Music – Black Frog Guitars

Geeks with Guitars

Whoa! Hey! If you stumbled on here from my other domain (geekswithguitars.com) you are probably surprised and disappointed to see a collection of old articles about many things having nothing to do with guitars. I am sorry for that but will defend a position that the AppleTV article is sadly still relevant as there is STILL no update to the device and just an increasing number of channels where an app store should be! Hopefully that will change with WWDC2014 on June 2.

IMG_1547-1024x1024 Back to the topic of guitars! Months ago, I bought the domain geekswithguitars.com hoping to someday build a community for all of my fellow geeks (developers, engineers, tech writers, gadget loving tech people) who also have a passion and talent for music. With a wife in school, three kids, cat, new puppy, and a software company to help run I haven’t really had the time to build this out yet.

Today, I saw this nice article talking about the correlation between developers and guitar players and it reminded me again how cool it would be to have a special place for us to find each other, talk about the tech, guitars, and music we love and maybe find ways to jam at conferences, form international/long distance bands, etc.

If any of this sounds interesting, or if you have ideas for content, you want to help, you want to be featured, etc. hit me on twitter or send me a note!

— Jeremy

Introducing the new BlackFrogGuitars.com theme song – In the Swamp!

Whoa hey!

It sure has been a while! The other day I was messing around with the guitar and discovered a cool little riff I liked. I made some adjustments and it turned into a broader guitar track in GarageBand. I really don’t get a whole lot of time to mess around with GarageBand, so I hacked around adding another lead guitar track over the riff. It was a fun little jam but too fast and busy to write lyrics for so I just decided to experiment with some words about frogs that might be useful to help advertise this website. I captured all of this on the camera on the iPhone as I made progress and after a few minutes “In the Swamp” was born!

I know this song is crazy and the words don’t make any sense at all. Some of you are probably wondering if I have lost my mind! 🙂 I spliced the videos I captured together and imported into Adobe Premier. I have a CS6 Creative Cloud subscription that I purchased for my company and since I focus primarily on software development, I hadn’t had a chance to mess with it much yet. I took a couple hours trying different things and spliced together my first original “music video”. It is a tribute to great 70’s/80’s hair bands and I hope you like it or at least crack a smile!

What is it about a riff?

Yo – Hey! It is 1:44am and I should be in bed!

I have been working a lot lately and not playing guitar all that much. I love the work I do so I am definitely not complaining. Around midnight I turned around and picked up a guitar. Believe me when I admit that this is a dangerous thing for me to do! There have been times in the past when I would pick up a guitar and not put it down for 3 or 4 hours. Tonight I had a sound in my head that I wanted to get out. A little riff that I wanted to experiment with. Not sure where it came from. Not sure it is even completely mine – though I hope it is.

What is it about a guitar riff that is so powerful, so memorable, so engaging? How can it stick inside your head? How can hearing it on a radio turn a troublesome day upside down? Music is an amazing, awesome thing! Take a moment to think about some of your favorite riffs. Even if you are not a musician, there must be some recognizable musical pattern that moves you or brings out a smile. Is it the intro to Sweet Home Alabama or Sweet Child of Mine or one of the tens if not hundreds of masterful riffs by Eddie Van Halen? Just a few notes will take you some where – Cabo Wabo just came into my mind.

At any rate this is a rather random stream of consciousness type of post. I sometimes ramble before I sleep and sleep is soon my destination.

I let this riff in my head out and captured it with my iPhone and threw it up on YouTube. There are timing glitches and some general sloppiness but in the midst of the mess there is something that I rather like. Something that might be nice to improve upon. Maybe I’ll try throwing it into garage band and see if I can turn it into something bigger.

Thanks for listening and as always drop me a comment and check out my YouTube channel. At some point I’d like to find the time to do a recording or video that I can be really proud of – something that I invest some real time into and something that is really worthy of your time to check out.

HD500 based pedal board

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year. I have been wanting to talk about the way I have set up my HD500 for a while but been too busy with other projects. This morning I had a major issue. It appeared that I had lost all of my patches which forced me to scramble up a quick basic brand new patch about 10 minutes before showtime. I messed around with the board tonight to happily discover that the entire problem was in my head. I was not hitting the right button to reload the other sound banks. All this was a result of a total lack of sleep. Last night was New Years Eve after all. 🙂 Since I had things out on the floor, I took some pictures and put this post together real quick.

Pictured above is the rig I ended up putting together between January and July of last year. I am sure most of you will agree, this type of project never ends. I am sure I’ll be filling up that remaining space at some point but am happy with the flexibility and portability I have now. I haven’t done anything with it since the end of summer other than tweak patches to include the fx loop.

Requirements

I wanted something that would work well in a variety of situations and give me a large palette of great tones to work with. I play at church and plug in straight to a PA so I wanted something fairly light and quick to set up for that purpose. When I am playing with a band, I like to have an amp too. This setup ideally should work well either with my 5150 half stack or into a Tech 21 Power Engine 60. Sadly I have not experimented enough with the 5150 to say whether I like it in that scenario but it sounds great into the PE60. Note that I have heard very good reports of using the 4-cable method to maximize the sound of both your amp and the HD500.

The Tour

For the tour of the board I decided it would be easier to show it in a short video rather than try to describe it so I recorded something and put it up on YouTube. I have been experimenting with some music and comedy videos out there just for fun and wanted to do something a bit more serious that might have a chance of helping someone who is thinking about effects, boards, gear, and setting things up.

Here is the link, I hope it is of some value!

Create Smart Playlists to find those lost Christmas favorites

There are only a few more days until Christmas. Time to enjoy those delicious once a year peppermint milkshakes from Chick-Fil-A and peppermint blizzards from Dairy Queen. It is also time to enjoy your favorite holiday tunes. If you love Christmas songs but have trouble finding them in your ever-growing iTunes library, consider this quick tip.

Set up some Smart Playlists!

Most people are familiar with Playlists which allow you to add a bunch of songs of their choosing to a named list. Playlists are a great way to help manage a music library that doesn’t change much.

Smart Playlists takes things to the next level. This is a feature that was actually added to iTunes several years ago. Sadly I didn’t catch on and try it until this past Halloween when I was trying to find some spooky songs for trick-or-treaters. For managing things like holiday song mixes or favorites within a constantly growing library it is AWESOME and best of all completely fluid. As you add new songs to your library, those new songs will appear in your smart playlists dynamically if they match the rules that you define.
To set up a new holiday playlist in iTunes, hold down the Option key (see my other post about the magic of the option key). This will turn the + sign at the bottom left to a gear.
Smart Playlists have this gear image next to them to indicate they are different from the regular playlists. You will now have a form to fill out to define the rules of your new lists.
Here are the rules that I use for my Christmas music selections.

Note that you can add more rules to get more specific. If you are good about rating your songs with stars you could add a rule to only play your best (3 stars or greater). You can also nest rules. Once the rules are set, when you select this new smart playlist in iTunes it will immediately show you EVERY song in your library matching your set of rules. If you make the rules too broad, you will get more than you want. If they are too narrow, you will have too little. Play around with your own set and see what you get. If you come up with something you’d like to share, post it in the comments! Have fun and Merry Christmas!

No sound from the TonePort – fixing the bouncing red clip led problem

I am a pretty big fan of Line 6 gear. Their modeling has gotten better and better over the years. I started with a PodXT many years ago and now have their flagship HD500 which I am very happy with and hope to post a future article on sometime soon. In the meantime, this little post will hopefully help someone else who like me has wasted several hours trying to figure out how to get their TonePort to work again.

To keep this story from being too long, I got the TonePort UX2 – which is a nice computer recording interface/tone box for Christmas from my wife several years ago. It is really a marvelous little box offering very good sounds for both guitar, vocals and bass. I love the thing but it has brought some headaches along the way. I used to use it with a Mac Book Pro which worked well but was a pain to always disconnect the wires as I needed to move the machine around quite a bit. In August, I got my dream computer – a 27 iMac and couldnt wait to get my magical little TonePort running against it to do some recording. It has been months since then and I had never really gotten it to work with my new computer. It was running briefly a couple of weeks ago but then last weekend started just blinking the red clip lights back and forth. I had tried reinstalling drivers, using their license manager, etc. but nothing worked. Just blinking red clip lights! UGH!

This week, I need to practice a TSO song to play next weekend and I really need this box to run again. Tonight I decided to spend some time to solve the problem and I am happy to say I think I found the root cause. My theory – which was kind of echoed by one of Line 6s support forum posts is that the Mac Migration Assistant that I used when I migrated my files from the MBP to the iMac brought along some extra garbage with it. Thus my attempts to reinstall the drivers were silently failing. The Line 6 uninstall tool apparently doesn’t always work and in this case completely failed. It acted like the old drivers were removed but they were not!

Bottom line – you need to completely eradicate those drivers from your system and reboot before you can use your TonePort again. Though this is specific to my circumstances (a UX2 migrating from one mac to another mac, I would expect this to apply generally to any TonePort on any machine. Perhaps the uninstaller is more reliable on a PC. If you know, please chime in on the comments below.

I’m guessing the uninstaller failed because the Line 6 tools, drivers, etc are spread across so many different directories. Below are the steps I took to remove the old drivers. I noticed on some other posts in the Line 6 forums that some folks were having success by removing EVERYTHING tied to Line 6 on your computer. That is the approach I took and it did work but realize that I lost all of my custom tones in the process for all of my Line 6 gear that were saved on my mac. In my case, everything is backed up via Time Machine so no big deal, but before you continue make sure you understand the risks and make sure you have things backed up!

I removed all of the files directly via the terminal. Please be careful when doing this and understand that if you accidentally delete the wrong libraries or other system files you will have more problems than you started with. Do not do any of this without a backup. If you have any doubts in your ability, I suggest you contact Line 6 and request a better Uninstaller app that actually works.

BE VERY CAREFUL DELETING FILES IN THESE DIRECTORIES. ONE BAD MOVE AND YOU WILL REALLY HOSE SOMETHING UP! ONLY DELETE THE LINE 6 stuff and NOTHING else!

Here is what I removed.

/Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers/Line6*
/Library/Audio/Midi Devices/Line 6
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST/Line 6
/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/Components/POD*
/Library/Frameworks/L6TWX*
/Library/Application Support/Line 6
/Applications/Line6
~/Library/Preferences/*line6* – only files with line 6 in the middle of the name

There was a forum post at Line 6 that also going to /private/var/db/receipts and running sudo rm -i com.line6*

Once you have eradicated everything Line 6 on your machine, reinstall the latest Line 6 Monkey software – this is their main hub for installing everything else

Now verify that the Line 6 license manager is installed and run it. I made sure that both the iMac AND the Tone Port are listed. You may have to rescan devices after licensing your computer to find the Tone Port
Install and fire up Pod Farm 2 and play!

Remaining Issues

Things are still not perfect yet! I used to use GearBox as my main app to access the goodness of this little box. Now, GearBox appears to be outdated and replaced by Pod Farm 2. Well that is fine except us old timers don’t have software licenses that fully supports PF2! Reinstalling GearBox today is not an optimum solution since the link from the Monkey refers to GearBox in an outdated complete package. i.e. it is a link to a big archive that includes outdated drivers, outdated Monkey, and GearBox. Not sure why they bundled it but I sure dont want to have to go thru all of this again. I have issued a support ticket with Line 6 and am awaiting their response. Hopefully us long term Tone Port users can get grandfathered in!

Update 12/13/11 –

Heard response back on my support ticket today copied here for anyone interested:

The POD Farm 2 license is built into the newer POD Studio devices by design. All owners of previous generation Toneport hardware are not ‘grandfathered’ in to get a free POD Farm 2 license. This is not a feature of the device that you purchased, so if you want to use the POD Farm 2 software the license must be purchased. You CAN use the POD Farm 1.12 software for free which will provide you all of the models that you get with the basic model set of the Toneport UX2:

I am not terribly thrilled with this response. Basically it sucks if you are an early adopter into the TonePort family of products. If you want to use it and have the same features and sounds as the folks buying the same hardware today, you need to pay them an extra $99 for that privilege. I suggested in my reply that they take some of the profits from the folks that agree to this to devote time to fix their broken device uninstaller. The problems with that uninstaller are the reason this post was written.

What’s up with the Option key?

Learned something new today! While reading about iTunes Match and how to replace your existing music files with higher quality matches from the cloud, I took a moment to examine smart playlists. This led to a side search on finding duplicates and intelligently removing them. In an Apple support article, it showed how to quickly find duplicates with the somewhat familiar File->Display Duplicates option. I have used that option before but always wanted something more.

I wanted a way to discover duplicate songs only if they were on different albums. i.e. there are times when I may want to hear an album in its entirety like for example if I want to just hear Kansas’ epic Leftoverture album. There are other times when I may want to listen to every song by artist. I’d search for Kansas and want to hear all of the songs but not listen to “Carry On Wayward Son” six times. Obviously I have gotten off track, but the point is that in this support article, it listed a separate mode of discovering duplicates – “Display Exact Duplicates.” This is only shown if you hold the Option key down while the menu is open. WOW! I didn’t realize Apple had hidden optional menu choices available for their various apps. I am not a great fan of hiding behavior in menu’s particularly behind an option key, but I am happy to have this new menu item available. It got me wondering what other cool features may be overlooked because they only show up while holding down the option key???

Back to my second music listening case above. If I choose to listen to a particular Artist, I would still like to be able to quickly listen to all of their songs and not hear duplicates. I am pretty sure that the Smart Playlists feature will let me do this but have never tried it. This feature appears to offer a lot and sadly I have not realized its full potential. Looking forward to taking a few minutes to build some interesting lists!

What have you done with Smart Playlists? What are your favorite hidden menu options? Add a comment and say hey!