RPM Day Three

I’m actually losing track of how many things I have in the musical pot right now.  I think I have four on the iPad and one on the iPhone.  Yesterday I added some pieces to the piano melody I had on the phone.  I like it significantly less now than yesterday, but it’s still alive.  I added two new things on the iPad.  One is a quiet little electric piano thing that I’m not sure what to do for the guitar.  I can’t do anything without a guitar part, ever.  What would be the point, right?  But this one… kinda doesn’t need a rhythm guitar.  I’ll squeeze something in somewhere.  The other thing I played with will probably be dumped.  I was testing the lightning cable adapter by plugging in my guitar.  I recorded the first thing that popped into my head.  At the time I was pleased, but now I think it’s a riff that is awfully similar to one that became an RPM song a couple of years ago.  I’ll try to salvage the idea somehow.

Is it possible that I might have five songs in the works and it’s only February third?

Wicked!

RPM Day 2

The RPM Challenge officially began for me last night at a little before 7:00pm. My wife ordered take out from our favorite Indian restaurant. I was in the car coming home from work so I drove straight there to pick it up. I arrived about 10 minutes early so I started noodling on GarageBand on my iPhone. I got a couple of little melodies down on a piano. There’s not much there, but it will be developed into something useable. After dinner my wife was watching TV so I took out my iPad and pulled a second idea out of my ass. The second one is bass and drums. This morning I woke up and started on idea #3, using the iPad again. This one is bass, drums, and an organ.

I’m thinking of making one process change this year. Last year I would come up with a couple of riffs or progressions or whatever and arrange them into song structures on the iPad. GarageBand for iPad is really limited in that respect so this time I am going to work out a handful of related parts and transfer them to the Mac before arranging them together. I’ll do voices and leads on the Mac, but all of the individual sections will be done on the iPad. Assuming, of course, that all of it ports successfully. We shall see.

The project is underway!

Photojojo Wide Angle and Fisheye Lens

I spent the last 15 minutes or so messing with the last two photojojo lenses.  The wide angle and the fisheye.  I am not happy with either.  I think it’s my fault though.  I am guessing that the metal ring that I glued onto my iPhone was placed ever so slightly wrong, and the result is the two wide lenses are screwed up.  Still, I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to pry the ring off and place a new one on right now, so you all are going to have to live with this for now.

I thought it would be fun to do this test in the back yard.  Unfortunately the sun is so bright and the reflection off the snow is so intense that I couldn’t see squat on the camera app screen.  You know, you take what you can get.  I supplemented the stupidity with more pictures of a coke bottle.  The cat is sleeping on the couch, so I won’t be adding more of her just now.

Our first shot is just the camera app.
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Now we have the wide angle. Note the horrible distortion on the right of the image, because I sure as hell did. Wait a second… I had this oriented wrong. ARGH!!!
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Finally we have the fisheye. Not so much distorted as just having the effect off center.
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The first test had the camera in portrait orientation. Now let’s try the same deal in landscape. First, no external lens.
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Now the wide angle. Note the distortion on the right and the upper left. Yeah!
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Finally, the grotesquely off center fisheye, although the sun peeking in on the upper right is kinda cool.
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Test #3 has us back inside with the obligatory coke bottle. No lens here.
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The wide angle is still distorted as hell, but you can still see that the field of view is wider. It’s not a total loss, right? Right?
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Again, the off center fisheye.
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One more time, in landscape.
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With the wide angle.
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And with the fisheye. For some reason I want to throw a capital F onto fisheye every single time I type it. Why is that? Note that the effect is really good. You can see Jen on the right side of the picture. She was in the next room, exactly 90 degrees to my right. It works, I just have it positioned wrong.
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I tried shifting the two lenses around on the metal right to try and fix the errors, but nothing I did helped at all. I think the problem is the ring the lens connects to, not the lenses themselves. Any thoughts, or do I just suck?

The zoom is the lens I really wanted. The macro was the happy bonus. I would expect that there will never come a time that I will want to use a fisheye lens, other than just goofing around, so that one is just sort of there. The idea of the wide angle is nice, but I think I would be less apt to use that than either the zoom or the macro. As it stands, the two that I am disappointed with are the ones I’d probably go to the least. I’m still disappointed though. I’ll try fixing the ring and then try testing again. Like I said, I can milk 100 posts out of these silly things.