Vary Your Gmail Address

Did you know you can change your Gmail address? Well, to an extent at least. Here’s how it works:

You can put any number of periods in the first part of your email address (everything before @gmail.com or @berklee.edu) and a message sent to that email will still get to you. For example, if I send a message to:

ma.rc.us.ba.ga.la@gmail.com  OR  marcus.bagala@gmail.com 


It’ll still be sent to marcusbagala@gmail.com. Another way you can change your address is by typing a plus sign (+) followed by any combination of letters and/or numbers (no spaces though). So if I send a message to:

marcusbagala+thegreatestcomposereveralive@gmail.com


OR

m.a.r.c.u.s.b.a.g.a.l.a+oBn0xIoUsEmAiL12345678@gmail.com

It’ll still be sent to marcusbagala@gmail.com. But when would you ever want to use this? Well let’s say you need to create an account on some website, but you don’t really want to sign up using your real address because you’re afraid you’ll start receiving 47 emails regarding “Natural Male Enhancement” a day. If you change your email up a bit, you’ll be able to see exactly which websites are using or misusing your email.

For example, if you only use the email j.smith+poundcake44@gmail.com on PoundCakeRecipes.com and all of a sudden you start getting spam sent to that email then you can assume that something is up with that site.  The good part, though, is that you can very easily create a filter in Gmail to automatically delete all messages sent to your “fake” email. This way, you no longer have to worry about receiving spam and your real email address is more secure.

-by LC Tech Blog contributor Michal Skrzypek

Read More

Loading Audio Into Reason's NNXT Advanced Sampler

I always get asked how to load samples into Reason that have been created in a different digital audio workstation (DAW). I’m going to show how to chop up a piece of audio in Logic and then import it into the NN-XT advanced sampler in Reason.

After I open Logic, I just chose an audio segment to use.

Then I'll export the region as a WAVE file, which is what the NN-XT sampler will be able to play. Highlight the region by selecting it and then simply control-click on it and export. When you are finished, QUIT OUT OF LOGIC. This is so that we don't inadvertently open Reason in Rewire mode. More about that here.

Now to the goodies. Open your Reason session and create a mixer and an NN-XT advanced sampler. You can easily load it from the CREATE menu on top of the window or conveniently by just control-clicking on the black area of the hardware window.

Now load the NN-XT the same way you did it with the Mixer. Make sure the signal flow is set up correctly so you don’t have weird settings messing up your groove! You can do this by pressing the tab button, it will show you the back of the virtual rack where you can verify everything is smoothly running.

Now clear the NNXT by just control-clicking on the device and choosing INITIALIZE PATCH from the menu.

Open the NNXT Remote Editor by clicking in the little arrow at the bottom left side of the device.

Now you can browse for the audio file from Logic and voilá! You have your sample loaded into the NN-XT.

Now you can start playing around with the effects from the ENVELOPES, FILTERS, LFO’S, etc.

You can even add delay to the sample, reverb, scream distortion, the only limit you have is the one you put on yourself.

Have fun!

-by LC Tech Blog contributor José Andrés Márquez 

Read More

Mac Daddy Monday: Need to Clear Space on Your Hard Drive? Check Out This Cool Ap!

Ever needed to erase stuff on your hard drive because you don’t even have the room to save a Word file? When you’re in that situation you are less discerning, and may throw out files that you normally would take the time to back up first. There is a free ap available that shows you a pie chart of disk usage on your computer, making it extremely easy to find folders and files that are cloggers. Download JDiskReport here: http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/

Read More

Waveform Wednesday: Auto Tune Techniques in Digital Performer

Everybody loves auto tune! Whether you’re going for the over the top T-pain style autotune or just a subtle fix to an otherwise good take, autotune can be a useful tool or effect. Logic and Digital Performer both have autotune functions that ship with the software and both can be used to get effect. The main difference being that in DP the autotuning happens on the actual track, as well as having control of how you’d like to tune each individual note.

Once you have a track you’d like to tune double click on the audio to open the sequence editor then switch the editing view to pitch.

Once there make sure to zoom in so you can see the individual notes to edit.
Now that you’re in pitch edit mode, there are a couple different things you can do.
First is you can auto correct all the pitches by going to the audio menu and select “pitch correction”, there are a couple different options, the quickest and easiest being “quantize pitch”, which will drag any notes that are off onto the next closest pitch.

You can also adjust how much you want DP to cut up each individual note, so you have more or less options of individual segments to edit.
Another thing to make sure you do is set the pitch mode, so DP knows how to properly use pitch correction on the audio, select either instrument or vocal. This is also under the audio in “pitch correction”.

The second way to use pitch-correction in DP is manually. To do this, zoom into the track so you can see each note and simply drag each one to the desired pitch. Another function you can do manually is adjust the level of vibrato on each note, to do this hold down options and click the note you’d like to edit and then drag up to increase the vibrato or drag down to flatten it (T-pain style).

-by LC Tech Blog contributor Marcus Bagala

Read More