howto – Just Another Halfling

91 Things to Boost Your Creativity (aka 91 ridiculous ways to kill time)

Sometimes your creativity kicker just stops kicking. When your mind is empty and you’re pounding your head against a wall of uninspired bulldust, it might be time to take a break and give yourself permission to do something else. While you might have a couple ideas of something else that you know you want to do, here’s 91 other things you can do to stop choking your creative mind:

Build something awesome
Turn off your phone and go for a long, long walk
See how many dogs in your neighborhood you can get barking at once
Go for a color walk and try to find an object in every color inside or outside of your home
Bonus points: Make sure your colored objects are something naturally occurring, like a plant or animal
Challenge a random pedestrian to a dance-off
Challenge a driver at a stop light to a dance-off
Learn a new instrument like the drums, guitar, or piano (no affiliate)
Teach yourself a new skill
Teach someone else a new skill
Prepare a GTFO bag
Work on your ~~everyday carry~~ EDC kit
Learn how to and practice walking like a ninja
Show up at your friend’s house without telling anyone
Bonus points: Make it a friend that lives at least 3 hours away from you
Track down a friend you haven’t had contact with in years
Call a friend you haven’t talked to in the past 12 months
Call your Mother / Father / Sister / Brother
Call your Grandma / Grandpa
Bonus points: show up at your grandparents’ house without telling them
Ask your family for their favorite stories about other family members
Ask your parents for hilarious stories about yourself/your siblings as toddlers/children
Start a rhyming text battle with someone
Start a rhyming battle with a random stranger
Give someone $20-$50 without them noticing (don’t forget to use your ninja skills)
Ask homeless people to tell you their best stories
Go through your closet and donate crap you don’t need
Go through your house and donate crap you never use
Bonus points: Try to sell some of these things to neighbors and/or strangers
Play bigger and better
Set up a Fiverr or Etsy account
Create a 5-20 page children’s storybook, including illustrations
Go to the library and try to find the most ridiculous book cover ever
Go to the bookstore and try to find the most and least expensive book in the store
Bonus points: Try to haggle with a manager to increase the price of the least expensive book, and / or lower the price of the most expensive book
Read up on the latest psychological discoveries
Sell your body to science
Take a nap and DO NOT SET A TIMER
Write a motivational speech for someone you know is having a hard time
Research the details of a religion you’re not familiar with
Rewrite 7 alternate endings for your favorite book series / TV show / movie / video game
Bonus points: Tell someone who hasn’t gotten to the end of the story your alternate ending. When they see / read the real ending, you will get to laugh and laugh and laugh…
Go to your local university’s free speech zone and ask students to tell you the most interesting thing they learned that day
Make a plan to build a new habit
Replay a game from your childhood
Start a blog or Youtube channel
Make a stop motion animated video
Write a 3-5 page script and send it in to your local News Station
Bonus points: Challenge them to actually use the script in their newscast
Offer to babysit for a friend so they can have an epic date night
Plan and run an epic date night for your friends who don’t have kids
Bonus points: Set up the date between two of your friends who aren’t dating
Go door-to-door and collect donations for a charity
Call your mayor and ask him about the city’s plans for prosperity in the event of a nuclear fallout
Download a free-to-play Steam game and play uninterrupted for at least 30 minutes
Talk like a pirate for the rest of the day…
… after making a customized paper pirate hat
Learn a new language
Make a friend from a foreign country
Research and listen to music from a foreign country
Bonus points: Ask your new foreign friend for their favorite band
Listen to music from a genre that you can’t stand for at least an hour
Try to write a song in a genre you can’t stand
Learn some really long words
Ask a guy to teach you some manly skill (like changing your oil)
Ask a girl to teach you some womanly skill (like folding bedsheets)
Play your instrument upside down
Invent a new board game
Invent a new card game
Invent a cardboard game
Build a snowman
Bonus points: Build a snowman without any snow
Read a comic book
Write / draw a short comic
Write / draw a satire
Do a drawing tutorial
Watch a kid’s movie and consider its political meaning
Daydream about the perfect kids movie
Daydream about the perfect video game
Investigate career paths that you could take with your hobbies
Plan a global adventure
Take the lyrics of 2-12 songs and mash 3-7 word phrases into one song
Bonus points: Mash genres together (aka metal mashed with dubstep, pop, and country)
Take the characters of one story and imagine what would happen if you plopped them into another story
Imagine how your favorite story would have been different if the villain was the hero and vice versa
Learn a martial art
Research a single year in history
Browse random articles on Wikipedia
Create alter egos for yourself and your family / friends
Read a self-help book for something you don’t need help with
Make a thank you / birthday card from scratch
Create a scavenger hunt for someone
Make a plushie for yourself, and a matching one for a friend
Bonus points: Personalize the plushies so they reflect your personalities
Genre-mash movies (Western + Superhero + Mecha)
Watch an anime
Write uninterrupted in a journal
Make paper airplanes and see how far you can get one to fly
Make the most delicious paleo (insert any other diet) meal you can with items already in your fridge / kitchen
Sign up for a free trial of a game (Runescape, World of Warcraft; something of the like)
Go to the park and see if you can Disney Princess a squirrel into your hand
Play on a kid’s playground (when kids aren’t on it, of course)
Come up with a list of 91 things to do with your best friend / significant other / brother / whoever

That’s it. 91 ways to beat your creative block and come up with awesome ideas. Have any more suggestions? Let ’em rip in the comments!

How to Make MIDI Strings Sound More Realistic

Unless you’re paying $200 for MIDI sounds, chances are good that your free MIDI sounds are… awful. This is especially true of strings – violins, violas, cellos, double bass; if it can be played with a bow and was free, the MIDI version doesn’t sound that great.

That being said, there are ways to help make your MIDI strings sound a little bit less pathetic and a little more realistic in your mix. This guide won’t make your stock Garageband strings sound like a real violinist actually played them, but it (hopefully) will make your stock sounds a little more bearable.

On Velocity and Quantization

Just like with MIDI drums, to make your MIDI strings sound most realistic, you shouldn’t just keep all your notes’ velocities at the same level. (In Garageband I think the preset is 98.) Varying your velocities within about plus/minus 15 steps is a safe place to keep it so that you get variation, but it still maintains a similar intensity.

The key to improving the realism of your MIDI string sounds is to humanize them – so you change the velocity, and you change the quantization. You don’t want to quantize your notes so that they begin right on the beat – about 80-95% is a good place to stay.

One of the hard things with strings and quantization is that the samples don’t always start playing right at the beginning of your MIDI note. To just keep your strings in time with all the other instruments, you may have to pull their start time a little bit back from the beat you want them to play on. In the first picture the notes are all aligned right with the beat. But if the sound doesn’t start right away, it can make your strings sound sloppy. Like the second picture, try pulling your notes back so that the sound starts right on the beat to help keep your recording tight.

Use Different Instruments and Split Up Tracks

If you can find some decent free MIDI sounds of each individual instrument in your string section (check out resources for some links!), you’re already light years ahead of Garageband’s stock. Use a different MIDI instrument for each of your instruments – violin, viola, cello, and double bass are the standard string section.

Even if you’re just got some stock “Orchestral Strings” instrument, try to have a unique track for each of those instruments, and keep notes that would fit for each instrument unique to that track. Just because you don’t have a specific MIDI sound for each instrument doesn’t mean you can split them up that way! Here’s a very generalized range that you can use to guide your track splits:

Violins can start as low as G3, and go as high as the spectrum allows
Violas can start as low as G1 and go to about D5
Cellos start as low as C2 and go as high as A4
Double basses are anything lower than G1

Those notes are by no means scientific or definite – they’re just a starter’s guide. I tend to have each instrument playing 3 octaves, with their lowest octave playing in the same range the instrument that’s lower than them, and their highest octave playing in the same range as the instrument higher than them.

For example: Violin would play C4-C6, Viola would play C3-C5, Cello would play C2-C4, Double bass would play C0-C2.The tiny little letters on the keys on the left help me determine where to keep my notes.

Layer Your Sounds

If you’ve got computer power to spare, one of the simplest ways to make a strings track sound more realistic is to layer sounds. Play duplicate tracks (same notes) with different instruments.

For example, say you’ve got a violin part, and you’re using an instrument that has just the violin. To give it more oomph, you can copy/paste the notes into a new track, and use the Smart Strings instrument. Bam! Sound improved.

Modulation and Mixing

One of the awesome things about Garageband’s Smart Strings is that by turning on the modulation, you can change the kinds of sounds that play. You can get staccato, pizzicato, and legato all out of one track instead of needing to have different MIDI tracks specifically for the different ways to play.

Play with the modulation on your different instruments to see if you can get any extra sounds out of your MIDI.A short little guide for playing the Smart Strings with Musical Typing:

3 is legato – smooth, blends together, good for long notes
4 is a staccato – short, jerky notes played by the bow, this is a shafting sound
5 is another staccato – same as above, slightly different technique
6 is a pizzicato – short, plucked notes
7 is another legato – same as 3, more or less
8 is another staccato – similar to 4 and 5

Mixing is the last key thing you can do to get your strings to sound more realistic. First off, do your panning well. Give each of your MIDI strings its place in the stereo field.

Finally, feel free to EQ those suckers. It’ll help clean up the sound, at the very least!

These are the things I have found take my crappy sounding strings and make them more palatable and authentic. The vice of MIDI (it sounds terrible compared to the real thing) is also its blessing – it’s a different sound than you’ll get from a real instrument. Use that to whatever ends you will.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. You can always send thoughts, suggestions, and questions to justanotherhalfling@gmail.com as well 🙂 Thanks for reading!

5 Reasons Why You Need to Play With Other Musicians

Music is intrinsically very soul baring. There’s just something about the sounds we make that impacts us at a core level. For this reason (among many others), many musicians prefer to play alone or have never gathered up the courage to look for other musicians to play with.

I am like this – being alone for a day with my guitar is one of the happiest days I can think of – but there is so much value in sharing the craft of music with other creators that it’s almost a crime to only create solo. Here are 5 reasons you should be playing (and recording) with other people.

1. You Improve as a Musician

Playing with other musicians forces you to play differently than when you’re by yourself. You have to keep time differently, have to follow, have to be able to keep the song going even when others make mistakes, have to be able to quickly recover from making mistakes, and have to get along well with people.

This not only improves you as a musician, but significantly increases your rate of improvement, especially in comparison with your rate of improvement playing solo.

If you really want to become better at something, it’s a mistake to be the most accomplished person in the room. Play with people who are at a higher level than you, and you will naturally become better.

2. You Get Good Feedback

Whether you play with a performing band or just hang out and jam with other musically talented people, you get great advice and insight on your technique, skills, strengths, and weaknesses. Be open to critique – if it stings, it’s probably spot on.

That being said, you’ll also hear a lot of biased nonsense (true bassists don’t use picks, anyone?). It’s well worth sifting through the nonsense to find the nuggets of gold.

If you are courageous enough to share your songs and/or recordings, you get some of the best critique on your music from fellow musicians. They listen for things that normal listeners don’t hear. Plus, they can share ideas on how to make the song better.

Collaborating on songs is one of the best ways to sharpen up musically. You get to hear new ways of songwriting, and get to share your processes. Plus, you get to hang out with some pretty cool people at the same time!

3. You Learn to Follow Cues While Improvising

Improvising is the #1 skill you need in order to play well with other musicians. The best way to learn how to improvise well is to play with other musicians, especially ones who are better than you (see point 1).

Improvising well translates well to any other aspect of music, from composing to playing live to recording. Learning to see cues and recognize signals makes you more suited to playing in various styles and genres.

If you compose songs on your own, you’ll learn a lot about song structure and how the different parts of a band work together to create a unified, beautiful whole.

4. You Learn How to Create Cues While Improvising

Not only do you learn how to follow while playing with other musicians, but you learn how to lead. Even if you’re not a drummer, even if you’re not a bassist, you learn how to guide whatever you’re playing. This also helps you understand song structure and social dynamics in composition and playing.

Once you learn how to lead and follow in improvisation, it’s easy to transition the knowledge into your own compositions. And don’t just think that improvising is only for jazz and blues musicians – improvisation is important for every instrument, every genre, and every level of experience.

Even if you picked up your instrument yesterday, you can improvise, and it’s important that you do so that you learn your weaknesses, strengths, and what you do and don’t like about your playing. Playing with other musicians, at its core, shows you what you need to practice on your own.

5. It’s Fun!

You probably got into music because you realized how much fun it is to create the sounds in your head. You know what else is fun? Hanging out with your friends.

Combining the two is the best reason to play with other musicians – because you get to meet people and create meaningful relationships through the craft of music! If you need any more reasons to play with other musicians, you might want to just use music as your personal diary: a way to express and experience the world…

…and try to find someone to play with every once in a while. ^^

It doesn’t matter how small your town is – there is always a way to play with other musicians! Keep your eyes on the lookout for other players, and don’t be afraid to introduce yourself as a musician if the topic comes up. Religious institutions, schools, and other social clubs are a great place to find musicians to play with.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. You can always send thoughts, suggestions, and questions to justanotherhalfling@gmail.com as well 🙂 Thanks for reading!

3 Methods for Recording a Song at Home

Your brain works in a unique and individual way. Your mind follows a logic that many other people do not understand. If your methods of sitting down and actually recording keep you content and creatively inspired, then that’s how you should be recording. But most people don’t know what processes are conducive to their own productivity. That’s how I want to help you today.

I am going to outline 3 different logical methods / processes that you can use to record a song today. If you’re sufficiently motivated and inspired, you might even be able to finish a rough draft by the time you should be in bed. Give each of them a whirl, and hopefully you’ll find something useful – even if that’s just three methods you know don’t help you.

1. Compositional Recording

I hear songs playing in my head, and I’ve found that the best way to get them from my head to the computer is to figure out each part of the song section by section. What do the first 8 bars of the intro sound like? I reproduce that until I’ve got the basics of the music recorded, and then move on.

When I say “the basics of the music,” I mean three things:

The groove on the drums/bass. I don’t have to have a perfect drum beat/bass line, but the groove in my head is fundamentally represented.
The basic rhythm and notes on all the instruments. If I’m hearing a breakdown, I focus on rhythm; if I’m hearing a chorus, I focus on the notes. Sometimes I end up with more of a musical skeleton, sometimes it’s closer to a proper composition. As long as I can hear the song in my head through the notes, it’s good enough.
General lyrical/melodic content. Even if I don’t have all the best articulation, all I’m looking for as I record piece by piece is to understand the basic form of the song in my head.

Once I’ve got a firm understanding of how the song goes, I can take the pieces and arrange them, cut them, mix them up etc. Then I re-record all the different pieces, filling in the melodic/rhythmic/stylistic gaps that are inevitable in recording section by section.

This method is most effective if a) you use loops, b) you use MIDI, c) you don’t have perfect pitch and want to get the song out of your head before you forget it.

2. Record from the Bottom Up (Or Vice Versa)

This is pretty much the most common way anyone has ever recorded in a professional setting. You record the song from the ground up: drums first, bass, other rhythm instruments (guitars, pianos, strings), melodic instruments (vocals, guitars, strings), and you finally end with the icing on the cake: any tiny fills, licks, transitions etc. that you want to color your tune.

If you’re a one-man band at home, this is a good way to record songs, especially in the case that you’re not a drummer first, and a bassist/guitarist/vocalist second. Drummers are really good at staying in time with a metronome, but most other instruments play more in time when they can play to a solid drum pattern. I’m not trying to bash non-drummers and bassists, but in my experience guitarists, pianists, vocalists etc. are all great at following the rhythm laid down by drum’n’bass. They’re not so great at leading the rhythm.

If you used process 1. to get ideas down, you might want to re-record all of the pieces in this fashion so that it sounds coherent instead of mashed together. This is just cleaning up the brilliance you came up with by recording section by section! 🙂

Alternately, to spur your creativity you can do this process backwards: melody first, upper rhythm instruments, bass, then drums. You’ll still probably want to add the musical icing to the cake at the end, though. That makes the whole song sound much cleaner and coherent.

This recording process is great if you write your music and have a firm understanding of your song already and want to put it in MP3 form.

3. Go Old School and Record the Whole Band at Once

Back in the days of the gramophone (and more recently with the turntable), if you wanted to record a song with multiple instruments, you got your ensemble together and recorded the whole shindig in a couple takes. While you can make that all nice and complex and get a fancy interface that you can plug all the instruments into, you can also take one (1) omnidirectional mic (the Blue Snowball isn’t a bad choice), place it in a place where it can easily hear all the instruments, plug it into your computer and press record.

If that isn’t about as simple as recording gets, I don’t know what simple means.

There are several drawbacks to this process: if you don’t play with other people, you can’t ask them to come out and record with you. (It’s super important to your growth as a musician to play with other people! Do it as often as you can!) Also, it can be hard as heck to get the mic placed well so that you hear all the parts clearly and concisely, especially if you have more than four or five instruments playing (including vocals).

That being said, it’s a great way to record a song quickly and effectively!

So there you have it – 3 ways to record a song at home. They’re all effective, but definitely have their merits and setbacks. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. You can always send thoughts, suggestions, and questions to justanotherhalfling@gmail.com as well 🙂 Thanks for reading!

Mixing Basics – Start Your Journey on the Long Road

Mixing is the subjective process of taking raw audio and polishing it.

That’s all it is, all it has to be. Sure, there’s plenty of schools of thought that tell you what “polished” sounds like, but it’s all subjective to the ear of the beholder. As my music/mixes demonstrate, I’m still learning how to polish my songs in a way that is more in line with popular music. That’s right, I’m no expert.

But I’ve learned enough to share something useful, and that’s what I offer you today: a foundation to mixing.

Mixing is Finding Balance

Using your subjective listeners on either side of your head, your job as a mixer is simply to balance all of your recorded tracks so that you can hear each one clearly. Be careful not to fatigue your ears though – take many breaks, and mix at low volumes. Your ears are your most important tool as a mixer, so don’t overwhelm them or exhaust them if you can help it.

That being said, the fastest, simplest way to balance sound is by adjusting the volume levels on your tracks, and adjusting your panning.Balance your volumes so that you can hear everything clearly, and create a stereo field by balancing the panning to the Left and Right. A stereo field is just the space in a recording – if you’ve ever been to a symphonic performance you’ve experience something similar to a stereo field.

Violins are set to your far left, cellos and basses to your far right, with 2nd violins and violas in the middle. The different angles that the orchestra is placed at creates space in the sound – you don’t hear percussion from the right, because they’re in the back. Panning artificially creates that sense of each instrument having it’s own space.

You don’t have to pan to balance volume well, but if you use panning you need to consider how it impacts the balance of the volume and vice versa. Listen carefully to determine what sounds best, and most balanced.

Balance Using EQ

Equalization is a delicate thing to balance, and to be honest, I really struggle with it. That being said, here are three principles I use to guide me when I EQ:

I cut frequencies rather than boost them. If I want to hear more bass, rather than pulling up the curve near the bass frequencies, I’ll pull the curve down in the mids.
I try to clean up my frequencies. Use a HighPass or a LowPass (or a HighShelf/LowShelf) plugin to cut off frequencies that your instrument doesn’t need to be singing in.
I put a LowPass plugin on my bass so that I don’t have unnecessary treble frequencies cluttering up the high range.
Each instrument has its own little frequency zone. Bass is in the bottom, rhythm guitars are the low half of the mids, lead guitars are the higher half of the mids, vocals are in the top. Drums are tricky, as they fit into all of those. Equalizing each part of the drum individually is helpful to keep them clear.

Here’s some links to more specific numbers and guides for using EQ:

Balance Using Compression

Compression is all about taming your recording’s dynamics. Most compressors take your loudest sounds, and reduce their volume to the level of your softest sounds. This makes your recording’s volume more consistent, but also squashes your sound.

Compression is very common in pop music, but not in orchestral soundtracks. After all, if you want to go from a soft, tender moment to a huge action scene, the change from soft violins to blaring brass won’t be noticeable if it’s all an equal volume. I have elected to rarely use compression to maintain the dynamics in my songs. When I do use it, I always am careful not to overdo it and play around with ALL the settings.

The trick to successful compression is to tweak until it sounds good and well balanced. Remember, balance is your goal – if compression helps you reach that goal, then use it! But just because you have a dynamic track doesn’t mean that it needs compression.

If you want a more comprehensive discussion of compression, check out this article from The Garageband Guide.

Hope you found this article useful! I’ve found all of my most useful information on mixing came from this guy, so check him out if you want to zoom down the road to great mixing. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. You can always send thoughts, suggestions, and questions to justanotherhalfling@gmail.com as well 🙂 Thanks for reading!

My Setup – How I Record Guitars, Vox, and Drums in Garageband

I usually use one of two chains to get sound from my head to the computer. If you’ve checked out my gear gallery, then you might want to see how I go about recording. I don’t have much gear-wise, but way more than when I first started. So let’s go!

Guitar/Bass

I either use my mic or USB interface to plug my guitar into my computer. If I use my mic, I set it in front of my amp and use Garageband X to record whatever sounds I get to come out of my amp. Alternately, I plug my guitar directly into the UX1 interface and record into Garageband 5.1.

That simple.

If you choose to use multiple input sources in Garageband, don’t forget to change your input in Preferences.

Why the distinction between 5.1 and X? Well… Garageband X doesn’t realize that I’ve registered my POD Farm for this computer, and won’t let me use POD Farm sounds in its interface. So I just use Garageband 5.1 if I don’t want to mic my amp. Works like a charm.

Vocals

I do have a cheapo $15 pop filter that I got for Christmas. So I set that up in front of my mic, plug it into the computer, and sing. I prefer using Garageband X for recording vocals, as the little Note pad is great to put lyrics in. Simple.

Drums

To be honest, I usually arrange my drums by hand in the MIDI editor. I prefer EzDrummer to Garageband’s MIDI drums, so it doesn’t make sense to use Garageband X’s Drummer feature.

It’s a pain in the butt, and takes forever. Worth it? In my opinion as a novice drummer, yes. I can’t play very many advanced beats, so it totally works for my intents and purposes.

One of the perks of Roland’s brain is that it does a quick record in MIDI information. So if I don’t arrange a drum track by hand, I play it on the electric drum set, take the USB with the .mid file to my computer, drag the file into the project, and voila! I have decent drums to play to.

If I play the drums for myself, I have to use X, because 5.1 doesn’t open .mid files. Which is fine. Another thing to note is that you have to set the tempo on the drums to match your project tempo, or else everything goes wonky. (Or you could just set your project tempo to the tempo on your drums. But that doesn’t work so well if you’ve already recorded audio in X.)

That’s it! If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. You can always send thoughts, suggestions, and questions to justanotherhalfling@gmail.com as well 🙂 Thanks for reading!