One Two, One Two, One One
by Tom Anthony on Jan.20, 2012, under Music
What is it like to drive 1400 MPH? I used an HD Flip Video Camera and recorded a video of a full length drive from Chesapeake to Hampton Virginia, including a traffic jam, going through the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel, stopping for an iced tea at Sonic drive thru – and getting lost in residential Hampton. Originally I included the audio from the sped up driving clip – but after my first upload I discovered YouTube processing did not pick it up so the whole clip was mostly silent. I decided to use an edited version of a song I did around the 2011 Christmas Holidays.
Being short on creativity the day I did the master edit I called the song “One Two, One Two, One One”. You may have already guessed that the original recording was made on December 12, 2011. Hopefully you will enjoy the track despite the silly title.
The driving video is available on YouTube.
Amy’s Song
by Tom Anthony on Jul.22, 2011, under Music
My Daughter is away on a mission trip in Canada and I have been missing her a lot. Usually I include the individual mix tracks on the Open Source Music Project – but this time the mixdown is pretty much exactly the content of the individual tracks – I’s a slow soulful song I hope you enjoy.
Amy
Music Studio App
by Tom Anthony on Feb.24, 2011, under Chatter, Music
I have been on an extended visit to my Brother Steve’s place near Atlanta as he recuperates from some surgery. He is getting along fine, and I am heading back to Virginia in a couple of days. Meanwhile I just had to do some kind of music while I was here. I mean two weeks away from my studio is a long, long time!
Music Studio app for iPad
I decided to see if I could do something nifty on my new iPad and sure enough two programs really jump out at me… Music Studio by xewton.com which I will give a mini review of next… and AmpliTube by IK Multimedia which I will review next time.
Music Studio pretty much blows me away. I am not one to do a lot of sequencing – mainly I just play my music and record it – then do additional tracks and mix it. (See http://music.tomanthony.com/about/what-i-use/) And while I have messed around with cakewalk in the past, I have not even had the program I own installed for some time. That being the case I would still say that if you are familiar at all with midi sequencing you should be comfortable in Music Studio.
Spending just a few minutes at a time I put together a surprisingly high quality music bed and several loops. Because this is also a pod cast I will only post one example of the music I created on my iPad as an MP3 file – see the link below. In case you also have the Music Studio app I have zipped and posted the native XMS files. You may import these into the app and mess around with the stuff I did… it’s not much but you are welcome to check it out. I have also included a zip file of the midi files from the loops and song… if you do use cakewalk or any kind of midi editor you may do the same.
Music Studio Instrument and Effects tabs
The Music Studio app starts with a keyboard screen that you can adjust for width of the keys and position of the keyboard – you can also make it a dual keyboard and assign two different voices. The instrument tab features 40 voice settings and of those three are drums and one is reserved for various sound effects. The voices sound surprisingly good – especially the synth leads and guitar power chords.
The tracks tab features a 128 track sequencer – but it might get a little clumsy managing more than a dozen tracks owing to the size of the iPad screen. There are decent effects, and it is easy to export the files. All in all I am glad I installed it.
Steve’s Buddy
by Tom Anthony on Dec.20, 2010, under Music
I believe the Holidays are about faith and family and not necessarily about the dollar value of the gift. So I wanted to give some very personalized gifts for the holidays this year for many reasons – mostly because I did not want to fall into the trap of buying some generic piece of crap at Wal*Mart and calling it a Christmas present. I decided to give My brother Steve a song. In the many years I have been recording I had never done that before, and it seemed like a cool thing to do. So here is a tune I call Steve’s Buddy. I especially like the big bass line. This is one I turn the volume up on. Enjoy
Tom and Steve Anthony 11/21/2010
The Long Walkabout
by Tom Anthony on Sep.17, 2010, under Music
According to Wikipedia, Walkabout refers to a rite of passage during which male Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months.In this practice they would trace the paths, or “songlines”, that their people’s ceremonials ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds.
I love that concept – but I really named this song The Long Walkabout becuase the Sax voice in the begining and to some lesser extent the breathy flute sound just reminded me of the Austrailian didjeridu.
I had to tweak this one several times becuase the bass frequency would rattle my speakers. It’s not the kind of bass you hear as the back beat in Hip Hop – just a weird tone from the lower register of the Sax voice on my keyboard. By the way I just added a page called “What I Use” to answer the question for a friend of mine who asked how I play all the parts at one time. I don’t – but you knew that right?
Sailing East
by Tom Anthony on Sep.11, 2010, under Music
I wrote this song for a friend of mine who likes my acoustic leaning mixes. It was really a quick thing that came out better than I thought it would. At first I fooled around with a simple chord progression on my guitar and got the tempo from a setting on my digital piano. On the recorder I first played just a drum track – then added the guitar on a different track. Next I added a kind of angel choir sound – and that’s pretty much it. 
At first I did not care for the very ending because it sounded to me like I hit a sour note. If you are a musician then you will probably know I did in fact play a single note out of the scale. I have been told by several people who do not play music they just can’t hear it – well you be the judge.
Second Chances
by Tom Anthony on Sep.10, 2010, under Music
I worked on this one a good long time –so the finished recording is somewhat dense compared to “Still In The Night” – but I still left most of the tracks I recorded out of the mix. And the title… well If I were writing lyrics to this melody there would be the phrase “Second Chances” in there – mainly because when I hear the chorus I hear those words in my head.
I’m not sure it’s a love song or an affirmation of life – but I hope you like it. Play it twice – after all (pretty much) everyone deserves a second chance. I’m not too sure about a fourteen or fifteenth chance – but definitely a second one.
Still In The Night
by Tom Anthony on Aug.21, 2010, under Music
This is really a great melody. Although I tried to keep this clean with simple instrumentation it ended up getting a little complicated.
There is a bass line track in there I played manually and another one generated by the automated accompaniment track in my Technics Digital Piano. When I took out the accompaniment track and replaced it with just the drum track it sounded flat so I put it back two separate base guitar tracks and all.
It is intended to be a romantic ballad, and I think it sort of has an anthem feel to it. Hope you enjoy it too!
Dotin Dah
by Tom Anthony on Aug.10, 2010, under Music
I am sure there will be a post detailing this further – but all my personal and professional web sites are in one master directory inside my Rackspace server account. Several weeks ago the sites were hacked by a program called a SQL Injection Trojan – which is a sort of attack dog on the internet searching for weaknesses in websites. At the time there was just such a weakness in the WordPress content management platform, the software I mainly use to build web sites. While that issue has now been corrected I found myself re-building all of my websites about a month ago. Then it happened again two weeks ago – only this time an old forum software platform was the culprit and the results were just as catastrophic. 
Today I am finishing up the re-launch of the Open Source Music Project site with a cleaner and corrected set of files. Some of the songs here had been originally listed in such a way as to allow iTunes to randomly select which track was the final mix – other tracks were uploaded to the server but for various reasons never posted. Dotin Dah falls into that category. It is up tempo and features a lot of the Sax voice from my keyboard. enjoy!
Sunday Morning
by Tom Anthony on Aug.09, 2010, under Music
From November 2008 this song was at least inspired in part by the song “Mornin’ “by Al Jarreau. It has a sort of atmospheric opening which reminded me of bird song and it breaks into a kind of Jazz Swing arrangement. I am not sure why I never got this posted to the Open Source Music Project site – but I have been listening to this track for a long while.
I hope you enjoy it!
