Wellington is Superdope

I've only been here just over 24 hours, and I already love this city. It's very compact, and easy to get around by foot. I've spent a lot of time walking around downtown, trying to get lost, so I can find my way again. It's the unmetaphorical version of what I'm doing in New Zealand in the first place, only the finding part is much easier.

I met a few buskers downtown today, one who played flamenco guitar. I think I need to learn from his technique, because he has an interesting way of adding percussion while strumming. His technique is different from my own, but I think there's a lot of potential in combining the two.

The other one had a Warr Guitar, which was cool to see for the first time. These guitars are designed to be "tapped" instead of plucked, like a Chapman Stick, or the technique used by Stanley Jordan. It's pretty cool to see these kinds of things on my second day in the city.

I'm planning to keep an ongoing list of observations about Wellington. And I think I should start with the most pressing issue:

1. It is my primary goal to avoid being hit by a car in the first week. It's not that I will suddenly stop trying to get hit by a car. It's just that for the time being, my instinct is to look the wrong way for cars. I'm also a bit jet-lagged and tired. This is a dangerous mixture.

2. The birds here know different songs than Canadian birds. This is probably true of most two places on Earth, but I find the differences interesting. They do still have untalented chirping birds, but the songbirds are quite different. Waking up to new birds songs is better than waking up to old birdsongs, even with the jet lag.

3. My leg muscles are not used to hills; they are used to prairies. Going downtown is great, because it starts by going down a hill. Coming back is tiring, and daunting to the point where I actually stay downtown to delay the inevitable climb home.

Summer is over...

...but it's almost summer again. In two days I will be going to Wellington, New Zealand to avoid the Canadian winter. I have little planned out for the six months that I will be there, but the plan was not to have a plan. The very act of showing up under-prepared is somewhat of an exercise in non-religious faith, trusting that things will work out.

After completing my work on Notepad Command, I worked on a second, as-of-yet untitled game for Monoclesoft. The music consisted of short loops which play until a certain even is triggered, then move on to the next loop, a slightly more layered version of the previous loop. It was all about stacking parts, musical elaboration, and gradual growth from an initial idea. It was an interesting process to tackle the music that needed to fit that model of progression.

I have been inconsistent with my blog posts, but I hope that my new adventures in New Zealand will inspire me to post more frequently.

Victory!

After much anxious waiting, Notepad Command is here! A lot of hard work has gone into this game, and we're glad that we finally got it on the app store. I think it's a pretty fun game to play, so if you have an iPad and are looking for a fun game, look no further. Just buy it.

Album Update

The people at Monoclesoft now have a trailer for the iPad game that I've been working on, Notepad Command. My work on the project is starting to wind down, so I'm looking forward to spending more time finishing my album. I have decided to distribute through CDBaby because I like their pricing, and they seem like a company that really know their stuff. They will sell my music directly, and will also get my music distributed on iTunes and other digital distributors.

I have settled on which songs I want to include on my upcoming album. I have finished writing all but one song, and a few of them are even recorded, but still need some post-production massaging. The one I haven't finished writing will probably be my favorite song on the album, and I'm excited to finish it. I have fragments of lyrics and phrases floating around in my head, but I have yet to bring it all together.

The guitar part is in a very strange tuning, one which I have never used before (Low C, G, D, G, C, E). I wanted to record the guitar part so that I could listen to it on my iPod, in the hopes that it would help the lyric-writing process. Since I did a guitar demo, I though I would post it here anyway. I got a strange stereo effect when I recorded it, and I'm not exactly sure how I got it. I hope I can reproduce it for the final recording.

Guitar Demo by ryanholaday

Waiting, waiting, waiting

The long-awaited iPad finally launched outside of the United States on Friday. Since I have been working on a video game project for the iPad, it has been a rather anxious wait for the release. No matter how hard you try, you can't sell an iPad game to someone who doesn't have an iPad yet.

Now that iPads are available in Canada, I now have to wait until the iPad game officially gets approved for release via the iTunes store. I thought that once I wrote the music and created the sound effects, it would ease the pressure, but I'm finding the waiting part to be the most stressful. Even under the time constraints that I had before, I was not as anxious as I am now. I had the power to do something about it before, but now, it's in someone else's hands. Apparently I don't like other peoples' hands.