🔗 Glenn Gould’s Every Detail. But Why? - The New York Times

Glenn Gould’s Every Detail. But Why? - The New York Times:

The first Beethoven sonata I learned as a young pianist was the dramatic “Pathétique.” When I started working on it, I tried to copy the way the great Rudolf Serkin played it on a recording I loved. There is a place for learning by emulating masters, but it can easily become inhibiting. Fairly early on, aspiring musicians must develop their own voices.

So when a score that meticulously transcribes every detail of Glenn Gould’s famed 1981 recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations was published recently, while I was impressed with the painstaking effort involved, I questioned what it was for.

What’s its purpose? For whom is it intended? From what we know of Gould, he would have been baffled, even horrified, at the idea that a student learning the “Goldberg” Variations would precisely mimic his performance. He was too restless a thinker to consider any recording of his at all definitive. And imitating a pianist as idiosyncratic as Gould may not be a good idea for impressionable young musicians.

🔗 My Headphones, My Self - NYTimes.com

This is a fun article from back in December…

My Headphones, My Self - NYTimes.com:

You see them on every block: people being propelled through their routines listening to their own individualized soundtracks, with the outside world serving as a stage set.

Headphones are now fashion statements. Status symbols. Fetish objects on par with luxury watches and limited-edition Nikes.

I also liked this quote:

“Headphones are the front line of urban social defense,” said Julie Klausner, a comedian, actor and writer. “I’m introverted and socially anxious by nature. My worst nightmare is sitting next to someone on a plane or someone who wants to strike up a conversation on an elevator.”

🎬 Adding an Index for Your Real Books in forScore

forScore 10 adds a feature that allows you to add indexes to large scores by uploading a CSV file that links the song titles to specific page numbers of the PDF. This is especially useful for real and fake books that have hundreds of songs all associated with one giant file. A competing score app called unrealBook pioneered this feature to my knowledge. I used to keep it installed on my iPad just for that one feature, but now, I can do everything I need to in forScore.

I created a video tutorial of how to accomplish this. See below:

 You can find the index files I reference in the video here. 

I don’t have a full technical understanding of how this feature works, so I tried to avoid explaining what is going on with the file. I think I am explaining it well enough that if you imitate my steps, you will be successful in most attempts. If there is anything unclear, let me know and I will try to clarify it in a future post.

One thing I did not cover in the video are the page offset settings at the bottom of the index settings screen. I have attached about 10 indexes to my forScore library and only twice did I need to use those buttons. In some cases, the CSV score may be offset by a few pages leading to the index not linking you to the correct songs. In these cases, I simply fiddled around with the plus and minus buttons until I got the result I wanted. I would be happy to redo the video with that step included if enough people are interested.

New Tech! Using Square Register with Private Lessons

I just purchased a new piece of tech I am looking forward to integrating into my private studio next school year.

I teach about 20-25 private students outside of the normal teaching day. As my number of private students increases, my ability to manage scheduling and payment is stretched. For the past ten years, I have strongly preferred checks for payment. I finally decided that I do enough transactions a year to rationalize the purchase of a Square Stand.

The Square Stand is a register that you can stick an iPad into and run Square’s Register app. I have repurposed an iPad Air to live permanently in the Stand.

Right when students walk in the from door, they are greeted with a Square Register which they can use to swipe their credit card, or touch their phone or smartwatch to it to use Apple Pay/Android Pay/Samsung Pay. The app has all of my monthly and single lesson fees preprogrammed as “items” that someone can buy. When they pay, the money automatically goes into my bank account after a few days and they get emailed or texted a receipt.

I am not using this enough yet to write at length about my experiences but I thought I would share the idea here in the meantime.

🔗 Mixing Call Me Maybe

I love reading stuff like this interview from Dave Ogilvie about mixing the song “Call Me Maybe.” Here are a couple of parts that jumped out at me.

Dave Ogilvie mixing “Call Me Maybe”:

Back at home in Vancouver, Ogilvie is well known as a top mixer and producer, although he is more strongly associated with electronic and industrial music than breezy, catchy pop. He has worked with Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, the Birthday Massacre, Marilyn Manson, Einstürzende Neubauten and many more…

…

'Call Me Maybe' thus conceals some darker elements beneath its radio-friendly surface. At first listen, it's a rather fluffy, lightweight, bubblegum pop song, but closer inspection quickly reveals another dimension, which is most apparent in a hypnotic four-to-the-floor bass drum that becomes monstrous in the choruses and a muscular string hook. The song also comes across as a genuine representation of Carly Rae Jepsen's character.

…

"The main thing that Josh wanted me to do during my mix of 'Call Me Maybe' was to make the kick drum really prominent and punchy. He wanted me to do everything I could to make it super-special. I think I spent a good couple of hours on the kick drum alone, and kept pushing myself to create the ultimate kick drum, and have it super-loud and driving the track. When I finished the mix, I thought it really was very, very loud, and I was a little apprehensive about the power of the bottom end, wondering whether I'd gone too far with it for a pop song. But Josh and I looked at each other and said: 'This is what we are shooting for.' So we printed it like that and when I later heard it on the radio I was like, 'Wow, this is awesome.' It seems to work because of the space in the track, which I was careful to leave, which means that you can hear the punch the kick drum is intended to have on computer speakers and in cars and in stores, in fact pretty much everywhere.

🔗 iOS 11 Tidbits from Mac Rumors

iOS 11 Tidbits: Customizable Control Center, One-Handed Keyboard, Type to Siri and More - Mac Rumors:

iOS 11 introduces a huge number of major changes to the operating system, ranging from a redesigned Control Center experience to a host of new features specific to the iPad, but along with all of these major changes, outlined in our iOS 11 announcement post, there are also dozens of smaller changes that have been added to the beta. 

Below, we've outlined some of the smaller but still significant tweaks that went unmentioned during Apple's whirlwind keynote announcement. 

I love articles like this. In the coming weeks, people who are running the iOS 11 beta will likely be discovering all of the nice little features that there wasn’t time in the keynote to address. Every once in a while, I find that there is one little minor change that is going to solve a daily frustration for me. A few from this that really resonate with me are…

• Type to Siri (an accessibility setting allowing you to type Siri inquires rather than saying them)

• Customizable Control Center

• Offload Unused Apps (auto delete apps that haven’t been opened in a while)

• Drag and Drop for iPhone (does not work across apps though)

• AirPod settings (now, double tapping the right side can perform a different ask than tapping the left side)

• Screen recording (will be awesome for making how-to videos and recording Snapchat videos

What did Apple check off on my WWDC wishlist?

A few weeks ago, I detailed my wishlist for WWDC. Below, I have reposted it with what Apple actually announced. My assessment over whether or not a feature was announced is based on whether or not the feature was announced verbally during the keynote, not on a slide or later discovered within the OS.

MACOS

-News app to mirror the one on iOS NOPE

-improvements to pro apps (Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X) and additions to the Photos app NOPE

-splitting iTunes up into separate apps like what is on iOS: separate app for Music, TV, Podcasts, and iTunes Store NOPE

IOS

-default apps (won't happen) NOPE

-serious overhaul of iPad productivity (better file system, better home screen, drag and drop, better multitasking, more control over audio ins and outs) YESX100

TVOS

-PiP NOPE

-Ability to watch TV content from two apps at once NOPE

-ability to command with Siri without the Remote app (for example, I want to say to my phone, “hey Siri watch Game of Thrones,” and have it turn on the TV, launch the HBO app and start the most recent episode) NOPE

-ability to sync all Apple TVs in the house so that they show the same video at once (for parties...also, this won't happen) NOPE

WATCHOS

-smart contexts: ability to change Watch face, complications, and notifications based on sensitivity to time and location CHECK, Siri watchface

-better audio controls (easier to access Now Playing screen, complications to play and pause audio, ability to scroll the crown for volume and use hardware buttons for control whenever audio has recently been playing) CHECK, sort of with swipe to audio controls within Workout app

GENERAL

-Siri improvements (more reliable, faster, more open to third party apps, better integration with tvOS, local dictation and basic commands CHECK

-AirPods with always listening Siri NOPE

-improvements to iCloud Drive (shared folders, files, and URLs) CHECK definitely to shared files, but not sure about others

Here are some of my favorite features that reddit users replied with:

-Multiple iOS user logins NOPE

-Hey Siri on Mac NOPE

-custom watch faces NOPE

-open CarPlay up to more developers (pasrticular third party maps apps and messenging apps) NOPE

-iOS dark mode NOPE

-Workflow integration NOPE

-Open up NFC to third party apps CHECK

-Apple Pay your friends and family over iMessage CHECK

-Apple Music continuity NOPE

Quick and Dirty Thoughts on the WWDC Keynote

Here are some quick and dirty thoughts I have on many of the announcements at Apple’s WWDC Keynote on Monday.

Apple TV

Disappointed we didn’t get any new features in tvOS. Maybe next year with the introduction of new Apple TV hardware. YAY for the announcement of an Amazon Prime app though.

watchOS

Not really impressed here. The main things I think Apple Watch struggles with are…

1. Access to audio controls

2. A more predictive, contextual, ability to show things on the watch face

As for 1, Apple did address this by making music controls a swipe away while running a workout in the Workout app. I was hoping for something a little bit more globally accessible. They accomplished 2 by introducing the Siri watch face. But for me, the Siri watch face is too much of a compromise because it can’t show any other complications on the screen at the same time.

I am also disappointed that they didn’t announce a Podcast app or Notes app.

macOS

No complaints here really. I wanted them to start the process of breaking iTunes down into smaller apps. Maybe at least breaking Apple Music into its own app and TV into its own app and leaving the rest of the things iTunes does inside the app known as iTunes. Really though, I am cool with Apple making slower and steadier updates to macOS. My Mac is the machine I depend on the most for work so I appreciate that Apple is focused on stability.

Hardware

The new iPads look great! I can see myself eventually buying the 10.5 size. I love my 12.9 inch for reading scores with the forScore app, but I really miss being able to hold it comfortably with one hand and also reading it in bed. Maybe the 10.5 inch will be the perfect compromise.

The iMac Pro looks fantastic. Its not a machine I am looking for right now though so I will just enjoy it from far away and appreciate that Apple still cares about the Mac and its professional users.

iOS Features for iPad

• Drag and drop: YES! Love it. Looks really well implemented too.

• Dock: YES! A great idea I did not expect.

• Files app: This is where I started to loose my mind. A native file browser with support for Google Drive and Dropbox is going to completely change the way I use my iPad! This might be my favorite announcement of the entire keynote.

• System wide markup. This is another one that is going to completely change the way I use my iPad.

• Notes app: Sooooo much good stuff here. In line drawing? AWESOME! Document scanner? AWESOME. Text searchable handwriting. YES! Bye Evernote.

… yeah. So this iPad stuff is going to be huge.

HomePod

Smart of Apple to position this device as competition against companies like Sonos instead of as competition for products like Google Home and Amazon Echo. The speaker ecosystem is something I really enjoy about having Sonos speakers but its lack of integration with my phone and music library is a constant hurdle. Something with good quality, that I can operate without using an extra app would be much more enjoyable. 

Will I buy one of these? It is really hard to see how this will play out. Amazon Echo and Sonos are working on some kind of integration. That could potentially keep me in that ecosystem, though the idea of selling the Sonos speakers and eventually replacing them with these Apple things has crossed my mind. It might be the kind of situation where I get one HomePod just to get a feel for it and then wait on additional purchases.

WWDC kicks off today!

It's WWDC keynote day. Christmas in June! (If you are a nerd like me) Tune in here  at 10 am PDT.

🔗 Bringing Apple HomeKit Support to Ring

As someone who has invested hundreds of dollars in home automation devices over the past two years, this news was exciting to me.

Bringing Apple HomeKit Support to Ring:

Some of you may have recognized a familiar name onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier this week.

We’re excited to officially announce that HomeKit support is coming to Ring later this year, which means Ring neighbors will have an easy, secure and private way to monitor their home via the new Home app in iOS 10. We’re also adding Siri support, which gives you another great way to interact with your home and Ring products.

Unfortunately, it is one year later and the app is still not updated with HomeKit support. I am still looking forward to it though. The demo at WWDC last year depicted the Ring doorbell app sending “rich” notifications to the iPhone. Rather than launching the Ring app to see the video feed of who is at your door, the live video feed was embedded right into the notification. Pretty neat stuff.