FastClick – a library to eliminate the delay before a click event is fired in mobile browsers.
Software development
Big design vs simple solutions – contrasting Simplest-Solution-That-Could-Possibly-Work (SSTCPW) and Big-Design-Up-Front (BDUF) approaches to software engneering
New year, new theme, new series of blog posts. I’ve noticed that my blog has been light on technical things for a while now, so I thought that I would do a semi-regular series of entries on things that have caught my eye online.
My wonderful wife gave me a copy of Session Strings Pro for Christmas, and this is its first outing. I’m very impressed by the sound and precision of Session Strings — especially compared to the VSL strings that come bundled with Kontakt.
This is a programmatic (movie/game-type) orchestral piece in a rough sonata form.
This piece starts out quietly, but moves into a fuller, orchestral and synthetic middle section. To my ear, it would work quite well in a game, with its emotive melody underpinned by a driving rhythm, parenthetically enclosed by an almost-melancholic processed piano.
Not only is this the first Kyrie that I’ve written, it’s also probably one of the least traditional. It’s a reworking of a track I wrote last year, Conflagration. This time round, I’ve gone more down-tempo, made the orchestration a little more “classic”, and heavied it up a bit. The chord progression’s also changed a bit.
The vocals were made using speak.js, which is an emscripten-compiled version of the open-source eSpeak speech synthesiser.
I asked, and apparently this doesn’t count as “dub”, despite the “woob-woob” bass. A melange of physical and synthetic instruments, this piece puts a strong focus on the viola lead, supported by light violins, cellos, and piano, and underpinned by the aforementioned “woob-woob”-ing.
Although originally conceived as a lyrical piano piece, this track is at its best in the central section, where bass and synth lead dominate (at least in my opinion). It’s somewhat experimental (there are some interesting sounds in the mix), but not, hopefully, too much so.
At the end of a long week, I sat down to write this piece. Writing music has always been cathartic for me; this piece expresses pretty much exactly how I felt when I wrote it.
For some reason, 7/8 has always appealed to me. This laid-back track layers 7/8 lines at normal- and half-speed to establish a “flow” — which is then disrupted at the end by offsetting some lines by a quaver or a crotchet.
This track was a lot of fun to write. Absynth and Massive take centre stage (piped through Guitar Rig) to create a large, full sound with overtones of glitch trance and synthpop.
