When you're going up or down...

Here's my latest music: unfortunately, I think it mainly turned out like elevator music. The basic backing riff was done on a Yamaha DGX-620 electronic keyboard. I recorded it on the keyboard, then copied it in midi format to a USB drive and loaded it on my computer. From there, I ran it through Timidity++, which converts the midi into higher-quality WAV format audio. That was the basic riff, recorded one sequence trhough. I then loaded that wave file into Audacity (a pretty cool, free audio editor) and copied it several times over to make the backing track.

At that point, I hooked up my PS2 Rock Band USB mic to my computer, and started recording with my Yamaha 62-series alto sax (that I got brand new - about 21-22 years ago). Unfortunately, the USB port I was using was not cooperating, and most of the good takes were wasted on a port that kept dropping the mic. The one you're hearing is the "I'm tired of doing this over and over and finally worked my way around and plugged the mic into the USB port on the back of the computer so it would quit dropping out" take.

Anyway, so now I have a nice elevator music track... what to go with it? What kind of video will match this music? Nothing. So, I'll just entertain you. Was going to try to do it with stick people cartoons, but I'm not that good of an animator yet. And I couldn't find anything free to let me do that sort of animation. But I did have this little "issue" with my Facebook page again, which has been a relatively frequent thing since they redid their post thing a couple days ago for their 6th birthday, I guess. So, that became the focus of the video. I did the video in Scratch (by an MIT student - it's actually a pretty decent little programming language - even my youngest kids have made games and animations with it, and it has the basics to get you into "real" programming concepts without being overly complicated). Once I had the Scratch animation mostly put together, I recorded it off my Scratch web page using CamStudio, a free screen capture utility, and finally assembled everything in Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and uploaded it to YouTube.

With that background: enjoy the elevator music (played by yours truly) and the little video (also made by yours truly)!