she likes a nice deck... and we started the garage band project
earlier this year I posted some sketchup ideas for our place in wimberley. I shared them with the wife to get some opinions. she made one request, a second floor deck, that receives some direct sunlight as well as provides shelter. I gave up on my strict constraint of the original footprint, and i also gave in to a full second floor, and I think the design benefited from the new version.
we now have more of a semi-private entry between two larger volumes. the white section at the front of the second floor would be transluscent (polygal), but would receive no direct sunlight except for the middle of winter.
I've not worked on a floorplan, or window placement. But you CAN see the second floor deck on the sketchup below.
we have an important event to photograph in a few months. I've already started to assemble my photo bag and list what equipment to acquire/pack. I’ve purchased a new off camera ttl (ettl) flash cord. this allows me to move the flash from directly above the lens. I held it up and out just a bit. notice the shaddows move a bit to the side and this allows for a slight shading on the face (nose)
Garage Band:
I think it was last summer, I overheard #1 son playing a new song on piano. I asked, "is that House of the Rising Sun?". he confirmed it was , but refused to admit it was the same song as played by The Animals. I checked with his instructor (Owen Summers) and I was right! Owen said the lesson version was simplified, but they could learn it as it's done by the Animals.
Then, I printed out the guitar tabs, and asked his guitar instructor to teach the guitar part... I had an idea
I figured he could do a cover of the song, where he played all the instruments.
I asked him to lay the guitar track today. he played ... a few seconds, and said, "I'm done". I was less than impressed, the actual song is more like 4 minutes. His reasoning was, "it just repeats, so I'll loop it". I was still less than impressed. He counted out how many measues (not sure if that is correct nomenclature) and then he did a few clicks, and it did repeat his guitar part. I was unsure if I should compliment his use of technology or call him lazy.
I realized this was not going to be a one day project and we can always go back and replace individual tracks. so we moved on to piano. we plugged the electric keyboard directly into the ipad/garage band, he could listen to his previously recorded guitar track on headphones and play along. it was then that he realized his guitar loop was MUCH faster, he had a hard time playing along with it. he eventually got it. but again, he recorded a portion and looped it.
we moved on to the vocals. we used my ipad to play the original over heaphones, but I had to use the jamup app to speed the track up to 1.5x original speed (50% faster) to match what he'd made. then we noticed piano and guitar tracks lost synchronization pretty early on into the deal. it's a learning curve.