If you aren’t familiar with The Beer Repository, let me bring you up to speed.  A couple of years ago when I was finally starting to feel comfortable with development and the tools I was using at the time, I started looking for a project that I could call my own.  Around that time I was starting to dig deeper into craft beer.  Craft beer, to make it simple, it mostly from smaller breweries or microbreweries and, in my opinion, is on the more flavorful side of beer.  Smaller batches means breweries are willing to try different things and so you get an amazing array of color, taste, and aroma that will make you wonder why you ever bothered with anything else.

So I had this new love for craft beer and a goal to start trying everything.  I started keeping a journal of what I was drinking because I quickly realized that I couldn’t remember what I liked.  Then I thought maybe other people were having this problem or were having a hard time discovering new beer.  I thought about creating some kind of online community that would be a collection of beer journals, that could be shared with the world.  It wasn’t a totally unique idea, but it sounded fun and seemed like a good project to pursue.  And so, The Beer Repository was born.  I set to work hammering out how it was all going to work.  I made the decision to try and incorporate Twitter; to actually make it the backbone of the whole project.  The idea was that people could post short reviews through twitter from wherever they were, and the site would grab those and add them.

I ended up spending most of my time on the project working out the interaction between the two systems and learning a lot in the process.  Unfortunately, despite the work I put in, it did not payoff.  What I thought would be easy and convenient wasn’t and the site never really got used.  I continued to post reviews, hoping people would catch on, but it never did.  So after months of hard work, I let it sit.  Eventually, Twitter made changes to their system and it now currently does not work.  You can still see the past reviews that were submitted, but no one can submit new reviews and no one has informed me as such.

While this is very disappointing, it wasn’t unexpected.  Web startups have an insane failure rate, because so many are launched everyday.  More often than not, it isn’t what your site does, but who promotes it that matters, as is the case in life.  Despite its failure, I still was able to get a lot out of the project.  I got to know jQuery better.  I learned how OAuth works and more importantly the perils of debugging it.  I learned a lot about using services.  The key is I learned something from it, it wasn’t all for nothing.

Flash forward to my discussion with Tony.  He started asking me some interesting questions and throwing out some very interesting ideas.  This got me thinking about the project in a completely different way and just like before, presented an opportunity to learn some new things and sharpen my knowledge of Rails.  I have started the very early phases of planning by just writing down every idea I could have, and using The Rspec Book, creating some stories that could potentially make up a first release.  I am determined to follow Behavior Driven Development with this project so I can really learn how to use it from the start of a project, instead of in the middle of one, which has been a disaster.

My other hope is that I won’t do it alone.  I enjoy working on a team when it comes to development, especially if that means there is someone handling design, which is not one of my strong abilities.  Working on my current project for work and The Beer Repository have been difficult and at times I just had to stop because I wasn’t making progress and just banging away at it wasn’t helping at all.  Its been nice to occasionally bounce ideas of the guys at ABQ, but it is different when someone actually has a stake in a project.  We will see what happens.

Hopefully, all of this results in a site that people want to use and more importantly want to tell their friends about.  I think I lost sight of a lot of things with the first version, including what people want out of it versus what I wanted out of it.  Also, I learned that despite how easy I think I am making it, it might not translate that way.  I think the Twitter integration was an interesting idea that in the end did not do enough to enhance the user’s experience to justify all the trouble I went through to set it up and maintain it.  This time I will focus on making a site for everyone else first, and myself second.  I still want it to be something I would want to use everyday, but it is more important that everyone else wants to use it everyday.

You heard right folks.  After spending probably two years with CakePHP, I am moving on.  For those who don’t know, CakePHP is a framework that sits over PHP and makes it possible to rapidly develop and deploy PHP-based web apps.  It’s a solid framework that seemed to be always improving, until one fateful day, the two top contributors decided to bail on the project and start another, competing project.  For the life of me, despite all of the reassurances that have come from the Cake camp and the new Lithium project, I can’t see how this is anything but a bad thing for the project, but others would surely disagree with me.

CakePHP and PHP are seeing a defining moment as PHP tries to move towards an Object Oriented approach.  At CakeFest, it was announced that there were two new branches of the project starting, CakePHP 2.0 and cake3.  On top of that, they were still developing the 1.2 branch.  Why are three different versions needed?  Well, Cake 2.0 is intended to embrace the new features in PHP 5.3.  Currently, CakePHP 1.2 doesn’t does work with 5.3, so users have to use a beta 1.3 that patches some of the incompatibility issues between Cake and PHP.  Cake3 was going to be a complete overhaul of the current project, but is now the aforementioned Lithium project.

Maybe this will all work out, and both Cake and Lithium will survive and strive in the ever growing PHP framework world, but for me, personally, it isn’t worth sticking around to see what happens.

So what am I going to do now?  Well, I am moving to a framework that inspired the initial Cake project, Ruby on Rails.  Just a short week into dealing with Rails and you can see how much Cake really took from this project.  However, Rails does a lot of things better, in my opinion, including better command line tools, including a complete debugger that lets you do backtraces, watch variables, etc.  You can also test code from the console, though I haven’t had any experience doing that yet, but it sounds great.

I don’t think my move is what everyone should do, nor do I think the CakePHP project isn’t worth taking a look at.  I have done several apps with it, and it is a very easy to use framework, that will have you deploying apps faster and with less headache.  However, from what I have seen, there is a higher level of support behind Rails which gives me the impression it will have more staying power in the long run.  I think if I had done PHP programming prior to Cake then I might be moving to another PHP framework like Zend or others, however I didn’t and so I am not married to PHP.

So far Rails has been fairly easy to pick up, just some syntax things to get my head around.  Railscasts definitely helped me figure out how to get a nice authentication system working with AuthLogic, which is something I didn’t have to worry about with Cake.  Nifty-generators has also proved to be a great gem to use.  If anyone else has any advice on sites or material to check out, I would appreciate it.

At the same time, both companies have made an attempt to develop a social network that ties their customers together, allowing them to compare accomplishments, high scores, or issue challenges to each other.  The concept of social gaming is best exemplified by Microsoft’s XBox Live!.  Live! set the standard with the first generation XBox of how a social network based around the guise of gaming could work.  You add friends, see what they are playing, see their achievements, but most importantly be able to play games with them, all in a nice cohesive interface.

It was no surprise that someone would want to emulate this same experience for the iPhone.  In many ways, the iPhone is an even better platform for a social gaming network with a constant internet connection (in theory).  So Firemint and ngmoco:) both released these new platforms and tied them into some recently released titles.  They both work fine.  You can add friends, see achievements, and in some cases issue challenges which is the asynchronous version of playing online.  Lack of true multiplayer aside, their is one problem with both systems.  Their are two of them.

Live! was so successful because it was the only game in town.  Microsoft controls the hardware and told developers, “You want to have your game online, you are going through Live.”  If each developer had its own system then the uniformity of the experience would be lost, we would have 10 accounts for all the different games we play, and it wouldn’t be worth the subscription we pay.  This is the problem with the current situation on the iPhone.  Every developer is creating their own system, requiring users to sign up for their respective service, and only caring about the games they make.  For each game, you have to find your friends and add them to that service.  You can’t challenge someone for a game outside that developers repertoire.

It doesn’t seem likely that anyone is going to cave anytime soon either.  Firemint and ngmoco:) aren’t the only companies creating these networks, but they are getting the lions share of coverage right now, so they could have a significant impact on what happens next.  One major reason preventing any kind of synergy to happen is the possibility of charging to use such a network.  Microsoft uses a subscription model to pull in recurring revenue and has convinced their audience that it is worth it.  Any developer would would love to get their hands on a recurring revenue stream with little overhead.

Will we ever see a unified network that works across all games on the iPhone?  Only if Apple implements it.  Apple could create a system that developers could tie into and feeds off their itunes user database.  However, this seems highly unlikely.  Apple seems to enjoy getting out of the away of developers, except when it comes to rejecting their apps, and letting them fight it out while they make all their money off the hardware.

I have also fell head first into development again, so I have been working in CakePHP a lot more than the previous months.  On top of all that I am in the middle of a video project for one of our clients, so I have a lot going on.  Not to mention keeping The Beer Repository running.  So I apologize for the lack of updates, but if you have read this blog for any length of time you should expect this.

For Christmas, my wife and I made all of our presents.  She made like four scarves and I made my brother-in-law a Rebote 2.5 from Tonepad.com.  Its a analogue-ish delay pedal.  The “ish” is because it isn’t analogue but there are very few true analogue delay pedals.  Even the one MXR sells, the Carbon Copy, isn’t true analogue.  The Rebote uses a Princeton Technology’s PT2399 Delay integrated circuit, or IC.  The build was the first to involve making my own printed circuit board, or PCB.  I was definitely nervous about the process but it came out great and was really satisfying to build.

Since then, I have built another Rebote 2.5 for myself and also designed my first PCB to make another Bazz Fuss Deluxe but in a smaller case.  I also started working on a Dynacomp clone but that one is having some severe issues.  I also have a pedal board power supply in the works that I need to get going so I don’t have to lug around all these power adapters.  I also want to make a Bluebox clone but that might have to wait a while.  

I still need to finish up the enclosure for the Rebote 2.5 and then I will get some pictures up on here.  I am waiting for parts to come in to finish up the new Bazz Fuss Deluxe and then that will get placed in an enclosure and finished up as well.  I also hope to have a DIY pedal board done before we go to Nashville in about two months.  For now here are some iPhone pictures of the compressor and Bazz Fuss Deluxe boards before they got etched.

BeatMaker Sampling from Ryan Billingsley on Vimeo.

The interface is really easy to use and perhaps the only thing that bothers me is you can’t preview what you are recording, but being able to edit the recording is great and almost makes up for that.  The ability to sample is very exciting for me because I have always wanted to create a song or a couple songs using only sounds found out in the world.  I know people have done this before and it isn’t the most original idea but I like the thought of turning noise into something musical.

Another huge improvement to the already impressive BeatMaker is the addition of pitch shifting in the sequencer.  Let me explain.  Before you could only change the pitch of a sound on it’s respective pad, or button that triggers the sound.  This meant you could only change the pitch universally no matter what it would always be that pitch.  This makes music rather difficult.  Let’s say for instance you have a sample of a C key being played on a piano.  In order for you to actually create a song you would have to use up several pads and then tune them to different pitches.  Now you can use the sample on one pad and then adjust the pitch each time the pad is played in the sequencer.  This really blows this program wide open.  To demonstrate, I made a little song using the sampling of the bottle.  It was a quick song and just demonstration so don’t hold this against me.

As you can see, this software is capable of a lot. I took the sample recording of the pencil hitting the bottle, assigned it to four pads allow for the sample to ring, then changed the pitch to create chords and make it musical.  I also added delay to it and the brand new Band Pass Filter.  You can see how the amount of creative freedom that exists is really staggering.

I can’t wait to start creating material with this. I really have my heart set on crafting a short EP of music created on my iPhone in places I wouldn’t normally create music.  I want to tie in a lot of visuals including photos and video of the places I visit and draw from and then package the whole thing.  I have been needing some personal creative project to embark on and I don’t think I will find a better one than this.

I will be using BeatMaker, Noise.IO, MiniSynth, and probably some odd apps here and there.  I will mix the whole thing in Logic as most apps have no ability to record or output any audio file save BeatMaker which can export both a WAV file or a MIDI file to use as rhythms in other applications.  Did I mention BeatMaker is the coolest, because it is.

If anyone out there is using the iPhone to create music I want to hear about it, drop a comment.

Bass players are always preferably recorded direct.  That means plugging the bass into a box that smoothes out the signal and sending it straight to the mixer.  This drives me nuts.  I don’t mind wanting a direct signal to use but not using amps at all is ridiculous.  I pay for my gear just the same as a guitarist and for the most part chose that gear because it added something tonally that I liked.  So then why is it the case then when the band goes into the studio, I leave my rig at home?  

I think much of it has to do with convenience.  It is probably easier to record that way and even easier to tell a bass player to forget the amp.  I couldn’t imagine a recording engineer telling a guitarist they won’t be using their amp.  Their would be no end to the whining and complaining, and rightly so because a guitarist amp provides a lot of their tone.  But so does a bassist.  My Gallien-Krueger isn’t the nicest amp in the world and isn’t even close to my dream amp, but it still does some positive things for my sound.  It adds some growl in the mid-range that compliments my Precision bass really well.  I also am a fan of the sound my two Avatar cabs put out.  I would be fine with just brining the 2X10 and throwing a mic on it just to get some amp sound on the recording.

Which leads to the best compromise:  Do both.  Yes, it is that simple.  Record the bass direct AND place a mic on a bass cab.  You then can blend the two and add as much or as little amp sound to the “clean” signal.  I have recorded my bass this way in the past and it actually works really well.  The additional time will be worth it in the end and I can be proud of the sound that translates through the recording.

If anyone else has any thoughts on how their instrument is recorded, likes or dislikes I would love to hear them.

*Update:

Found an article via TalkBass on Sound on Sound that talks a little about what I am looking for.  Here is a snippet.

If you really want to go to town on the bass sound, try combining a miked amp with one of the DI techniques described earlier. Often you can get away with a smaller amp than if you rely on the amp sound alone, as the DI will provide all the bottom end you need. This combined approach is taken by many professionals. The relative phase of the miked and DI’d sound has a profound effect on the final result, so you may need to phase-reverse one of the sources to get the best result. Also, experiment with the EQ of the individual sources as well as their balance, as the EQ controls may not have the same effect as they do when the sources are heard in isolation. Similarly, changing the mic-to-speaker distance will also affect the phase of the combined sounds, so this can be useful in fine-tuning the result.

It has been a goal for the band to record in Nashville.  My brother-in-law went to school in Nashville for music business and is now getting himself established in the highly competitive world of recording in the most competitive city in the country.  This all means that we have the opportunity to go record for much less than it would normally cost us.  

Deciding to record, however, has been the easy part.  Now we are in the process of writing new songs and learning material so that we can record.  The problem is that just learning new songs isn’t enough.  We have enough songs that we could actually cut some and still have enough for an album.  This doesn’t mean they are cohesive or flow well together.  They don’t necessarily represent pieces of a puzzle that when put together makes sense.  I am not sure I even know how that is done.  

I don’t know if it is the pressure of recording in a city known as the “Recording Capital of the World,” or this being my first real experience recording, but I am really hung up on it.  I want this album to be good.  No, I want it to be great.  I want to be able to look back on it and be proud that we really did a solid job.  The real problem is that I am a bass player.  I am a bass player and the newest member to this band.  I feel like I overstep my bounds enough with some of the feedback and comments I make.  I have been in the band for a little more than six months, but I still want to be respectful.  

So right now I am trying to do everything I can within reason.  The first thing is taking charge of my own bass lines, refining them, crafting some runs, building some depth.  I have a lot of work to take care of, so I am just going to do what I can and hope that everyone else is doing the same. 

I purchased a 2006 Highway One Precision Bass about a month ago.  I knew I wanted to make some changes to it because Fender instruments are among the easiest to modify and ever since I shielded the Spector, I wanted to do more.  I decided to follow Lyle Caldwell’s Jazz Shielding Guide down to the semi-star grounding scheme.  This would make it easier to open up the cavity with only two wires connecting the body to the pickguard.  

I also wanted to swap out the capacitors in favor of the popular Orange Drop.  There were many good reviews from members on TalkBass so it seemed like a good way to go.

I dug into the project by first opening up the bass and surveying what I was dealing with.  I must admit, I knew very little about the Highway 1 when I bought it, other than it had some nice upgrades like the BadAss Bridge 2, a nitro finish, and a great neck.  When I removed the pickguard I noticed immediately that this wasn’t a traditional tone circuit.  I consulted with the TalkBass experts and found out that it was in fact the Grease Bucket circuit.  The goal of the circuit was to allow for a cut in highs without a boost in lows, resulting in very growly, mid heavy sound, when the tone was rolled off.

This development led to a moment of decision: keep the Grease Bucket or switch to the traditional P-Bass tone circuit, consisting of a single cap that bled the highs off to ground.  The decision was too difficult so I decided to use both.  Basically, there would be a switch that would toggle between the two different circuits, allowing me to get two different sounds out of one bass.  With a lot of help from a fellow TBer, I was able to come up with a circuit that would make this possible.

So first things first, take everything out.  On a Precision this is simple to say the least.  The only thing that really holds the electronics package to the body is the ground wire from the bridge and the grounding terminal in the cavity.  Once unsoldered/unscrewed I was able to pull out all the electronics.  After cleaning out the cavity, I laid down the copper shielding and then tack soldered all the seems to make it last.  I also laid the copper tape on the back of the pickguard to make a complete shielded box.  Step one done.

Next, I replaced the bridge ground with a little thicker wire and ran it to the cavity.  This wire, as well as the ground from the pickup, and a third wire that would be attached to the ground terminal of the input jack, were coupled to an o-ring connector and then screwed into the shielding.  This is the basis of the star grounding system, maintain one common point for electricity to travel to ground through.  

After that, I was able to start piecing together the lion’s share of the electrical components.  I completed the volume wiring, so there was signal going to the input jack.  Then I wired up the common leads of the first switch, using the lead from the volume pot and running the other side to outside terminal of the tone pot.  Then I constructed the traditional tone circuit and then finally the Grease Bucket.  Everything was connected, grounded, and ready for run.

The first hang up was fitting it all in.  The Orange Drop caps were at least 5 times as big as the Fender caps, so squeezing three of them in there was a slight challenge, but I managed to make it work.  Once everything was in, and some pickguard screws were put in to hold it all together, I was having a grounding problem.  This was because the input jack was oriented the wrong way and was being pushed into the copper foil.  A quick adjustment and the bass was fully functional.  I had pulled it off.

I had decided to use two switches instead of one mainly for the look of the switches.  All of the 3PDT switches (which is what I would need if I used only one) were just not going to cut it for me.  I think it looks great with two and am glad I went that way.

The difference in tone circuits is not humongous but it is definitely discernible.  I have not had the chance to rehearse with the new system yet, but I am anxious to see what it can do.

Even if this project did not have a lot of utility, it was still really amazing to completely rewire the entire bass myself.  I feel like I understand how it works significantly better than before, and if anything should go wrong, I will be able to diagnose the problem with confidence instead of trepidation.

It has also inspired me to revisit the notion of adding a kill switch to the Spector to prevent prematurely draining the battery when I forget to unplug the bass.  I ordered a push/pull pot when amassing my parts for the Precision but couldn’t use it because it had a split shaft where the pots for the Precision are solid shaft pots.  The Spector uses split shaft pots and wiring it up should be incredibly easy.  I could also remount the batteries in the bass better than they are now and possibly star ground the whole bass.  First, however, I need a break to enjoy the Precision and get back to playing.