Author: BogusRed

New Piano Music!

Posted on by BogusRed

You’ll be happy to know that I have purchased the new Reason Pianos refill. :thumbsup: This has allowed me to take my MIDI recordings and apply these samples and it makes the music sound like it was played on a real piano! :bounce:

So I am proud to announce that TWO new piano songs have been added to the Music section and both were created in Reason using Reason Pianos.

I really love this Reason program. It saves me so much time in so many different areas. Like if I happened to play a sequence too softly, all I have to do is select all the notes from the sequence and tell it to add 15 points of velocity. I couldn’t do that with crappy Cakewalk Music Creator. :annoyed: If I needed to make a sequence of notes louder in Cakewalk, I had to change the velocity of each note in the sequencer separately, which, as you can imagine, takes a really long time and is very tedious.

I still use Cakewalk for recording my MIDI data though because Reason doesn’t automatically stretch the song length if the recorded data exceeds the length of measures. Instead, it just cuts off your recording. I learned that the hard way :slant:

 

I bought new music software!

Posted on by BogusRed

Ok so I finally have the money to support my projects and one of the first things I bought was this midi music program called Reason. I heard about it from some members over at OC Remix.

It’s definitely a step up from my shitty Cakewalk program. Reason is so amazingly powerful. I can’t believe the quality of the songs that I’ve heard come out of this program.

But with power, comes complexity…

When I first got it and installed it I tried doing some simple stuff with it like taking some of my piano midis and putting a nicer piano sample on it but I was having trouble doing something as simple as that. o.O I found out about a Reason beginner’s workshop in San Fransisco and I signed up. The workshop was 6 hours long and was only $165 bucks. And it was worth every penny!

If any of you are thinking of trying out this workshop, I highly recommend it. It’s very reasonably priced and you will learn a ton. :thumbsup:

The sequencer part of Reason was pretty easy to figure out because my other MIDI programs, Cakewalk and MIDI Orchestrator Plus have sequencers that look and function almost exactly the same as the one in Reason. But the part that was tripping me up was all the hardware racks and wiring. I have absolutely no experience with audio engineering. A lot of the terms are based on the actual physical hardware that is used when audio engineers create music. All these terms I really didn’t know. :question: The workshop really gave me enough information to really get started working with the program.

As a result I have a new piano piece available in the Music section! :bounce: It’s a piano rendition of the main theme from Surviving Together. It is an original composition. The midi was recorded with Cakewalk a few months ago but the piano sound is from a Reason piano patch.

Reason just came out with a Piano’s Refill pack. I’ve tried multiple times to order it from their online store but for some reason it isn’t going through 🙁

But when I finally do get it, I will use it on some of my existing piano songs in the music section and submit them to OC Remix. I’ll also record some new songs.

 

One Week Left Of My Internship

Posted on by BogusRed

Life is good. Work is hard. It’s almost the end of summer and the end of my internship. This has been my first real experience with a real full time job. It feels great to be moving out of the school phase of my life and into the working phase but at the same time I feel a little depressed about it. Not because I’ll miss school. Far from it. I am getting sick of school! But I’ve found that having a full time job that mostly involves sitting on your butt in front of a computer all day can be quite draining. I’m often so tired by the end of the day that what free time I do have, I don’t want to spend on the computer. Which means my personal projects like ZMT and PaperDemon.com don’t get as much attention as they used to.

I still have one last year of school left. I will be working part time during the school year.

I can’t take on anything new. From now on, anyone who approaches me about any sort of project, whether it be a flash project, art request, website design, I will just have to say no. For the first time in my life I’m saying ‘no.’ I have this problem where I get really excited about projects and say ‘yes’ to every opportunity that comes at me, whether or not I have the time for it. Now I don’t even have as much time for the project that matters to me most, PaperDemon.com.

In other news, I’ve finally got my hands on some real music software. I bought Reason. I’m still trying to get the hang of it though. It’s not the most user-friendly program out there. But I’ve signed up for a workshop being held next weekend. So as soon as I get the hang of this program I can start posting more of my music.

 

Week 1 @ Google

Posted on by BogusRed

I’ve finished my first week at Google. It seemed to go by so fast. They had a lot of new hires this week so my equipment still isn’t all available yet. But luckily I got enough of it to get started on some actual work by Friday.

I made my first submit to the Google server on Friday! That means I made my first change to a web page on the Google server. It was just a small change on the about page for Gmail. All I did was change the languages from 38 to 40 and add Hebrew and Arabic to the language list. But I feel pretty special about it. I also got to work on my first icon. I also have a meeting for my first real project on Monday :D!

I really like the atmosphere at Google. By the end of my first week I was feeling really comfortable. I no longer feel nervous or anxious. My co-workers are really nice and have been a big help in getting me up to speed on how to use the Google file systems and learning the procedures. There’s a lot of documentation I’ve had to go through and read. I sort of felt like I was cramming for a final :lol:. It’s been a challenge though because a lot of it is centralized around Unix and I only just started learning Unix a month ago.

Anyway, I just really love it there. I like the people, the food, the equipment, and the work. I just know this is going to be the best summer of my life.

 

Day 1 @ Google

Posted on by BogusRed
Rule number one about Fight Club, don’t talk about Fight Club!

That’s pretty much how it is at Google. I can’t tell you anything about what’s going on there. That’s just how it is.

I’m very tired. I didn’t really do any work today but it was hectic running all over the place to do orientations, setting up stuff, etc.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go shower and collapse on my bed

 

I’m Working at Google this Summer!

Posted on by BogusRed

On Tuesday I start my new internship at Google. I’m really excited about it. I can’t wait to meet the other interns and learn what life is like as a Googler.

I am really proud to be working at Google. My manager is the guy who does all of the Google holiday logos! Can you believe that?! That is AWESOME. I’m looking forward to working with him and learning the secrets of the Google doodles. Every time I think about the fact that I’ll be working at Google I pinch myself just to make sure I’m not dreaming.

Another Google intern sent me a link to this cool site called Gintern.net that displays all the Google intern blogs.

Anyway, the art section of my blog site is FINALLY done.

There are a lot of things I’m looking forward to learning this summer. I’m told I’ll be making a lot of icons and such. I don’t see myself as a really great icon designer so I’ll get a lot of practice and learn all the tricks. I’m hoping to take what I learn at Google and apply it to PaperDemon.com to make it easier for members to post their artwork and such. I’m also looking forward to trying out the hardware. I hear they use Tablet PCs for drawing and I’ve never drawn on one before. If I like it, I may buy one for myself. It will be nice to have a little computer to use as my sketchbook. I will be able to do watercolor without carrying around a paint set! I like painting digitally better than painting traditionally anyway.

Another thing I think I will buy is that Reason software for making digital music. The music programs I have now are so crappy. That is part of the reason why I haven’t posted any new music in the music section of my site for a long time. I’m waiting to get some better software with a better piano sound font.

Google gives free meals every day for employees and I’m hoping I don’t gain any weight.

 

Spring Break recap

Posted on by BogusRed

I did work on my vis dev work but not as much as I should have.

I didn’t touch my short film or Surviving Together.

I did work a lot on Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater. We released two episodes and have recorded three more that are ready for animating. I will work on these slowly though the semester.

But mostly what I spent my time on was PaperDemon.com. I decided that it was time to build all of those nifty features that I’ve had in mind for PD and prepare to sell Premium Accounts. I still have some more work to do but Premium Memberships will be offered some time in mid to late February. I’ve spent a ton of time on it and I can’t wait to offer the Premium Memberships and see what people do with the cool new features. I don’t want to get into the details of the features because they are already explained on PD.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it is I want to do in life and what it is I enjoy doing. I spend an awful lot of time on my website and it makes sense to me that web design or web programming is where my future is. Even though I don’t have hardly any formal education or training in it, I have a lot of knowledge and experience on the subject. I really enjoy organizing information and designing an interface to display that information, which is exactly what the Paper Demon website is all about. People upload their artwork and writing and it is categorized and organized into sections. Then that information is displayed for the viewer. I don’t know why but I really enjoy doing it and for the past month I’ve been working at least 40 hours a week developing new features for PD. I often work late in the night until I can hardly think strait or keep my eyes open. And then I just collapse on my bed and sleep. So that’s what I want to do.

My Mom sent me a link to an article on Monster.com recently that was really encouraging:

http://technology.monster.com/articles/webdesigner/

It says in there that your ticket to getting into the field is to build something. Haha! I have PaperDemon.com as well as a few other websites. It’s encouraging to know that the hardest step is already done! I do think I need to spend some time improving the user interface of PD though. I know that some of it is a little plain and confusing so I’ll need to get a book on UI design principles and look at other websites for ideas.

 

ZMT might be saved

Posted on by BogusRed

On thursday night, I discovered that the data for all of my websites on my old hosting account was deleted. This put me in tears because it meant I lost all of the data in the database for

Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater

since it hadn’t been moved over to my new hosting account yet at micfo.com

But today, I was relieved to find out that my old host has a backup and will have it restored tomorrow. So hopefully ZMT will be up and running just as good as ever tomorrow.

 

It’s my birthday and I’m 22 years young.

Posted on by BogusRed

It’s about 1:30 am on the morning of my birthday and I’m up late working on Vis Dev homework. I tried out that new Google Talk today and got a kick out of the voice chat. I was surprised at how good it sounds compared to Ventrillo and Yahoo voice chat. The quality is pretty good.

I finished up the Music Page today and realized that I hadn’t really posted any new music since like the end of last year. So when I get the chance this weekend I’ll record a new song and post it. I’m thinking of doing Ahead On Our Way from FFV and/or a Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger Prologue medley. I actually recorded a version of that called Turn the Page but then removed it from the music section because i felt it was too underdeveloped. The file is still stored on the site if you want to give it a listen in MP3 or MIDI format.

If you have a song in mind that you’d like me to record or learn, feel free to send me your requests in an email.

 

The First Of Many

Posted on by BogusRed

This is my first blog entry here at my personal website BogusRed.net.

Since the Paper Demon community moved to another domain name, I figured I’d use BogusRed.net for my own personal space on the web. Once I get everything up and running, you’ll find my sketches and fanart as well as my music. In the meantime, you can view much of my artwork at Paper Demon.

Well, just yesterday my boyfriend bought me a new hard drive for my upcoming birthday on Sept. 8th. It’s 200GBs woo hoo! My old drive was only 80 and it was getting pretty full. So full that it slowed down my computer’s performance. Now I can use that extra 80GB hard drive for backups :D.

 Just this passed weekend I moved over the Paper Demon site to its new domain name and server space at micfo.com hosting. I’ve never tried this host before but I heard from a friend it was good and they gave me a free month trial! I’ve only had minor setup problems so far and I’ve found the tech support to be extremely fast, unlike my last host Apollohosting.com. That’s one of the major reasons I decided to switch. I have a whole list of reasons why I switched which you can read about in the Paper Demon News Post on the site move.

Hopefully I’ll get the art and music sections up within the next few weeks.