how things should sound.

And what do I prefer, the Spanish or the electric one? Each one has its own distinctive features but I guess the electric one is more versatile, although you can’t beat being able to bring the acoustic one with you anywhere and busking a bit. Not that I have done that, but I considered it for a while actually!

Also, since the electric guitar uses metal string for the six strings (unlike the spanish one which uses metal only for the three lower strings), I feel slightly scared of cutting my skin when sliding my fingers over them, specially over the highest string.

Anyway, expect some real guitar sounds in my future songs instead of prerecorded samples. I’m doing my best to get my guitar skills back into shape so it could be anytime soon! Fear me!

¹ What I read is that you have to either buy another plane ticket and bring the guitar with you into the cabin, which I don’t know if it’s possible with the recent changes which just allow one to have one piece of hand luggage, or check the guitar in as fragile. And the sole idea of checking a guitar is giving me the creeps already…

I spent some days in Spain these past weeks. For the first time, I didn’t tell anyone I was going there; call me antisocial if you want, but I was slightly stressed and didn’t want to think of timetables, meetings, arrangements and all that.

To make it even better, I chose to flight a week before Christmas, on an absurd day and hour: Sunday between afternoon and evening, and I think I will always try to repeat that decision. The check in queues were quite fast (maybe five minutes) and I passed the passport control and security check quite quickly. If it wasn’t because I had a laptop and had to take it out of the bag and place it in the tray and blah blah I would have been in the waiting lounge 4 minutes ago. The rest was quite smooth, excepting a couple of Spaniards which had been in London for the past week and already hated it and the weather.

Apart from moaning about that during the full length of the flight, she decided to adopt an strange giving-birth position, by reclining in her seat and putting her knees against my seat back, without asking if I minded to be shaken and pushed forward, of course. I tried to let her know or to demonstrate that she wasn’t behaving, by looking back at her, but apparently she didn’t notice (or didn’t want to notice). So I finally had to stand up and asked her kindly if she minded to stop doing that, because when she put the knees that way, I was quite uncomfortable. She looked at me with a questioning face and mumbled something as to justify what she was doing, instead of saying Oh sorry! I didn’t notice I was being such an annoying passenger!. And then I proceeded to calmly explain her that because the seat was so thin, like a very, very thin cushion, I not only was being shaken and pushed forward, but I also could feel her knees kind of kicking my back. And then I said thanks and sat down again, luckily she removed her knees from where they were (not without moaning about that in whispers, of course).

Luckily too, my suitcase hadn’t been lost and I got it with my load of presents. I think my idea of putting an sticker on it to differentiate it from all the other samsonite suitcases was a very good (although almost two years late) idea.

In the following days I did several amazing things:

Fogassa

First one was having some fogassa for breakfast. A fogassa is a typical sweet product which has a texture in between cake and bread, and is topped with almonds and nuts, and usually some sugar. The dough has also seeds which give it its distinctive flavour, mostly comin. I hadn’t eaten this for years! I almost felt sorry about eating it :-)

Tried to renew my ID card

I went to the police station, scared in advance (after having had to stand those horrible queues in Seville for renewing doob’s ID card), but it was totally unnecessary. I not only got an appointment for that day but I also couldn’t do anything because since I’m registered as resident in London, I can’t renew my ID without a residency certificate which the consulate has to emit. Following the officer advice, I sent them an e-mail asking for those details that very day, which happened to be a complete loss of time since I got the reply today, that is, almost two weeks later. I’ll give a try next time I go to Spain, I guess.

Visiting an old hermitage (and finding a derelict house)

I had that feeling of the hermitage being far away, up the hill, but London’s distances make everything appear little. I began to walk and even if I stopped for taking pictures several times, I was on top of the hill in around 20 minutes. My main intention was to make a panorama picture of the view, but it was very foggy and it looked more like a romantic watercolour; the mountains at the end of the valley could hardly be distinguished.

The best of all was that from the top of the hill I saw what looked as an abandoned house, so I thought that it would be cool to have a look when going back, since the path was close to the house. It was a marvelously neglected house, actually. The roof was falling or had already fallen in most of the rooms, burglars had removed most of the doors and left only the ugly ones, but mysteriously they didn’t touch the beds, which were left there, as well as the mattresses. They were pretty much rotten and destroyed but they hadn’t been moved from their place. I didn’t dare to go to the upper floor since I didn’t want to have any accident.

The house had its name painted on the front door, and I tried to find some information about it but it seems like nobody has mentioned it ever in the internets. I could probably get some info if I went to the official registers and archives but I think that would be a little overkill, and I think I am not that curious.

It is a real pity since it looked like it was a very nice looking house; one could still see the faded decoration in some of the walls and it was naive but had a distinction touch. Mystery!

Getting a cold

Instead of getting it after I go to Spain, this time I chose to do it during the trip. But I acted quickly and gave myself an overdose of vitamin C and various vegetables and I managed to recover in a few days.

La follonera

I was somehow attacked by an old woman while waiting at a supermarket’s till to pay! She came to the queue a minute after I had arrived and tried to fool me so that I let her go first. The woman which was currently paying at the till probably couldn’t read or write since she offered her open wallet to the cashier when having to pay and asked her to write a “For my loved Blah” card for sticking it to the big Serrano Ham she had just bought. I was so placidly waiting and she began to nervously shake herself behind me, reducing the courtesy distance between she and me more and more, since I had blocked her the access to the belt where the products are placed.

The illiterate woman finally left and I began to put my items on the belt, when suddenly another woman came asking for a refund. The crazy woman behind me, which I’ll call La Follonera from now on, began to pant and moan and complain about having to wait one minute (all of this action had happened in a very short amount of time). She even began to push my items forward in the belt so that she could put her stupid presents in the belt, as if she was trying to evidence that she was in a hurry.

I finally asked her to calm down and wait as we all were doing and she began to shout, for our surprise:

WHAT HAVE I DONE WRONG?! HUH? It’s you which has to move your products instead of being stuck in the middle!!!!

The cashier, another girl which was behind La Follonera, and me, looked at her, completely puzzled by that sudden expansion of rage and absurd reasonings. I quietly told her:

Push. You have pushed me. That’s what you’ve done.

… and then proceeded to continue bagging my items, as the cashier had began to scan them. La Follonera kept complaining and moaning, maybe more annoyed by the fact that nobody paid her attention than because I told her to wait.

It’s even more funny that I asked things to her politely and she spoke to me in a very rude way. She looked as if she had decided beforehand that she was going to get angry with someone that day, whichever was the reason, just because she felt like having a fight.

Windowsless \o/

I also took the opportunity to upgrade the family computer to Ubuntu 7.10. It was running Windows 2000 and I was delaying any change because I know it’s hard to change habits but it never worked properly and I was feeling worse and worse about the idea of the computer running windows.

I am very happy about the change, I might write more about that. Best is I’m not the only one which is happy with the new system!

Hormigas

On the 24th December I stumbled upon the only half decent TV programs I saw in the Spanish TV for years, Hormigas and Eva Hache (or something like that). The Hormigas show was quite entertaining (the little muppets were very nice too) and the parody of the King’s speech by Eva Hache was quite hilarious; after that, it turned to be slightly annoying and somehow forced.

Tripping down the memory lane

Concerned about the longevity of writable cd’s and even more about the data in them, I decided to go through my CD-R cd’s and copy the relevant stuff to the computer’s hard disk. In the process I found some songs and other jewels which I may publish or not but that I had almost forgotten about! :-)

Sun!!!

I think it had been raining or cloudy the 90% of days but we finally had a sunny day on the 25th. We headed to the country to have a bit of a sunny green grasp. At last!

Everything was fairly wet yet but the sun cheered us up a lot. Specially me, I had left a sunny London just to be greeted by a cloudy Valencia, boooh!

Back into London

The Spanish picaresque manifested itself again in the Airport’s metro station, with lots of people travelling to the airport with a ticket which was valid for one zone only (the airport is in zone 2) and complaining about having to pay an extra. Amazingly, the station staff was simply letting everybody out without asking them to pay the right fare.

We had some refreshments in the coffee house with views to the runway and I finally went to my gate, where I could assist to the total disgrace of the people which had bought that infamous speedy boarding and were placed in a bus for going to the plane, instead of directly boarding the plane as one could expect. The result is that they paid more and ended up being treated as a normal passenger in group A.

The arrival into Gatwick was chaotic, there were people filling all the space right after the UK border control. It seems they were waiting for their baggage belt to be announced but it hadn’t happened and there were the people from two or three planes waiting in a place which isn’t ready for so many people.

And do not forget the kids – because this is such a family holiday, there were kids everywhere. There were zombie kids which didn’t notice they had stumbled upon you, then the kids which tried to get underneath oneself (very bad idea if you ask me, my legs are quite short), and the best of all: the kids riding the handrail in the escalators and the ones which blocked the exit at the top of the escalator.

There was even a woman saying whose child is this? where are their parents?. Total confusion!

Fortunately my suitcase came quite early again (it might be the sticker influx – it has a smile legend on it) and I could escape to Victoria – which even felt relaxed after all this crazy confusion!

By popular demand, comments are here for the blog posts, pictures and songs! :-)

I have also been changing some things in the songs section (mainly the songs list which is nicer to browse now).

By the way, I found some lost songs in old cd’s and will add them here as I clean them up (putting titles, converting to MP3 and so on). Isn’t it exciting? I thought they were lost forever and unexpectedly they are still there!

Next time you feel undecided about making backups, remember about this ;-)