Maybe our beloved Gibson is going a little sideways. But check this out!

Gibson is in more than a little bit trouble due to floods and other setbacks.

What does this mean to us who love the art of playing or creating music?

Yea, sure you might be able to buy a copy of a Les Paul or Stratocaster made in a foreign country.

But, in all honesty.

Nothing beats the real thing – as any mature adult knows even if they don’t play music, and only listen to it.

So, what are the takeaway’s or what can we as consumers/users of these products get from the statements above?

Well, enter Bandlab.com. Cakewalk Sonar which was once a Gibson owned product. Now it’s free!

https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk

Fender acquired RiffStation and is now offering it for free!

https://pro.riffstation.com/download/

In summary, if you want to help either of these companies survive.
Please only buy the real thing.

Or sit there looking at your hand and think for a while.

Sources:
A friend told me about bandlab and cakewalk. Read about Riffstation here:

https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/free-download-fenders-riffstation-shows-you-chords-for-any-song/

Audacity, the musicians crescent wrench, using Dropbox to keep files sync’d between a Mac and PC computer plus more…

Ok, Im not the first person to write about these products, and Im sure if you search YouTube or Google there is about ten tons of more info on all I will be talking about. But, heck – give this article a read – I will get right to the point. =)

Audacity has to be one of my most ran to tools when I am finishing up a song. Some programs just dont give me what I need. But either through plugins or just the stock tools you get when you install the program. Audacity always seems to come through and get the job done.

Fade ins, Fade outs, volume adjustments to knock down peaks, normalize, equalize and many more. Download it, install it and when you have a problem go to YouTube and search for “Audacity <problem name>”. You will get the job done trust me. Plus if you get used to using it, and move from a PC to a Mac or Linux distro there is a version for all.

Dropbox.. Ok this has to be one of the coolest programs out there today if you use more than one computer during your daily grind. You install it, wait for whatever you drop in the Dropbox folder to sync with the Dropbox servers. Then you can access it from any computer with an internet connection with your browser, or it will auto sync with any computer you have the Dropbox software installed on.

As an added bonus you can even get public links from items you put in the dropbox\public folder and share them with the world! If you click the Dropbox links on my page, both you and I will get an extra 250mb of storage space. So what ya waiting for? Sign up and learn to love Dropbox – I know you will. If you don’t. Please leave a comment below and let me know why. I will try to come up with a solution if I don’t get to many comments.

Passwords, passwords, passwords.. You just have to have em, and you need to have different ones for the different services you use on the internet, and you need to use different ones for different sites if you don’t want Joe Bloe from Cocomo.Com buying stuff with your paypal account. Writing them on your monitor isnt a good idea, neither is having them on a paper or digital notepad. If someone gets physical access to your house our your computer they will have all your usernames/passwords.

“One more point to ponder for those who use the same password everywhere. That is the best way to get all your accounts hacked at once”

Enter Keepass! Ok, this is some cool beans software. You have one password to get into it. I make mine longer that 7 characters so they are harder to crack. Something like “MyDogIsAPainInThe@r$3” – and the only place I use this password is for Keepass. Once you have Keepass open you can start adding entries with the urls to sites you have to log into, usernames and passwords. This sure makes bill paying a lot easier! Just double click a username or password and its on your clipboard for a short period of time so you can paste it into your login/password fields. There are versions of Keepass for just about anything.Whats really cool is if you put the keepass database in your dropbox folder you can access all your passwords from all your computers, even iPhones,Android,BlackBerry and Windows phones!. I wouldn’t download your Keepass database on a public computer then try to use it, that wouldn’t be too wise. I personally use KeePass Classic on PC’s and this on my Mac. I found the cool Mac version when I googled up this cool post at BallOfLightning.com.

Rock on! And keep busy!
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My first week with a Mac Computer.. After years using a PC. And how I’m learning to use Garage Band!

Well since around 1995 I have been using PC computers. As I stated in my previous post I recently bought a Mac-Mini. Ya, I bought the cheapest mac-mini available. The Apple Mac Mini MC815LL/A Desktop (NEWEST VERSION) and the Corsair 8GB (2x 4GB) 1333mhz kit. I bought the Corsair ram kit since most of the reviews I read said that the new Mac-Mini sucked if you didn’t increase the ram.

So far the transition has been pretty painless. I used my existing DVI monitor, pc keyboard and pc mouse (this mac mini comes with a hdmi to dvi adapter so I didn’t have to buy anything else to get it up and running). Which is working out quite well. One problem I had was the way the mouse wheel moved text in a browser, but that was easily fixed by unchecking “Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating” in the “General Settings/Mouse” applet. The second issue for me was the control and windows keys being switch. So I went in the “General Settings/Keyboard” and swapped control with the window/apple key.  Now, its almost like a PC but it’s a Mac. And, to be honest the iLife software that comes with a mac is nothing short of incredible so I’m not jonesin for a PC at the moment. In this post I will cover my Garageband ’11 experience so far.

GarageBand! Oh YEAH – I SO LOVE THIS PROGRAM!!

I watched maybe three or four YouTube videos on Garageband 11 and made this simple tune:

GB Test 1

Using GarageBand really piqued my interest. So, I fired up the my Chrome brower and searched for Garageband tutorials, sure YouTube is good. But I wanted more! Finally I came across a website that had free examples of their tutorials. After watching the free tutorials I was extremely impressed. So I researched the product to see what kind of reviews other people had left for it. The reviews were all good, so I pulled the trigger! =)

I bought MacProVideo.com’s GarageBand Core 101 by Scott Freiman.

For a great price it comes with over 74 videos in bite size chunks that thourghly teach you how to use Garageband. What is really cool, if you are in the middle of a GB project you can go back to over the 74 lessons and find a topic that has the info on what your trying to do. Give it a try, as of this writing this tutorial set is less than 20 bux. Ya can’t beat that.. Most courses I have found on other products run in the $99 plus range.

Rock on and keep checking back!
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