Tag: Music

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Mud vs Sheep vs Bike, the song

Mud vs Sheep vs Bike (MvSvB) is an event that my friend Fraser and I started in about 1993. I’ve written about it on here before. Essentially it’s just a bunch of friends going mountain biking in Wales, but it has achieved a kind of independent existence in our collective consciousness. It’s loosely named after the famous “Man vs Horse vs Bike” race that I regretted once entering in about 1991. MvSvB has been held at various youth hostels and other group rental accommodations, but most often at what was my Dad’s farm near Llandovery in Wales.

Certain MvSvB traditions have been established, most importantly:

  • Banoffee pie
  • T-shirts
  • Getting wet and muddy
  • Getting lost
  • Punctures and disintegrating wheels
  • Being chased by fierce sheepdogs
  • Beer

Banoffee pie is a critical component of the coping mechanisms required to spend much time in Welsh weather, and is a great source of the calories required for biking up hills (at least that’s our excuse). Some terms for the unaware: liquid sun = rain, Welsh not raining = light drizzle.

I’ve designed most of the T-shirts to date, starting in 1995, when I learned that half-toning really isn’t a good approach for screen printing on fabrics. The designs usually tried to have 1 or 2-colour prints using strong mountain bike themes with in-jokes, references to mud, sheep, bikes, hills, etc. This year I came up with a bold design, based on a picture of a friend on a bike, carefully redrawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad (using Linearity Curve), and printed using a groovy high-tech direct-to-fabric printing process by my friends at Vektor.

Since I moved to France in 2009, I’ve missed out on a few events, Fraser moved to New Zealand, we’ve mostly had growing kids to contend with, the whole age thing, and so MvSvB events have dwindled. But 2023 is the comeback year, the kids are big enough to leave at home, and we can reunite to enjoy a collective mid-life crisis.

To commemorate what we are officially calling the 30th anniversary of MvSvB, I wrote this song about it, celebrating all the nasty weather, excessive eating and drinking, impromptu bike maintenance, and generally messing about on bikes with friends.

I came up with the first line first; always a good start. I wanted to have a sparse, slightly gloomy sounding verse so that I could pair it with an excessively happy chorus. Of course It just would work without rain ambience and bike and sheep noises. Next up came the bass line; I’ve never really played slap bass before (on my Sire Marcus Miller M2 bass), but I am pretty happy with the result – I’m sure it sounds better than when I played it due to the wonders of Logic Pro’s flex pitch editor! Next was the guitar, which is very simple. Drums are courtesy of Logic’s excellent Drummer instrument, which I got to follow my bass part in places. I had quite a lot of lyrics for the chorus, and despite the 130bpm tempo, it manages to sound fairly leisurely. The timing of those lyrics gave me a pattern which led to a melody, which led to some very basic chords, and voila, one functioning chorus!

I’ve been very keen to try out Synthesizer V, which I had bought at fair expense earlier this year, only to find that it’s borderline unusable in DAWs like Logic. However with a little perseverance I found it was workable so long as I didn’t even consider touching the tempo. This gave me the first set of vocals – two backing lines that I made in a similar style to how I worked in Tailwind, except with these synthetic voices. I had planned to sing the main parts myself, but found it just really didn’t work, so I enlisted the help of Lucas H on Fiverr who did a great job with a quick turnaround. With all these working together, I’ve ended up with 5 vocal parts in some places, and it makes for a great ensemble sound that I wasn’t quite expecting, but I’m very happy with.

I don’t care if it’s raining,
get back on your bike
I know you’re hung over
from drinking last night
But that’s not my problem
there’s mountains to ride
and there’s no way I’m
letting you stay inside

Sheep getting restless
and puddles so deep
there’s mud to my elbows
and I’ve had no sleep
but I don’t care
‘cos we’re here to have fun
to every last drop
of this liquid Welsh sun

There’s mud and there’s sheep and there’s rides with our friends
There’s banoffee and T-shirts and hills without end
There’s maps and confusion and roads to nowhere
There’s mud and there’s bikes and that’s why we are here

No punctured excuses
or unspoken wheels
we’re chained to the bars
as we grind up the hills.
We’re spinning for summits
and covered in grime
leaving tread on the tracks
of a great mountain climb

There’s mud and there’s sheep and there’s rides with our friends
There’s banoffee and T-shirts and hills without end
There’s maps and confusion and roads to nowhere
There’s mud and there’s bikes and that’s why we are here

Pedal, pedal... up the hills
Pedal, pedal... up the hills

There’s mud and there’s sheep and there’s rides with our friends
We always come back here, again and again
There’s mountains and rivers and crates of cold beer
There’s mud and there’s bikes and that’s why we are here
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Tailwind, the CSS framework, the song…

Tailwind is a CSS framework created by Adam Wathan, and beloved by many. I’ve found it’s really helped me understand CSS grid in particular, and has made building responsive layouts really easy. It sometimes comes in for criticism because it is based on utility classes, meaning you mostly skip the ability to attach styles to elements via CSS selectors (a fundamental feature of CSS). However, when it’s used with a content framework that provides components (like Laravel’s Blade), they can effectively take on that role and prevent repetition. One of the consequences of using Tailwind is that you often end up with lots of classes in HTML class attributes.

Anyway, Tailwind is cool and I like it, so I decided to write a song about it, in the same vein as my previous effort for The Good Ship Laravel.

The arrangement in Logic Pro

It’s all about a hapless, design-challenged developer (could that possibly be me??) having trouble with their styling and layout, and thinking they should give this Tailwind thing a go as a way to help them solve it. They give Tailwind a try, it takes them a while to get to grips with it, but they finally figure it out and all is rosy.

The “I ain’t got no style; I got Tailwind” line was the first line that came to me, followed by “I got classes…”, giving me most of the chorus, but the verses took a while longer. I wrote the music for the chorus first, then worked backwards to make a verse that led into it nicely. There’s a break in the middle that seemed really obvious (“When my mode is getting dark…”), straight out of many other songs – there’s nothing revolutionary going on here!

I played the guitar parts for the chorus (which is a simple C, Am, G), and eventually found a sequence for the verse that worked well (C, F, Dm, G, then Csus2, G at the end). I wrote a very melodic bassline on keyboard. Logic Pro’s Drummer took care of the brush-style drums – I didn’t spend too much time on them. Unfortunately I then found I simply couldn’t play the chord changes in the verse smoothly enough, so I enlisted the help of musicalduo on Fiverr, who did a great job of it. He also played a really smooth version of the bass part, which I hadn’t asked him to do. So my guitar playing only appears in the chorus, and I need to practice more!

I don’t rate my singing (I would love to work with someone that can sing!), but Logic’s Flex Pitch editing works wonders. I also really like using it for vocal harmonies – figuring them out using Flex Pitch, then re-singing them, just as I did for The Good Ship Laravel. I had a cold for a couple of weeks and early versions sounded like I was holding my nose, so I re-recorded them when I was feeling less bunged up! I’ve discovered that you can get away with really bad backing vocals, so long as they are in tune!

I have some other, older songs I’ve not released, one about npm, one about being an open source maintainer, and a half-finished Whitney Houston-style belter about composer… PRs welcome!

If you like this song, please consider supporting me by buying my album, “Developer Music” on Bandcamp, and sharing links to my song posts on here.

Lyrics

[Verse]
I’m trying to build an app that looks good
It’s all taking much more time than it should
Classes and styles going ‘round in my head
turns out it’s not as easy as I originally said.

I’m finding my breakpoints, feeling defeated
and all this old stuff will have to be deleted
One thing is clear from all this confusion
I’ve had to come to an unfortunate conclusion

[Chorus]
No, I ain’t got no style;
I need tailwind
I got problems, maybe more than a few
I need tailwind
Oooooh, I ain’t got style;
I need tailwind
Not sure what I’m gonna do
I need tailwind

[Verse]
You might think I’m crazy, but I’m gonna read some docs
I’ve gotta figure out how to arrange all these blocks
It looks great on my Mac, but explodes on my phone
and judging by Stack Overflow, I’m not alone

I ask, “hey Adam, you got any ideas?”
He says, “yeah, get Tailwind to mop up those tears”
So I’m going with the flow, flexing my grid
trying to figure out what those tutorials did, but still,

[Chorus]
I ain’t got no style;
I’ll try tailwind
I got problems, maybe more than a few
I’ll try tailwind
Oooooh, I ain’t got style;
I’ll try tailwind
Not sure what I’m gonna do
I’ll try tailwind

[Middle]
When my mode is getting dark
and my layouts fall to bits
I keep trying all kinds of things
until suddenly everything clicks

[Verse]
My grid’s all cool unlike my previous wreck
I don’t have to keep my units in check
I love my pretty colours, my text is so clean
I hate to think of what it might have been, but now 

I’m slicing up my blade into little tiny pieces
It’s the moment for components, it’s all utility
I’m loving how it works everywhere, especially on my phone
Tailwind’s really in several classes of its own

[Chorus]
No, I ain’t got no style;
I got tailwind
I got classes, maybe more than a few
I got tailwind
Oooooh, I ain’t got style;
I got tailwind
Maybe you’d like to try it too
We got tailwind

[Outro]
Oooooh, I ain’t got style;
I got tailwind
Oooooh, I ain’t got style;
I got tailwind
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The Good Ship Laravel

I like writing songs about open source, but I’ve never actually released any or posted them publicly, mainly because my singing is fairly terrible, and trying to find others willing and able to sing about these things seems hard! I really liked “the Wellerman” sea shanty craze of 2021, I had a thought that I should make use of the the nautical theme that runs through a lot of Laravel’s nomenclature to write a shanty of my own, that wasn’t just another cover of the Wellerman. It also occurred to me that I could semi-speak the words (in a pirate voice of course!) instead of outright singing, and that made it feel a bit less daunting. I wrote the intro first, and I liked the storytelling aspect, though as intros go it’s quite long. The first verse came quite easily as I built a list of words and kind of ticked them off the list. The timing and rhyming structure is straight Limerick, which makes things very easy. The main melody was just the result of doodling on the keyboard for a bit. I was pleased with the sailor/Taylor rhyme for the chorus, but it took me ages to come up with the rest of it. I had several failing attempts at a melody for the chorus, eventually just singing something that the words fitted, and then turning that into an accordion line, then building out everything else around it.

The instrumentation was very simple – it’s a sea shanty so we need simple folk instruments – accordion and cajon, and then a plucked upright bass to fill it out. In the final chorus I threw in some lovely blatty brass and a bit of piccolo, since the top end was kind of empty.

The Logic Pro arrangement

I recorded the vocals for the intro in July 2021, but re-recorded them later for consistency. I sang the first (lowest) line of the chorus vocals, and then did something I’ve done before – copy the track, and then use Logic’s Flex Pitch editor to shift notes around to make harmonies, generally upwards, since I’d sung a low line to start with. Having found harmonies that worked, I then re-sang the new line, as a heavily edited one doesn’t sound quite right, especially when pitch shifts are quite large. I then repeated the process for a second time, giving me a three-part harmony for the chorus. Flex Pitch let me correct pitch, but also timing – the harmonies sound so much better when they line up in time too. The low line was only possible for me to sing because at the time I was recovering from COVID and a very nasty sore throat, so while I was feeling much better, my voice was much deeper then usual, and I could hit much lower notes! Overall I found the singing much easier than the other things I’ve tried to sing because it was pitched much more comfortably for my voice.

If you like this song, you might like to have a listen to my later creation, “Tailwind“.

Software & Hardware

  • Apple Logic Pro X
  • Behringer UMC404HD USB audio interface
  • Aston Element dynamic microphone
  • Adam Audio TR5V monitors
  • KRK RP10S subwoofer
  • Arturia Minilab Mk II MIDI keyboard
  • Behringer DSP8024 Ultra-Curve Pro (room correction)
  • Mackie Big Knob passive volume control

Instruments & effects

  • Accordion, cajon, upright bass, piccolo, seagulls and waves from Logic’s standard sample library
  • Brass section from Logic’s Studio Horns instrument
  • Rowing boat sample I found from some ancient soundfonts collection
  • iZotope RX7 noise reduction
  • SSL Channel Strip (EQ, compression)
  • Logic standard compressor, EQ, de-esser
  • Logic “Space Designer” reverb
  • One of Logic’s default mastering configs for final output
Intro:
I was cast adrift in development seas
a shiver of bugs a’circlin’ me
Naught but a pair of oars and my IDE
to keep my app from drownin’

I spied at last a distant sail
I signalled for ‘elp to that caravel
As she hove to I made out her name;
’Twas the good ship Laravel!

Verse 1:
Gather ye round my developers
and I’ll spin you a yarn most eloquent
A tale of passport and breeze,
socialite and jetstream
a cloud full of vapor and elegance

We’ve resources and models and more
Controllers and actions galore
Fortified with some rum,
and a sack of enums,
we’ll build an app clients will adore


Chorus:
Train your telescope on that far horizon
Don’t get marooned on development island
We’re gonna build an app so well
On the good ship Laravel

Get on board now, every sailor
dance to the tune of cap’n Taylor
You’ve never built an app so well as
On the good ship Laravel

Verse 2:

With livewire on top of your scripts
and laracasts dishing out tips
We’ve got the best pest
to chase the rats from your tests
and artisan helping you ship

The framework’s the star, that’s for sure
but there’s packages of treasure to explore
but the best bit’s the crew,
and you can join too –
everyone’s welcome aboard

Chorus2:
Train your telescope on that far horizon
Don’t get marooned on development island
We’re gonna build an app so well
On the good ship Laravel

Get on board now, every sailor
dance to the tune of cap’n Taylor
You’ve never built an app so well as
On the good ship Laravel
The good ship Laravel

If you like this song, please consider supporting me by buying my album, “Developer Music” on Bandcamp, and sharing links to my song posts on here.

An explanation for non-Laravel folk!

A shiver is the collective noun for sharks. An IDE is an integrated development environment such as PHPStorm or VS Code; think MS Word, but for programming. An app, in this context, is a web application built in PHP. Sail is the name of a Laravel feature for managing local development environments. A caravel is a 15th century Portuguese sailing boat, exactly the kind of vessel that a stranded pirate might encounter, and also the word that gave inspiration for Laravel‘s name. “Hove to” is a sailing manoeuvre used to more or less stop a boat by pointing the sails in opposing directions, very useful when picking up castaways. A yarn is a story, often nautical, and a thread, but it’s also the name of a Javascript package manager. Eloquent is the name of Laravel’s database abstraction layer. Passport, Breeze, Socialite, and Jetstream are all Laravel features for building authentication workflows. Real clouds are made of vapor, but Laravel’s serverless service is called Vapor, and runs in the cloud. Elegance? Well, it mostly rhymes with eloquent, and is something that any framework aspires to. Models, controllers, actions, and resources are all important parts of a typical web app built in an object-oriented style; I was planning to have a line about “plundering” to go with resources, but that didn’t make it. Fortify is another Laravel authentication feature, but rum is a traditional source of income for pirates, on top of its role in providing Dutch courage. Enums are a common programming language feature, but notable because they were added natively to PHP 8.1 recently. Telescope is an in-app debugging utility. Horizon is a queue monitoring extension. Cap’n Taylor is of course Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. Livewire is a toolkit for building dynamic, interactive web interfaces for Laravel apps. Laracasts provides an amazing library of training material for Laravel and related technologies, and also a great forum. Pest is a relatively new system for building automated tests that Laravel uses. Artisan is a command line tool that helps automate numerous development tasks. The crew is Laravel’s development team, but also the enormous and diverse community of developers that make Laravel far greater than a typical framework – it’s home for many of us!

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Using a Behringer DSP8024 for Room EQ

I have a Behringer DSP8024 Ultra-Curve Pro audio processor on the output of my computer.

Behringer DSP8024 audio processor

I picked up this relatively ancient unit for £50 about 15 years ago (it cost about $500 back in 2001!), and they can still be found on eBay, along with later models like the DEQ2496, and related hardware like Focusrite’s (discontinued) VRMBox. It provides many different audio processing functions, including:

  • Stereo 31-band ⅓-octave graphic equaliser
  • Real-time stereo 31-band spectrum analyser
  • Stereo 6-band parametric equaliser
  • Delay up to 2.5 sec
  • Noise gate
  • Automatic “feedback destroyer”
  • Accurate level meter with selectable scales
  • “Brick wall” limiter for output protection
  • Automatic room equalization using microphone input and internal noise generators

It’s this last feature that is the most useful, combining the analyser with the graphic equaliser. Room equalisation (EQ) can correct a lot of acoustic deficiencies in a room. The shape, composition, and contents of a room, and non-linearities in your speakers and audio interface all contribute to how audio sounds within it. Ideally you want to minimise these effects so as to hear as true a signal as possible. It’s a good idea to apply corrective EQ after adding simple physical acoustic controls (e.g. absorber panels, diffusers, and bass traps, or just old duvets and cushions). Room EQ gets some criticism from audiophiles because it can be very hit & miss and can’t address bigger issues, but it can work very well if you listen from a single location in your room (e.g. in front of your desk).

To measure the room equalisation accurately, you need a microphone with a flat (or at least well-documented) frequency response; I use a t.bone MM-1 for this.

The t.bone MM-1 measurement microphone

The equalisation process works like this, starting from flat EQ (no alteration):

  • Output pink noise from the unit through the speakers
  • Analyse what it sounds like through the microphone, from your usual listening position
  • Alter the equalisation towards a flat response
  • Iterate over this process until the overall response is as flat as possible

This process is loud and quite unpleasant, so leave the room or stick on some closed headphones while it’s busy! It takes a minute or so, and you can hear the change in characteristic of the noise playing through the speakers, and see the changes in EQ on the screen of the unit during the process. After it’s done you can save the EQ curves, and switch the EQ in and out to A/B the config. The difference is pretty noticeable, particularly at the low end where most room-related acoustic problems tend to be; overall it’s like having a major speaker upgrade! One benefit I really notice is when switching between my corrected speakers and a decent pair of monitoring headphones – the audio really doesn’t change in character; there’s no significant tonal shift between the two.

Some people have noted problems with “digital noise” when using this unit, particularly at low volume levels. I suffered from this for a long time, but then realised what caused it and solved the problem. If you have a volume control that is before the processor, you will end up with a small signal going through the analogue to digital converters (ADCs), effectively throwing away much of their available resolution, and you’ll get a lot of quantization noise as a result. The best way to hear this deliberately is turn the input level down, and the output level up, then play something smooth and quiet. It will sound horrible, gritty and noisy, you can really “hear the bits”. This isn’t a problem unique to this unit – any ADC provided with insufficient signal will suffer the same problem.

You want to maximise the use of ADC resolution by giving it a full-range signal to convert. So if you have an audio interface before it, make sure it’s turned up full, and if you have any software level control (e.g. macOS system volume), make sure that’s turned up full too, so you’re always sending a full-volume signal. This way the converters will always use their full 24-bit resolution and the quantization noise will be so small you won’t hear it (it’s impossible to remove completely). However, you still want to control your output level. There are 2 ways to do this: alter the level on your monitors (which can be inconvenient as volume controls on active monitors are often on each speaker separately, and often hidden around the back) or use a passive volume control between the equaliser and the speakers. I use a Mackie Big Knob Passive for this.

A Mackie “Big Knob” passive volume controller.

Passive volume controls have no power supply (so no noise or extra cables), and can only turn a signal down, not up. It’s analogue, so there are no DACs or ADCs, just simple passive components. Ideally when it’s turned up full, it should be indistinguishable (acoustically speaking) from a length of cable.

Controlling level directly on the speakers (or on a separate amplifier if you have one) is possibly better than this approach, but usually less convenient. If you want to be able to run your speakers at full volume via the passive volume control, you need to have the monitors turned up full, and this often means you’ll get significant analogue noise (hiss) from the speakers when you’re listening at lower volume, however, that’s generally less unpleasant and not the problem we’re addressing here.

All of this attention to correct signal levels throughout an audio signal path is part of a wider concept known as gain staging, and occurs in many other places in audio recording, processing, mixing, mastering, etc.

It is possible to do all this processing in software using systems like REW or RoomEq, or even to go further and emulate other listening environments, famous studios or speakers, but I quite like having all this externalised and independent of software, and it also means that it can be applied to external inputs too, if you’re playing an instrument directly through a mixer. The “big knob” also provides a very convenient single control for output level, along with other features such as mute/dim and speaker and input switching.