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Last day of the April Maker Challenge, I made bagels!

I used this recipe as advised by my favorite food blog

Here’s what I have down for the bass/synth parts so far.  The first 4 measures are with a motown drum beat, and the last 4 are with a classic rock beat.  Hopefully I’ll record a shaker part soon so I can ditch the drum beats, and then I’d like to figure out something I could actually use to play these parts instead of using the korg ds-10 synth/sequencer.

close-to-me

Compare it to this:

leave some comments, let me know what you think, hopefully I’ll get to record some trumpet soon, and I’d like to tune the thumb piano I made the other day to use for the high bits that I beleive are being played on a mallet instrument like xylophone/marimba.  Then for the flute parts maybe whistling or make a flute from pvc or vegetables?

Mini Golf!  Only the 2nd greatest sport ever, it comes right after foosball…

So I’ve got about an acre of tall grass just beyond the grass that we mow and call our yard.  I’ve always wanted to make a mini golf course out there.  It shouldn’t be too hard, and wouldn’t be terrible expensive, it’s just more money than I’d want to put into something I might not finish.

Materials:

Lots of 4×8 sheets of plywood.

2×4 or 4×4′s for the edges.

Lots of pvc pipes and fittings for awesome mystery tunnels.

Pvc end caps for the holes.

A couple rolls of green grass carpet stuff.

Old mousepads for the tee’s? +1 recycling points

Thumb Piano!

The box was already mostly made by my dad and sister years ago and was abandoned in my work area.  I sealed it up with some caulk put a lid on it and made it into an instrument.  The “keys” are nails that I hammered flat.  Using a 3lb hammer on the bottom as an anvil doesn’t work so great.  There are only 3 good notes on it right now I need to make some better metal tabs and then tune them to be useful.  If you watch the video you’ll hear the 3 good notes sound like carol of the bells, ding fries are done…

video0011

I’m going to continue documenting the song I plan to record.  It’ll be a cover of The Cure’s Close to Me with some influence from their closer mix and Lady Sovereign’s So Human

So tonight I’ve recorded one of the loops that plays for the entire song.  It is being played on my nintendo ds using the korg ds-10.

synthloop

Make balloons.  Most of the ax-man locations have a wide selection of old porcelain latex balloon molds.  I want to get some liquid latex and make some balloons.

Make a yeast bank, kinda like a sperm bank, but for yeast for brewing.  Start collecting wild yeast from different places around where I live, from places I travel, or have friends bring me yeast. Grow and keep samples of each yeast so that it can be used to brew and hopefully impart the flavor of it’s home on the final product.

Record a cover of a song.  I haven’t picked what yet, but since my voice is so terrible it will either be an instrumental or I’ll mess around with some auto-tune t-pain style.  I’ll probably want to use both my trumpet and piano.  I’ve had both an electric piano with midi out and a soundcard with midi in for a while, but I’ve never hooked them up.  Also this will probably involve making a microphone-preamp pair to use for recording my trumped since the built in microphone on my laptop is absolute crap, and picking up the trumpet without distortion is hard without have the microphone really far away.  Hmm, and while I’m at it I’ll hook up the guitar hero: world tour drumset to the midi connection too.

Made a fire!

Just kidding, that fire was several miles away.  I burned a huge pile of grass.  The dead stalks from our grass garden are pretty ridiculous, they range from tiny puffs that go up in flames like a dead Christmas trees to the elephant grass which is like bamboo and we use as firewood sometimes.  The elephant grass only grew to 7 feet last year, hopefully this year it gains another foot.

Make a trailer for my bike to carry camping gear for an overnight bike trip, or just lots of bags to attach to my bike.  I don’t know how comfortable I’d feel riding on roads pulling a trailer any wider than my bike.  I will have to look into more single wheeled designs.