Get It

I was looking for a way to write down our songs in a way that the whole band will easily understand. Musical notation would be overkill – i needed a simple “map” of every song that will describe it as song parts – intro, bridge, verse, chorus, coda, etc., and instrument parts – guitar, piano, drums, and comments such as play slower here, play louder there etc. MIDI is good for describing music to computers, not people. Cubase is good for recording, but not for printing – except maybe notation scores, but i don’t need that. I tried writing it as a table in a word processor and found out that it was bad at the middle of the intro to the first song.

So i thought about making up some XML format and writing a Perl script that will convert it to PDF, HTML or some other printable and readable representation. And then i found out that what i really need is XSLT which does just that – transforms XML to other formats.

I kept hearing about XSLT everywhere, so i thought that now would be a good time to finally start using it. I read some articles and tutorials about it and most of them said that XSLT works like Lisp. So i recalled Eric Raymond’s article about becoming a hacker:

“Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it’s very widely used [...]

LISP is worth learning for a different reason – the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it.”

(I think that there are more and better reasons to learn Perl, but i shall put that aside now.)

I tried to follow Raymond’s advice and study Lisp since about 1998. Yesterday i started getting it for the first time, with the help of Cygwin, Guile and this fine tutorial by Dorai Sitaram. The experience is enlightening indeed.

If you ever tried studying functional programming and gave up – try it again. It took me nine years to get it, and chances are that you are smarter than i am.

Miron’s Space

I made a very simple page for Miron Tzabari’s band at MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/mirontzabari http://www.myspace.com/tzabari

It’s not so good. It should be in Hebrew, but MySpace doesn’t accept Hebrew. It shouldn’t have so much ugly advertising. It shouldn’t use Flash. But for starters, it’s a good way to spread the word.

Next in line – stage.co.il and last.fm. http://www.mirontzabari.com will be a bit more complicated but with God’s help will appear one day. Any other suggestions are most welcome.

Beach party tonight (actually on 2006-07-29)

See, that’s a band. Nothing special.

See that geek in a BitTorrent t-shirt playing piano on the right? That’s Aharoni, ya mama.

The lighting died the moment we connected it. We asked our friends to bring any lamps they can find.

Miron celebrated his birthday and his second-birth-day – a year since he nearly died in a work related accident. On the morning of the show he had another work related accident – he cut his left hand and he needed stitches. He played guitar anyway. He said that the nurse told him not to remove the bandage if the hand is bleeding. It bled, but in the middle of the show he removed it anyway. Guitar hero.

Eli, the new guitar player really tied the band together. He had some feedback problems, but handled it gracefully.

Playing on the sand was not that bad. It even didn’t destroy the instruments too much.

Elad is a show man. This bass is actually black blue, but it looks blue black in some pictures.

My old cheap and cranky 700-channel mixer and a couple of brandless amplifiers actually worked as monitors.

And i played some piano. Miron was happy and didn’t yell at me for playing too loud.

This is Rock Action, ya mama.

I was there.

I guess we know the score

Miron scheduled a gig on Friday on a beach between Netanya and Hadera. Nasrallah said that his next bombing target is Netanya. We decided that the show must go on. I just hope that the crowd will come too.

Eran Gitara 2004

Played with Meron and Eran yesterday. We worked on only one song, Eran’s “Am”. A few months have passed since the last time we played together; in the meantime he has written good lyrics and gave the song some structure. The problem is the balance between the instruments—my piano is way too dominant, and Meron’s guitar lines are too sparse. And there are no drums. Meron has a kit, maybe i’ll try to learn it? There’s also a major problem with Eran—he’s a genuinely good songwriter, but has bad timing; he just couldn’t manage recording his guitar over a recording of piano and elc. guitar that Meron prepared. Completely out of beat. I’m sure we’ll get over it.

Meron is great songwriter too. Every time he plays us some of his demos, of which he’s unrightly ashamed, but i’m constantly stunned. It will be very bad if they don’t develop into complete recorded songs. He’s gotta get an album out, to paraphrase Waters.