Tag Archives: music

A funny musical instrument

From DailyMotion.comThis is an instrument that is used in serious music productions, but funny by itself, makes me laugh out loud.

It’s known as a jaw harp, or Jew’s harp, or juice harp, or mouth harp, or ozark harp, or trump, or guimbarde. Yes, that many (probably more) various names for the instrument.

So how can it be taken seriously with so many names? How can it be taken seriously when it sounds so funny and is played basically by making a “twang-a-lang” sound inside your mouth?

But it makes for a good laugh. Oh, and I’ve personally owned a jaw harp for at least 15-20 years. But I gave up learning because I didn’t know how it was supposed to be played… sheesh.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4qre7_solo-de-guimbarde_music

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Today: learning and doing activities. Tomorrow: repeat.

Today has been a day of guitar-playing, reading, interpreting, typing, mouse-clicking, and dragging.

I built a 3D model of the Bahamas islands plus Turks & Caicos islands. I am using it as the sample of a 3D islands world in my iPhone game project. This is fun! Building in 3D is new to me, but things don’t go in one ear and out the other in this sort of subject. There are SO VERY MANY things to learn in Blender, because it’s not a user-friendly 3D modelling program. I didn’t know that when I started learning it, but now I do know it.

I got into using it from someone’s internet article of 3D and 2D graphic rendering engines for iPhone and iPod touch (and I suppose now, iPad). The person had SIO2 and Oolong as the top two ranked options, but in pros-and-cons, listed Blender as a con for SIO2.

But that’s probably because like me, that person had no experience with 3D art and modelling.  Anyway, I spent the latter half of January going through Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, and have progressed about 40-50% through it.  I should really finish, except SIO2 does not fully support everything, and I’m trying to catch up to the 40-50% full competency of SIO2  before going on with more complex Blender subjects (like animated armatures).

So anyway, going through the tutorials in the source code is what must be done, not reading step-by-step how-to documents.  This is a guerilla-style learning.  Gotta get my feet wet by jumping in 100% and swim with the sharks.  Not that anyone associated with SIO2 is a great white shark, more like very pleasant whale shark… that sounds really odd, but I’m tired now.

When complete, this project will be a lot of fun (I hope!).  A lot of ideas come to me when I’m in a lucid state, so immediately in the morning before I am out of bed and just sort of coming out of unconsiousness, I try to figure out what ideas are lurking.. at the edge of thought.  Collect them up!  They’re worth money in the right hands, my hands!

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Defining iPhone game app scope

I’ve had a bit of annoying troubles today. Not a whole lot, but a bit. I’ve gone through them after a bit of stress.

Classical music does wonders for slowing down and calming my super-fast reading eyes, that my mind can’t keep up with. It also brings a bit of patience. So tasks may be done.

And I didn’t start listening to classical music until around 7:30pm. heh.  Earlier in the day, I built up a document of screen names (eg. load screen, main front screen, instructions screen) and the contents and behaviours on them, from a number of existing iPhone game apps. Using these notes as a starting point for constructing the outer scope of the game. With them, it becomes much easier to see where everything fits from a top-down perspective.

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Crazy day

This morning I woke up to the alarm duck quacking at 5:30 am. Having set the alarm a few hours earlier (2:30 am) I was tired and turned off the alarm. Fortunately I set two extra alarms: 6:00 am and 6:40 am. So I really woke up around 6, then was out of bed around 6:20, trying to become sane.

Prepared for the day, and embarked on a day that took me to a great musician jam, followed by a visit to Dad’s home and a visit to a new photography store in downtown Colborne. Finally, a visit to another friend’s home who I’m doing work for.

I arrived home around 6pm, and have been wanting to go to sleep since. Now, it’s 11:50pm and I’m typing the first entry on the new Edge of Thought blog. I have two domains that are joined: EdgeOfThought.com and TheEdgeOfThought.com so the branding with the word “The” is optional, but both work.

The music was great. Maybe in a week or two I will play Classical Gas in front of a bunch of people. Or maybe something else… must refer to the list of songs I typed on facebook, I cannot remember all the songs I’ve learned.

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