Sidingsound

A quick update on the weekend ahead: according to the friends we’re staying with, the area where we’ll be going may not have 3G network coverage (or at least not as much as I’m used to), and we won’t have any WiFi.

This means that whilst I should be able to get some Twitter and blog posts out (providing there’s at least GPRS or GSM data), I may have to wait a couple of days to upload any batches of photos (and more likely, any videos) I take while we’re away. Be sure to keep an eye on my Twitter feed and this blog for updates as I have them, and hopefully I’ll have more 3G access than I’m expecting to.

Posted by Wordmobi

This being the middle of the worst recession in most people’s lifetimes (as the media seems to take a little too much pleasure in reminding us most days), the Walker family is taking a somewhat modest summer break this year, and it starts this Saturday (raaaaay! ). It’ll be great to just go away and do/be somewhere different to the normal routine, and I’m looking forward to it a lot—not just because it’s a holiday…

…but in true Sidingsound style, it’ll give me the first proper test of whether I can ‘run’ this blog, and post multimedia to it, all from my mobile phone

I’m calling this a “road trip”, even though we’re not likely to be driving that far by US standards. We’re going to stay with some friends in south Wales for a couple of days, and then… well, you’ll just have to wait and see. I’m planning to blog the journey and the places we visit—certainly in words (this blog and Twitter), and depending on access to 3G data and/or WiFi hotspots, in photos (Flickr and/or Picasa) and videos (YouTube and (suitably fast data connection permitting) Qik).

By the time we go away, I intend to set up a separate page at the blog, with an embedded Google Map so that you can view photos by their geotagged information (i.e. they’ll show up as markers on the map), and hopefully any videos which I can upload while we’re out. I’ll also tag any Flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc. with “walkerroadtrip09″, which should help you find them.

More details nearer the weekend…

It’s coming up for two weeks since I migrated my blog site across to a new host, and to a new blog ‘platform’ (WordPress). So far, I’d say I’ve managed to realise most of my early aims, which to a great extent revolved around creating a blog with tie-ins to the various multimedia services I send stuff to, and which as far as possible I could maintain from my Nokia N95 without needing a desktop or laptop.

Whilst I’ve got a fair amount of the ‘auto-update’ functionality working (insofar as I can send something to YouTube, Qik, Flickr, etc. and it’ll appear somewhere on this site automatically), there are still a couple of ‘holes’ which I hope I can work out how to fix:

• I haven’t yet found whether it’s possible for YouTube to post automatically to WordPress, when I upload a new video. YT can update Twitter and Facebook automatically, and you can set up a WordPress blog on your YouTube account, which gives you a “blog this” feature on a video’s page. However, I have yet to try YT’s mobile site to see if the “blog this” feature is present there; if not, it’s not easy to access the “full-fat” YT pages from a Nokia N95, so some kind of totally automatic feature for posting new YT videos to a WP blog upon upload, would be useful. I’m guessing it already exists, but just haven’t tracked it down yet.
• In a previous post, I referred to my search for an audio equivalent of YouTube—i.e. a Web service where I could upload short, impromptu voice recordings which would then be cross-posted to this blog. After I posted this here and on Twitter, someone from ipadio dropped me a line—this is the service which allows you to make a voice phone call, and have the audio from that call uploaded straight to the Web (they call this “phlogging”). Apparently, ipadio is working on allowing users to upload pre-recorded MP3 audio clips, which may address my primary concern with ipadio (the limited audio quality of a phone call), so I may well be giving their service a try shortly.

Otherwise, I feel I have more or less got the whole infrastructure to where I wanted it at this stage. Other future developments I have in mind are:

• a “music” section, where you’ll be able to listen to some of my recordings (probably via an embedded Flash music player at first);
• an expansion of the “lifestream” feature, so that each day on the main blog page will carry a summary of the day’s content from the lifestream;
• the “contact” page, which I know I haven’t implemented yet, but I have to make as sure as possible that I won’t expose myself to any more spam than I already get (no offence meant, incidentally )

Anyway, I think that’s enough to be going on with for the moment, wouldn’t you agree…?

Posted by Wordmobi

This is the sort of situation where things get complicated due to posting to too many online services…

Basically, I’ve made my first YouTube video with my electric mountain dulcimer, and have posted the link to it on my Twitter feed, but also on my “tumblelog”. So, just to be complete, I’m posting it here too

Here’s the embedded version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj9OpygSlxE]

It’s a first go, but I hope to make another demo video one day… once I’ve practiced a bit more!

Enjoy…

You may be aware (or probably not) that I have a few other outlets online for my various jotterings, pics, vids (occasionally) and so on. It’s been a while since I referred to many of them in any depth, and I don’t actually remember mentioning them all together, so here is my attempt to corral my online “presences” (or at least the ones I use much) into one post, in no particular order…

• I’ve been saving photos to our Flickr account since at least 2005, though I didn’t start using the service in earnest until 2006. The majority of our photos are there, although lately I’ve been considering a move to Picasa Web Albums, owing to a few advantages it currently has over Flickr (e.g. no limit on the number of items in a photoset RSS feed—Flickr can only output the first fifty—and apparently, better integration with Blogger (a fellow Google-owned service). However, with over 550 photos in Flickr, and no easy way I know of to migrate, I think I’ll be sticking with Flickr for the time being.
• For about the past year, I’ve posted regularly to my Twitter feed—i.e. long before the media found out that Stephen Fry rather likes Twitter and thus made it the Next Big Web Thing Usually, I “tweet” at least a couple of times a day, most days, though my usage fluctuates depending on where I am, what I’m doing, etc. It’s probably the Web service I use most often, and is therefore most likely the best way to keep up with what I’m generally up to.
• About two months ago, I discovered Delicious, where you can save Web bookmarks and comment on them (a sort of “bookmark blog”. To cut a long story short: here’s my Delicious page.
• I dabble with video, but have only posted very occasionally to the video pages I have set up so far: my blip.tv and Qik accounts. My videos go out under the name “Digital Ramyun”, which will be the name of my video blog if I ever get the time to make it regularly! As I write, I am also setting up a YouTube channel for Digital Ramyun, so that the many more who use that service will be able to tune in, but more to the point, because YouTube integrates a bit better with another service I’ve just signed up for…

As of today, ladies and gentlemen, I have joined Tumblr. Basically, Tumblr is one way of integrating many different kinds of content into one big “super-blog”, so if by some immense stretch of the imagination you were hoping to find all my different writings, tweets, videos, photo uploads and so on, all in one handy location… well, here is Digital Ramyun @ Tumblr, to provide you with your regular fix of all things Tim Walker-esque.

My Tumblr page is currently very much “out of the box”, but I’ll be customising it with new feeds, visual tweaks and so on, just as soon as I figure out how to do most of them It currently pulls together my Twitter updates, Flickr photos, Delicious bookmarks and YouTube video uploads, and you’ll also see posts from the Sidingsound blog, once I find out why Tumblr doesn’t seem to like the details I’m putting in.

And before I go: no, I haven’t joined Facebook yet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time now…

Just watched Mitch Benn’s most recent single video, “Sing Like An Angel”, which proves to me a couple of things about The Now Show’s resident songsmith, including one which I had not hitherto fully realised:

Anyone who can get up on a stage and sing a brilliantly-measured spoof of a Pop Idol song, backed only by keyboard almost-deity Rick Wakeman on piano, has more b…elief in themselves than I think I’ve managed in my life.

Who knows… one day I may surprise myself.

Last night, I posted the cryptic item below to my Twitter feed:

I just tried to tweet a YouTube URL (nothing dodgy), and it didn’t come through – what gives? Will try again in a moment…

No doubt you are just dying to know what the YouTube video in question was, so I shall keep you in suspense no longer: it was “Ondes Martenot / Messiaen 4ème Feuillet Inédit by Thomas Bloch”, a demonstration of an instrument I really want to try one day, by one of its greatest exponents.

And if that clip whets your appetite, try this one on for size (with apologies for the video quality)…

Well, it’s been a hectic run-up to the Christmas period, and I’ve just about managed to keep my Twitter feed sort of up-to-date, leaving almost every other Web 2.0 outlet of mine to gather a patina of dust. Anyway, as Santa and his employees ready the sleigh for another night of science-defying activity, I thought I’d check in here for a brief update before the festive season kicks off in earnest…

The main news: following up on the last post I wrote on these pages (one whole month ago!), I and the builder of my new electric mountain dulcimer, managed to sort things out after it originally arrived damaged in transit. As of this morning, I am pleased to report that I now have a fully-intact dulcimer (yaay!), and look forward to sharing some words and multimedia about it before too long.

The only catch is, I actually have to get the hang of playing it first Whilst it helps that I have over twenty years’ experience with guitars and other fretted stringed instruments to call on, the mountain dulcimer is a slightly different prospect. For starters, whilst it has strings and frets like the guitar, mandolin and so on, the dulcimer is not technically a “lute” like these, but a “zither” (i.e. it has no neck, but the strings pass the whole length of the soundboard), making it more a relative of instruments like the autoharp or psaltery). Also, the mountain dulcimer is usually played across the lap and the strings fretted from above, meaning a different position for the fretting hand than with the guitar and its ilk.

That said, I’m hopeful that I can pick up playing the dulcimer reasonably quickly, and if so, over the Christmas and New Year period I’m planning to record a couple of simple demos with it, and if all goes well, my first YouTube video! (There aren’t many vids there of electric dulcimers, so maybe I can ‘corner the market’…)

In the meantime, I trust your final preparations for the festive season are preparing well

Well, that audio processing is still going on, so while I’m waiting some more…

Have you discovered the Web site Now Play It? The concept is simple: take some well-known pop and rock songs (both old and new), and sell video downloads teaching you how to play them.

So far so good—music tutor videos have been around almost as long as the home video concept itself—but I think what makes Now Play It a bit more special, is that the Internet and modern audio/video production methods make it possible to produce these videos and get them out to the audience much more quickly. In other words, the tutorials can cover songs which have barely dropped out of the charts, whereas tutor DVDs might be months behind the times, if not more.

What’s more, NPI have managed to get some of the artists who produced the original tracks, to present the tutorials themselves, and it’s here where for me, it gets really interesting. You can have members of Supergrass coaching you through some of their back catalogue; KT Tunstall showing you her guitar chops on “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” and others; Graham Coxon (ex-Blur) doing much the same (on his songs, obviously)…

…and lastly (and most pertinently for me): Sir Paul himself, giving us a full-blown multi-instrumental (guitars, bass, drums) lesson on one of the better songs from “Memory Almost Full”, “Ever Present Past”.

Quite aside from me seriously considering stumping up the readies for Macca’s video tutorial, Now Play It has got me thinking: with YouTube and mobile phone video output getting better and cheaper all the time, why aren’t more musicians providing this kind of interaction with their fans? I’d consider doing this for my own works, although I admit I’ve got to build up a few fans first…

So, if I end up posting a video tutorial for “Sidings and branches” or something, you’ll know where the idea came from. You read it here first.

File this under “just because I can”, or possibly “something I’m doing while I’m waiting for some audio to finish processing”…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTNXrkBSp_o]

One of my favourite singles of the year would have to be “Dance Tonight” by Paul McCartney, from his latest album “Memory Almost Full”. Full disclosure: I’ve been a Macca fan since the 1980s, but to be honest, I wasn’t as keen on MAF as I was on Paul’s last (pop/rock) opus, “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard” (2005), and I’m still not quite sure why. It’s not just that I’d hold “Chaos” to be one of the best albums of Macca’s career (yes, all of it)—I simply didn’t feel that the songwriting on “Memory” was that consistent, and that there were just not as many strong numbers on the album as there were on “Chaos”.

Maybe the key was Nigel Godrich, who produced “Chaos”. I’ve read that McCartney himself credits Godrich with really “pushing” him on the project, rejecting many of McCartney’s songs as “not strong enough” (my paraphrase) and encouraging him to show what he is capable of as a writer and performer.

Godrich also largely isolated McCartney from his usual touring band, persuading him to play most of the instruments himself. Whilst Macca is certainly no stranger to this approach (quite a few of his albums were recorded mostly or completely solo), being effectively forced to work differently to how he’d probably expected to do, may well have contributed to Paul producing an album quite different from most of its forbears.

But back to “Dance Tonight”, which I think is just a great single. It has more hooks than an angling competition, not least with that thumping four-on-the-floor bass drum and the jangling strummed mandolin which provides the body of the song. It’s almost primevally simple in concept, yet the song has a cheerful simplicity which just seems to pick me up when I hear it—and don’t we all need that somedays?

And it gave me as good an excuse as any to try posting a YouTube video here