reincar asked: Sandy looks dangerous... I don't know whether it is affecting your area or not but I hope you will be okay.

Oh, that’s so sweet of you to worry. No, I’m worried about others too, but thankfully Sandy will not impact my location. Lately I’ve been most concerned about a terrible anatomy test coming up (hence the lack of updates, sigh), but that pales, of course, in comparison to what some people are suffering from now.

Thank you once again. I hope that—whatever you might be going through yourself, wherever you are—that you stay okay and safe too.

fazspazz22-deactivated20121222 asked: Hello! It's good to see your updating lately. I was beginning to think you fallen off the earth or something!

Oh—hey! I was really, pleasantly surprised to get your message—your art is lovely as always, fazspazz22.  Wow. Thank you! (Do you have accounts anywhere else, e.g. dA, by the way? You ought to; your sketches deserve it.)

I just finished something that required all my attention, so I skipped it for a bit, but I hope to get back on the fifteen minutes a day art thing today. I hope I can stay interesting—thanks again for the lovely note! Always keep pushing too! ^_^

A Belated Reply

ckunt asked you:

Hey confused, where are you man D: we miss you

reincar asked you: 

I hope you will treat your followers and watchers with one more creation before leaving for your job.

Gosh, I check my account after two months, and I find that you both sent me a message a month ago. I’m so sorry for the belatedness of this reply.

Thank you so much for the kind words—the Job, as you might see from the fact that I haven’t done anything for two months, is happening right now; the Wall has hit; the Eternal August has begun, forever, heh.

When I got back from the trip in June, I wanted to end with a bang, as you might have hoped for too. I started to work on a comic more ambitious than anything I had done yet—a long comic in color, to be around a hundred frames long, about a robotic Sweetie Belle character named Sweetie Bot from a movie series called Friendship is Witchcraft. It would be, rather, about a human girl named Molly (from MLP G1, in fact) who loved her, and about both of them confronting their fears, their humanity, and blah blah…heh. In spite of it being a tad dark, it would have ended on a hopeful, uplifting note.

But I was arrogant and overambitious (I thought I could finish it in a few weeks, pfft), and when the Wall hit in August I had only finished the comic’s script and rough sketches for thirty out of one hundred frames.

I do mean to finish it, though. I still have a lot of art to learn, music to record, and stories to write and tell.

I thought that I’d have to give them all up forever (until I retire in sixty or so years), you see, but I realized that would be foolish of me again.

I need to catch up on some a lot of things at the Job, but after reading an essay about how you must leave fifteen a day to do your personal project, or else you’ll never do them, ever, I was inspired to do fifteen minutes a day for the projects I wanted to do. I had fallen into the trap of believing that “some day” I’d be able to get good enough—no.

You can get something done in 15 minutes…

So many of us have a neglected personal site or pet project that we dream of launching or revamping just as soon as the halcyon dawn breaks on the day, that blessed day, when we Finally Have The Time.

(That day will only come if your entire life vanishes into a sinkhole and, even then, I’m sure it will not seem an apposite opportunity to launch your long-planned blog about the relative merits of insoles.)

…make the simple time commitment of 15 minutes a day…

Fifteen minutes? I can afford that, even with this all-consuming Job. Right?

But, heh, I haven’t had time yet for even fifteen minutes a day, heh—not yet. I must catch up in my work, first.

But when I do catch up…

…I’ll start putting up something here, after fifteen minutes a day. When I catch up…maybe in a week [two weeks]? I don’t know yet. But while the Job unfortunately consumes almost all my time right now, fifteen minutes a day will happen…when I catch up.

I hope you all like a lot of WIPs. Because there’s going to be a lot of them, heh. And they’ll be crappy at first.

It will be slow.

I hope you might be patient with me, though. ^_^

I’ll see you all later.

Some things I learned from the second music recording

I’ve started recording music for the first time in my life. It’s been a blast. It is also very, very hard. I was foolish to think it’d be easy; I found that I was kind of in over my head.

These are some things I learned from making my second recording using the iPad, the remix of the Ōkami Promise song, over the past few days—

• I now realize why so much popular music doesn’t vary much in volume and dynamics. Compared to, say, classical European music, you’d be hard-pressed to hear any sort of crescendo. This really annoyed me before I tried recording music myself: why give up such a rich variety of moods and expression you could convey with dynamics? It seemed like such a waste. Now, after dealing with varying speakers of varying quality in various levels of noise, I realize that modern music has to stay within a narrow range of volume in order to be audible in the many environments that people will play and judge it in. Back then, people would hear instruments live in a quiet setting, like a concert hall. Now we can listen to music at any time, which is super cool, except for the fact that we often don’t make our environments quiet for our music like we used to. Soft parts now are inaudible. Loud parts now make loudspeakers crackle. When you’re running on the street and the symphony playing on your radio drops to a pianissimo, you won’t be able to hear it! All the subtle texture that you could give is flattened by poor speakers and noisy settings. And that’s why you hear nary a decrescendo on the radio. What a shame.
• Which brings me to another thing I learned: always, always test the final version of your music file on every device, speaker, and headphone you can hear. When you’re in a noisy environment, listen for which instruments are emphasized, and when. What parts can you hear the most? It might not be what you expect.
• Also export and test often while you’re in the middle of adjusting your song. If you do a lot of tweaks, but the final MP3 version crackles because a lot of parts were too loud, it’s going to be painful to adjust all of them.
• If you find that a part of your song crackles your speakers when you export it into an MP3, it might just be one track’s fault. You have to hunt down and isolate which track’s fault it is. Sometimes it’s multiple tracks’ fault. This is a humongous pain. Sound engineers get my respect for dealing with trivial-seeming but super annoying stuff like this.
• Yes, you can transfer projects from Garageband for iPad to Garageband for Mac. No, you can’t do it the other way. Yes, you can transfer music files into Garageband for iPad if you want timing for iPad recordings, but you have to use iTunes for Mac/PC. (iTunes for Mac/PC also needs to die and its syncing needs to be completely replaced by iCloud.)
• Garageband for Mac thankfully can shift the pitches of each track and tempos of each instant of time. So I don’t need to buy Logic Pro, yet.
• Garageband for Mac’s FlexTime is a lifesaver. That is all.
• Well, no, actually, but…make sure that, when you record on the iPad, your project is set to the right tempo and key signature. FlexTime on Mac is temperamental when it comes to shifting tempos and key signatures, and there’s no good way to override it.
• Garageband for iPad can merge/bounce tracks, but Garageband for Mac cannot. This is annoying.
• In addition, when you export your file to disk from Garageband for Mac, if your music file has parts with high volumes, e.g. 6 dB, you are faced with a dilemma. 6 dB is way, way too loud, but if you let Garageband use Auto Normalize then this will make the entire song too soft. What you need to do is turn off Auto Normalize but make everything softer until your speakers don’t crack from the strain when you export.
• Garageband’s Arrangement Track is also a lifesaver. With it I was able to make the grand pauses as long as I wanted: I created a blank, silent “Pause” section at the very end of the song. But I had to make sure that the Pause section was precisely one measure long, and that I inserted it precisely at a bar line, and that none of the sections would be unduly split up, especially synthesized instruments.
• Finder’s Quick Look is the best thing.
• Splitting regions in Garageband preserves the recorded parts before and after the split on both sides, as if you had trimmed them, and if you separate the two split regions you can extend those parts again, basically duplicating them. This is useful for patching up gaps. (Joining, however, discards those hidden preserved parts of your region.)
• I thought that making a drum set sound good would be easy to learn from scratch as long as you have a good rhythm sense. I was wrong. Making a drum set sound good is actually complicated, and that drummers make it look easy hides a lot of that complexity from those who watch but don’t actually try, like me.
• Shifting your singing voice’s pitch with a digital filter may exaggerate vibrato and intonation problems.
• Any clicking, slurping, licking, sucking, biting, and other subconscious movements you make with your tongue, lips, cheek, teeth, and saliva are very, very audible to your microphone during times of quiet.
• Creaky voice during singing is very, very audible too.
• Tuning your violin’s G string down to simulate a viola may make its sound post (or something) buzz.
• I had always heard from others that excessive sliding when shifting fingering positions on the violin sounded ugly, but I never got to experience it for myself until I heard myself doing it. Yuk.
• Slamming the low keys of a piano is a good tympani substitute. But make sure the bass pitches aren’t too low, or else they might get deemphasized in some crappy speakers.
• Sudden true dead silence during a song for any track sounds very, very conspicuous. (This is also true for sudden removal of true dead silence.) There is almost always some sort of reverberation or noise needed to fill the space, unless you know what you’re doing. (I don’t yet.)
• For some reason, recording instruments with my iPad’s microphone sounds better than with my iMac’s. I don’t know anything about microphones, so I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a setting’s fault.
• I really need an actual microphone, but I don’t know anything about microphones. I often get ugly popping artifacts in my raw recordings, but I don’t know why.
• Excessive stereophony can ruin the illusion of music in a reverberating cathedral. However, flat monophony seems to be able to carry a lot less musical texture and sound quality.
• It’s better to start with a faster tempo with a slower tempo if you’re going to want to slow down. Garageband has a minimum tempo, and it is not zero beats per minute. It is forty. This is very, very annoying.
• In Garageband ’11 for Mac, post-processing your near-finished file into another Garageband project seems like a good idea, but make sure you do import the project directly from the Media Inspector! Do not import an exported MP3/AAC file! This flattens the music’s stereophony and re-encodes the music twice, making it sound much worse. If I had know than I could import projects directly into other projects, then I wouldn’t’ve wasted three hours.
• Using the Save command in Garageband ’11 for Mac clears your Undo history! Beware! This is bad design.
• I also have to exit Garageband for iPad from time to time to save it—because once, just once, it crashed, and twenty minutes of work were gone. Garageband for iPad is a miracle, but the fact that it’s the only iPad app in the world I know of where you have to manually save it from time to time is also bad design. I’m still thankful, though.
• I wish MP3 files could support louder music without crackling.
• Some 80% of the polishing work you might spend on your work would not be noticed by anyone. A lack of that 80% would, however, be noticed very much.
• Timing music is much, much harder than it looks. Making music files sound clear is much, much harder than it looks too. I now appreciate every song I hear on the radio and the Internet more, now that I know how much real, actual hard work really goes into producing each one.

I’ll see you all in two weeks. ^_^

fazspazz22-deactivated20121222 asked: Thanks for the kind words, though I'm not sure how much you'll even learn from me. I'm constantly on an art block.

I’ve already learned quite a bit from you—you were, in fact, the person who got me to stop my own art block.

I don’t have that much time left until I start my next full-time job, but in the meantime I’ve been practicing and studying others as much as I can. It looks bad, it sucks, no one should see it, but if I keep moving on I’ll be able to draw the stories I’ve wanted to tell in comics.

But in any case, your art really, truly is lovely and inspiring—the way you draw Pinkie Pie alone, let alone the way you construct forms and make them look so clean, makes me envious—

—and so I thank you, because it was the kick in the butt I needed after becoming complacent, after finally finishing a series of paintings after five months.

You’re already a great artist! but there’s of course so much for you to do, and I’ll hopefully be watching. I hope you grow out of your chronically recurring art block, as I hope I will too, and thus grow into the ideal artist you’d like more to be. I’ll be trying too.

Thanks, and good luck again! ^_^

itsthatlazyguy asked: Sorry if I get too nosey or something. But why don't you post on your tumblr that often or something?

Ah, no, not too nosey. By me not posting on Tumblr that often, do you mean in general over the whole time, or just over the past month?

…Heh, I’m actually going to be mostly going away, forever, starting in August.

The ponies, the drawing, the writing, and the music were fun while it lasted these six months. But, come August, I’ll be almost gone. I’ll still try to work on stuff while I can, but it’ll be much busier for the rest of my life.

As for why I’ve been busy lately this past month, I’ve been hurrying to finish programming a new iOS app for iPhone and iPad…before I go away.

The past six months have been some of the most fun in my life. But time is cruel, and I’ll be mostly gone—and that’s part of the reason why I’ve started to really start studying and emulating artists who are better than me—the show, real animators, as well as fan artists who are better. Be prepared to see a lot of artistic studies in the next week.

I also will do one more song or two, and maybe finish one of my stories, while I still can. And when August comes—well—

—maybe I’ll still be able to do stuff, sometimes. We’ll see.

Heh, it’s been only six months, and it’s not fair…

But thanks for the message. I hope it finds you well, Zero Rocks. ^_^