Well, here’s a nifty idea for those of you who can’t quite make up your mind or want to put the onus of your next (valentine’s day / memorial day / bar mitzvah) gift in fate’s hands: make a scratch-off lottery ticket.

There are a few places online that’ll sell you premade scratch-off stickers that you can simply stick over any portions of your ticket that you want to obscure (easyscratchoffs.com looks good), but I was too late to order them I really wanted to go the extra mile and actually make the scratch-off stickers myself. I found a couple of tutorials (this one is the one I ended up using), all of which said to put clear contact paper over your printed-out card and then to make your scratch-off solution out of a mixture of 2:1 silver acrylic hobbyist paint to dish soap (like joy). I set to designing a christmas-themed lotto ticket in Inkscape— a free, open-source vector art editor a’la Illustrator (but it’s FREE) that i grew to love quickly (did I mention it’s FREE?). Grab some clipart and a few occasion-specific fonts for extra pizazz— I found this handy Christmas font. After a little bit of tinkering, I came up with the following:

Once you’re admiring your handiwork with the same pride as Ralphie admires his ‘What I Want For Christmas’ essay in A Christmas Story, save your document as a PDF and send it to the nearest Fedex / Kinkos or print shop that will print cheap color copies on card stock. While you’re on your extended lunch break to pick up the printouts, stop by your nearest dick blick / pearl paint and grab some silver acrylic paint (this stuff was pretty cheap) and a cheap brush, and then run to K-Mart to pick up some dish soap and clear contact paper. Then simply apply the contact paper to the printout, summon your best inner fourth grader in arts and crafts and cut out the printout. Then prepare your paint mixture- as I mentioned, 2:1 paint:soap. You’ll most likely need to do a few layers so paint one on, eat some pretzels, get some work done, and repeat.

In the end, you’ll probably end up with something like this:

Now, since you don’t actually have anything to show for your sorry-ass self, you’ll want to put extra care into wrapping the card (hey, even throw in a bow) and make sure you hide it and all evidence of any files you used in designing it & your fedex / kinko’s receipts until the cat’s out of the bag. And keep your fingers crossed that she doesn’t scratch off the all-expenses-paid trip to Austin.

You’re welcome for saving your Valentine’s Day.

www.freestyleapplication.com

So as the two readers of my blog probably already know, Jon, the esteemed bassist and co-founder of vice stevens (and not to mention one of my best friends since second grade) has chosen to pack up shop in riverdale and set sail for Austin,TX. I’m billing this show as more of a going away party for jon; plus it is my understanding that this not only is in the middle of nowhere on the Thursday night before labor day but it also may conflict with Barack’s acceptance speech at the DNC. Still, if you want to be at Jon and Vice Stevens’ last waltz (until jon puts together our reunion tour in a couple months), come up to the end of the 1 train and have some tasty pints with us.

And for those of you that asked- no, we haven’t even thought of looking for another bassist. w/o jon, there is no vice stevens. And, yes, I have meditated quite a bit on the subject of being in aspiring bands after being in a few over the past decade or so of my life (más o menos), so I’ll certainly be sharing some of those thoughts on this interwebs site in the future.

And here’s the invite to the event, as conceived by our also irreplacable drummer, bob.

Peter Neubäcker

Doesn’t this guy just look like the kind of guy that would invent something crazy and completely game-changing?

This man is the creator of Melodyne, which has been one of the most creative and amazing pieces of music production software since it came out years ago.  I remember seeing a demo of it way back in… what was it, 2004?  I was at the Taxi convention (on behalf of Focusin) and the Melodyne demonstration simply blew me away.  Melodyne basically lets you treat audio signals like MIDI– that is, you can take a preexisting recording and it will separate musical and spoken events into, say, syllables, and you can manipulate them to  your heart’s content by changing their pitches, timings, and durations.

A number of other pieces of software let you do this (that’s why every piece of pop music on the radio has every single bit of imperfection sucked out of it- pitch and timing correction, baby- but that’s a story for another day).  However, while you could, say, cut up a guitar performance chord by chord, you couldn’t take each of those chords and look inside them and change their constituent notes.  And that’s exactly what Melodyne 2 and its ‘Direct Note Access’ (DNA) ability claims to do.

This is amazing stuff, kids.  Many, many very smart nerds have been trying to do this for a while (I met many of them while getting my Master’s) but as far as I know, none have come up with as successful an implementation as Melodyne’s.  Peter does say that you will probably have limited success in splitting a full recording back into its constituent  tracks (like if you wanted to pull out just the drums from your favorite Blink-182 recording… not that I’d want to do that) but… well, I know quite a few people that are salivating to see just how far this software can be pushed– I am one of them!

The picture of Peter links to a 14-minute video in which he describes what he’s been cooking up and how he’s done it (to some extent).  Enjoy.

omg

that is so mean i did not like that at all omg that goy is so mean and i luv animals i never wanna watch that again

anyhow… enjoy.  the video’s only viewable on mtv.com, d’oh:

http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1586120&vid=227205

2) david lee roth’s a capella vocals from ‘running with the devil’. if i was ever tracking these vocals i’d cut out 90% of them. shows how square i am.