Welcome to Peopod's Music and Technology blog! Access the indie music world of a million+ songs within a click of landing! Designed for indie music explorers, reviewers and podcasters, urls have been pre-tested and calibrated to achieve a unique "download-in-1" click reach. This custom search engine only features creative commons and free artist hosted material.
Simply key in your present search interest into 'Spin a Song' on the left (e.g. romance, celtic ballads) or click below.
Here’s a great story for youth and kids! Lolli ventures to Beauty Land as she is led to believe she can be more beautiful there. She ends up trading away everything she loves but then finally discovers the essence of real beauty. A lovely and heartwarming story by Singaporean storyteller Neo Beng Choo and artwork by Neo Beng Poh. Includes Lolli voiceovers by Mikayla Khoo (2+) and a song by Chee Hui Ling.
This full-featured widget also contains a special section for a ‘chat with Lolli’ (ie. the author and production team), reader feedback, and options for buying the actual book (printed by Armour Publishing). The widget is designed to be responsive and really lightweight (just over 100kb for loading up). So enjoy!
Back in the days before the Internet, letters were a decidedly more enduring form of communication. Now with blogs it’s easy to see archives hanging around in theory forever. But somehow more seems less. More email doesn’t carry that same touch or feel - maybe because it’s all been depersonalised into Arial or Times New Roman. With letters that you’d receive once a week or even once a month, you’d be quite happy reading, or rereading them a dozen times. Blog posts don’t have that kind of longevity, understandably, nor email. Unfortunately the only things that come through mail nowadays are bills and sales flyers - and all of them are ironically trying to sell that personal touch.
My Dad’s passing me a bunch of letters, poems my grandfather wrote to my grandmother. He was a librarian and very well read so they must be quite literary. So they’ve been ‘bequeathed’ to me and I suppose I’ve got to take on the baton and do something about family history. I’ve never been a big writer myself as I’ve always liked to say more with less, acting as critic rather than creator (though it’s also true critics write voluminously more on a single point than most authors intend). Here are some ideas I’ve been considering anyhow.
Idea 1: If they’re substantial enough, perhaps they’d be worth publishing with some of Dad’s stuff and mine, as a Khoo family anthology. [four stars]
Idea 2: Develop them as a base for a song and then record matthew in backing vocals as an intergenerational piece. [two stars]
Idea 3: Reconstruct a ’story’ with Dad’s input and turn it into a digital story of family history. I’ve always relied on uncles and aunts to do this: guess it’s time to pitch in. [three stars]
Meanwhile, I’m glad Firefox 3 has finally arrived. Great new predictive URL function and nicely resized backbutton. Let’s see if it proves more stable with Google Apps. Makes me wonder when Opera’s going to roll out the next major upgrade. For all of us waiting for that perfect browser it doesn’t seem so far away now.
The theme for Sunday Sharing this week is ‘What I remember most about Dad’.
“And there where cold winds howl into the mist of morning, fresh with autumn change, and leaves scurry on to warmer domains: in those mulled moments ensconced by family and fireplace, we remember all.” (Life beside the River by Thomas Crooke)
With dad, there’s always the expression of faith to remember. My dad grew up in a Christian home but never encountered God until middle life - and it wasn’t because of a crisis - just a deep encounter with God one day in a meeting. The significance of a personal faith was something I learnt in the many father-son sharing times we had, casual, instructive, sometimes too well-worn, yet heartfelt. There I also learnt to listen to heart and not just words; love, not just well-meaning intentions.
The faith I recall was of personal encounter that led to a life journey of seeking God. For him this meant leaving a job he had trained half his life for as a chartered surveyor, joining a church, then becoming a pastor, then later a missionary. In these transitions what I remember most is a deep humility and purposed conviction that there is more in life in what we can’t see than in what we can. A 200% universe that is underscored with purpose, meaning and design if we cared to look and if we dared to see. The point was, the cost is easy to calculate when you can see what you’re losing out: money, pleasures, prestige. But it’s the cost you can’t see, the possibilities in the other 100% of the unseen universe that can make life unsettlingly unfulfilled: the incalculable unknown potential of what’s missed, or lost, or left unclaimed.
And where the recollection of conversations meld into that expression of faith, it’s turned into a challenge to build something of greater significance. A legacy Mikayla and Matthew might themselves remember as something to treasure. Thanks Dad!
‘Father’s Hands’ still seems to be dominating the newsfront. Except this time mine are involved to as I’m helping with triggering and setup.
It’s instrumentals today and sounds here are really pristine - pure and virtually untouched by digital manipulation (actually I tried but failed). So dip into this demo mix especially if you’re in the mood to unwind to some light improv. If you love these, you’ll also be amazed how far talent could take a short recording session. Meric’s from Turkey where his first instrument is the oboe so saxophone isn’t even his strongest suit!
I just joined a blogging carnival and the theme is on Fathers. This week, it’s Father’s Hands so I’m drawing from the momentum here to post something. Hopefully regularly. Technology is cool for professional reasons but then again something closer to the heart is more likely to inspire me to write.
But first, since I’m on lenses, I can’t resist sharing about the most amazing 3-D viewer I’ve seen yet: stunning, fast and effective. Pic-Lens lets you glide through an entire archive of photos and videos in an enhanced aesthetic environment.
I’ve taken my fair share of baby feet, enough to know that this one says it all. Beauty in bite size means you don’t need to do anything to be meaningful, or strive into a new suit of significance. It’s enough that you’re resting in a pair of hands that is willing to do it all for you. And if you share faith, with a God this big, to have created the universe and replicate your life in DNA, doesn’t seem like there should be all that much to be worried about? Feet fettered? Or ardently admired. That’s closer to truth!
And then we all grow up, older, wiser, or so we think. Until we encounter the magic of seeing life from the other side of the lens: and the wonderment of maybe we don’t know it all. Afterall, a few years more of relatively wiser, stronger, bigger becomes no less treasured in the hand of the infinitely transcendent creator.
Everyone inevitably goes through a season in their life where they have to take a step back and reassess certain assumptions about life… for me, it was the feasibility of being an adsense-funded blogger. Back in Feb this tiny site hit a record 83GB of downloading traffic, then came the Google bolt.
This is for those of you who have yet to see what an adsense check (or dishonoured one) looks like. The photo is worth S$193, a piffling sum for some bloggers, but you might as well get the benefit of the experience in case you have to see it one day: TOS have and will remain one of the bigger mysteries in blogging life (still, thanks Goog for the continued use of picasa and search, I’ll remain your loyal fan).
A blog conversion experience
For now I’m dedicating this music and tech blog and the website back to God, as in directing traffic to worldvision and other frontline communities that need the traffic and donors, ie. any other values other than converting traffic to cash - will that mean less spam? I don’t know. I hope so! But then again there isn’t any bot-saving software I know of.
World Vision is a Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. www.helpsurvivors.org.
There’s a song I wrote recently, titled ‘One Life’ - can’t wait to find some space to produce it, but it goes like this:
turn the lights this way / i hear a little voice from over here you say / something in your eyes tells me that I can / something in your words says you understand / something in the way you lend your hand// more than just the way / it’s a friend that makes this journey stay / what it is / the meaning of it all /// one life to live / something’s gotta give / you can see a world through broken jigsaw pieces / falling into place / one life to live / someone’s gotta give / children of destiny, faces in the dark / searching for the day / searching for the day /// the learning never ends / though I’ve turned the bend the wonder never can / you lift me from my knees help to make me stand / stepping by my side walking with my hand / when you believe what I could be // through the sands of time / it’s your candle that’s been lighting mine / brighter than / when we shine alone /// one life to live / something’s gotta give / you can see a world through broken jigsaw pieces / falling into place / one life to live / someone’s gotta give / children of destiny, faces in the dark / searching for the day / searching for the day / one day / one life to live
Guess YPN, Nuffnang, Advertlets, Clicksor, everyone, you’ll have to wait your turn.
We’ve released a complimentary key to our new EP on the Peopod main site itself. Check it out! Let us know what you think here.
This new digital music album features full releases with enhanced vocals for ‘Summer of Life’, ‘Skidmarks’, ‘The Tolls of Twelve’, and ‘In Your Eyes’, a song for that special someone!
Step 1: Download the Free Album at CD Quality - 320kbps
Step 2: Access your Complimentary Key
So onto planning that acoustic space. The quietest spot at home is not necessarily the furthest from the main door. Don’t make the mistake of just looking at the sound sources within your home. Often, sounds from outside your home are louder and harder to control than those inside. That deserted corner of your apartment or garage might just be the most vulnerable to overflying planes or the honk of the garbage truck along the road. Instead, what you want to isolate are the loudest sounds that could reach your mike. One simple way to do that is to use an air buffer and build on a room-in-a-room concept.
Now, assuming you have control of the internal environment (i.e. you can arrange to have your kids out with family when you’re recording) here’s how to deal with the external. The walls of your home in contact with the outside will resonate with the sounds from the outside. So look at your internal walls and find a nice junction or section that isn’t in contact with the outside. Think about building a physical structure around that (with a door of course). It can be large, or in the example below, as small as a 1m x 1m vocal booth. What that creates is an air buffer or dead space between the ‘external’ walls of your home and the ‘internal’ walls of your recording room.
This was an amazing shot to discover. Couldn’t quite figure how to capture the DIY vocal booth but finally got this from a bottom up angle. The vocal space was designed into the intial room restructuring with a double wall filled with rockwool. Unfortunately that left one slight problem on the sound isolation front: the fully solid single-layer glass door with gaps all around. The solution was to sheetblok the entire room and door surface in such a way as to create an ‘airlock’ when closing the door fully. Mounted on this layer were the sound absorbers that very successfully eliminate all reflected sounds.
Facing the light would be the RodeNTK, an awesome condenser microphone. Behind that is the wall-mounted Samsung monitor that allows me to trigger recording and playback directly from this booth. How that works is simply through a wireless keyboard that’s sitting on a ledge below the screen.
Seems like setting up a personal studio’s all the rage now. If you’re trying this from scratch you might want to check out this DIY version that is designed around the concept of a single-operator vocal booth. You don’t need a garage for this, just a small room in an apartment.
First question to ask is simply what are you going to be recording: Vocals or Instruments? If the latter, Acoustic (e.g. Folk Guitar) or Electronic (e.g. Keyboard)?
If you’re doing Vocals and Acoustic instruments, you need to seriously look at the acoustic space and budget some money to treat the room. Sound dampening and isolation are the key problems in getting a nice clean recording. For midi work and electronic stuff that can be piped directly to your onboard sound processor/virtual studio, the requirements are relatively simpler. However it’s not to say that all you need is a table and keyboard. Chances are you’d want to do some mixing so that means you’d need to consider acoustic issues too. So the first tip really is to head here to get a good sense of what acoustic spaces demand.
Recall times when you’re casually surfing and seem to be passing by too many ‘excellent’ sites? It can feel like travelling on a tour bus where there’s too much to see and no time to explore. Often, you move past a good site without favouriting or bookmarking anything simply because:
1. You’re not able to tell from a cursory look whether the page or site is worth flagging compared to what you might encounter in a few moments.
2. You’ve been hopping through many sites in a ‘linear’ fashion (i.e. following a trail of links) and so it’s hard to compare the current and previous sites.
3. You much rather finish identifying all the dozens of ‘good’ links first before going back for a second round of deeper exploration.
In essence, backward surfing works for the many situations when you’re tempted to start clicking Backspace, the browser Back button or surf the history bar because you think you’ve missed something. So here’s the tip: don’t break your surfing momentum; simply “save” your current status by duplicating your current tab or window. In the original window, you can start backward surfing to all the ’stops’ on the journey you would have in retrospect wanted to make. At each of these ’stops’, duplicate the window again before continuing backwards.
At the end, or rather the beginning, you should now have all your interesting sites open in separate tabs without needing to use bookmarking. This means that when you finally do bookmark sites, they would really represent the best of your surfing efforts.
Browsers:
Internet Explorer 7.0: Alt+Enter while in address bar (duplicate window)
Mozilla Firefox: Alt+Enter while in address bar (duplicate window)
Opera: Shift+Enter while in address bar, Hold Right+Down-Up mouse gesture (duplicate window)
