I have an iPad, as of about a week ago. I have now had the chance to try it out on a trip, as well as general home use, and I think this sort of form factor is probably the future of computing for most folks. It’s clearly early days still for slates like this, but you can see the path from here, and it is an interesting one, with variations depending on who needs to use the tablet. In the meantime, with some trickery, it can do most of what I would need to replace a laptop. Basically, I am now carrying it everywhere, and on my trip I booted up my laptop exactly once, and it was to create and display a presentation — I didn’t have a VGA adapter yet, so I couldn’t project from the iPad.

I have already spent over $100 on apps for it, and thought I would share some of my thoughts. I tend to favor free and cheap apps, actually, so the below is me trying to be a skinflint and failing!

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As those of you who follow the blog closely know, I listen to (and play) a lot of singer-songwriter music. One of my favorites is Ellis Paul, whom I’ve been listening to since I first heard him on a Kerrville stage in the early 90′s. Every once in a while I mention one of his songs or comment on one of his concerts here…

Well, today an email showed up… seems like his manager noticed. I don’t usually put up marketing stuff on here, but as a fan, I’m going to anyway even though this is more of a gaming blog than a folk music blog!

Ellis’ new album was completely funded by the fans, and he is giving the lead single track “Annalee” away for free. Go check it out! You don’t need to give an email, sign up, register, or anything. Just download it — and share it. Share the link with as many people as you want. And if you like what you hear, buy the album (buy all of them, they are all really good) and support a truly indie and truly fantastic singer-songwriter.

This is another piano improvisation from a few weeks ago.

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– Tarboy download

It has nothing to do with the animated film, which I have never seen nor heard of until just now. The title actually came from an evocative word in the fantasy novel The Red Wolf Conspiracy (which I quite enjoyed, by the way).

Another little piano improv here. It starts out a bit rough, sorry. By the same we get the second statement of the theme, it’s a bit more surefooted. Sorry about that.

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– download

It’s nice to feel like I can sit down at a piano and just bang out stuff like this again. I was never very good on piano, and still am not really “good” in any technical sense. It has been a couple of decades since I stopped noodling on keyboards in favor of the guitar. Now when I go back to it my comfort with chordal structure and progression is so much greater that it’s making it a rather different experience, and a lot of fun. Maybe I should get around to relearning how to read music…

Noodled this in about 45 minutes this evening, while thinking about the halls at GDC emptying out. Just me and the piano…

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– download

To say goodbye to Metaplace.com in style, there’s a party scheduled at noon tomorrow January 1st, probably running all the way until the lights go out at midnight. Please come on by and hang out!

I am also going to do one last, final farewell concert, after some users asked me to. It will be at 2pm Pacific (or Metaplace time) in The Stage, and I will embed it here as usual.

…means reading those crazy crazy liner notes, full of pretention and affection.

…means finding Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and Steve Martin as a wild and crazy guy.

…means wondering why my wife had so much Barry Gibb when she was a young teen. And uh, Crystal Gayle?

…means laughing over the albums that we gave each other on CD this year that suddenly we can also play on vinyl.

…means marveling over the 25 cent stickers on them, remembering being broke in college and tracking down obscure stuff in bins in used record stores.

…means blasting Joan Jett & the Blackhearts.

…means rediscovering our classical and jazz collections.

…means, unfortunately, hours and hours and hours of “ripping” the vinyl, because the romance of the record will probably only last another few hours.

Another guitar instrumental… it’s in open D, capo IV. I sorta-tabbed it, after the break.

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– download “Holidays”

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Another month, another concert. This one is for Charity Day, another MacZ event in Metaplace. It runs from 2pm-4pm Pacific time. You can get there at this link: http://www.metaplace.com/thestage/play

Or right here, if you can see this world embed:

(event over)

Head up the stairs and through the triple doors by the meep with the bow tie.

Here’s the 2 hour and 20 minute recording of the concert I did yesterday for Halloween on Metaplace. It’s all covers, and there’s plenty of awkward silences between the songs, because you can’t hear and see anything that the audience said and did while I was playing. You only get what went up the stream. Some of my answers to text chat may seem out of context.

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No download link — it’s almost 200MB. Edit: here’s a download link for the concert broken up into individual MP3 tracks, in a ZIP file. It’s around 170MB this way.

Before anyone asks, this is just me singing and on solo guitar, plus a harmonizer pedal. Most of the songs are fingerpicked, actually, but I used a flatpick on a few that asked for more of a strum. The recording setup is moderately complicated — mic and guitar into a harmonizer pedal which added some EQ and reverb and of course harmonies sometimes; then guitar further into a multi-effects pedal to add some reverb and punch. I also had a large diaphragm mic, dry (meaning, no reverb or effects at all), sitting close to add detail and some wood back into the guitar. From there, into BUTT and thence up to a Shoutcast station. BUTT did the recording locally.

I tried to make each song lead into the next narratively, and to cover a nice wide range of genres for everyone who was there. Here’s the set list, which was selected to fit the holiday: horror songs, creepy songs, songs about death and madness, prison tunes, and murder ballads and silly songs. It has a bunch of the stuff I usually do — blues, a lot of singer-songwriter material, 80s covers that it’s weird to tackle on acoustic…

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