hodnick.com

sledding weekend

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:47:32 -0600

sledding weekend

Craziness at the Hodnick household after dinner.

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:16:27 -0600

Craziness at the Hodnick household after dinner.

New Music: Hostile Robot Takeover

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:10:29 -0600

I present to you:

Hostile Robot Takeover, by The Skill Druids

Hostile Robot Takeover is a musical suite written, performed, recorded, and produced by myself under the Skill Druids moniker (more info on that name can be found here). These songs are permanently located out on HodsAudio, but you can just download them directly here below (don’t miss the lyrics/story a little farther below).

These songs are also available here on HodsAudio.net: http://hodsaudio.net/Album/Details/17

Credits

Directly or indirectly, small or large, in some way, shape, or form, this album has been influenced by (in no particular order): me, robots, Keelhaul, Helmet, 311, Melvins, Dr. Richard Lindeke, Lee Sackett, Jason Bock, Neil Iversen, Jake Good, Steve Digre, Nicole Hodnick, Pantera, and Static-X. Yes, I said Pantera. I’m not going to bother explaining, but trust me, there are some specific Pantera influences on Escape.

If it weren’t for Jackie and Greg Gerten, I probably never would have even started this project.

The Plot

You can view the full lyrics here

The lyrics speak for themselves, but here is a more descriptive summary. The story is told in the first person, but I really don’t picture myself when listening to these songs. Anyway, first I’m abducted by robots from my home. I’m taken to some sort of facility where I, along with other human captives, are placed in a crude prison with blue force field walls. Some humans try to overcome the force fields and become injured. In the meantime, two other robots consider the possibility that the humans might rise up and resist their captivity. We secretly talk to each other and plan a resistance. We find our chance to fight and bring it to the robots. We do considerable damage and use the chance to attempt escape. We fight our way to the doors through a robot defense, but ultimately we fail. Meanwhile, two robots consider the damage done and reveal that they have enslaved the humans. We concede that we lost our opportunity to escape and that we must now obey and yield to our robot masters.

Mike’s Take on All This

By far this was one of the most enjoyable solo musical projects I’ve worked on in a long, long time. I think part of it was because four out of the five main tracks have been incubating for some time and I was able to focus just on recording and writing lyrics rather than arranging the music. Tunes like Abducted and Captives have been in the works since about 2002. Wow that’s eight years ago. Tunes like Escape started around 2003 and Fight was probably around 2005. Fight actually appears in a different form on the Skill Druids’ “The Drow”. Slaves Forever was the only “new” song I composed for this collection.

Next, I plan on taking the tracks from this release and slicing them up and remixing them into some ridiculously complex breakcore. Not sure how that is going to go…

Hope you enjoy the music!

I secretly dance while my code compiles

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:51:53 -0600

Halo 3 FlagDrag/BombDrag

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:38:36 -0600

Halo 3 is over two years old, but it’s still a fun game. Fun enough that each Monday night there is a small group of us who get together and play it.

A staple of our Monday evenings has become drag racing:

We’ve modified this track and have been playing it for months, but now the excitement is starting to wear off. I think we all love the insanity the drag race map brings to the table, but we’re getting a little bored with it.

I decided to create a similar variant that combines the drag racing insanity with Assault/Capture the Flag. Here are some screen shots and descriptions:

Overhead view of the map. Notice the attacker starting point on the left and the defending base on the right:

Attacking team starting point:

A few goodies along the way for the attackers to pick up:

At the end of the strip, the launch point we’ve all come to know and love:

Attackers have an alternate side route. Vehicles can only leave from the base on these routes - not enter:

Defenders have a chain gun available to spray bullets on attackers as they launch:

Better view of the defensive base:

A big, tall back wall is provided to try and keep the lightweight Mongoose ATV’s from flying out. I’d say it’s about a 50/50 chance they will stay in bounds! During play-testing, I found that the ATV’s just fly super far into the air with the exploding fusion coil plus grav lifts at the launch point. I kind of like the randomness of not knowing if you’ll make it as an attacker. The bigger Warthogs make it in without risk almost every time.

Secret route to rocket launcher. Approximately equi-distant between offense/defense:

Hopefully we’ll play this on the coming Monday. After some play testing with the group - I’ll try and remember to make this map available for download.

WaveEdit - a Silverlight wave form editor

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:10:00 -0600

Introducing WaveEdit - a Silverlight gadget you can use to craft your own sound wave form:

The purpose of this app is purely just to have fun. So, enjoy!

OFF THE AIR

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:35:00 -0600

I introduce Off The Air - a Silverlight audio gadget. Download the source code.

I intended this to be an entry in the MIX10k challenge until I learned I could only submit one entry.

Enjoy!

Video

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:24:29 -0600

The Home Studio is Officially Complete

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:21:23 -0600

This moment has been about eight years in the making. Eight years ago we moved into a new house with an unfinished basement:

Goal number one was always to “finish” this space and create a small music studio. This goal was achieved within the last year or two. However, a secondary goal was to replace my custom-built studio computer (used for recording and music production) with a much better-performing machine.

The old computer (watch the video to hear how unbearably loud it ran - not good for a studio):

The old computer was a Pentium 3 running at 733 Mhz with about 700 MB (or so) of RAM. When I built it, I also purchased Cakewalk’s Sonar (version 1) recording software. Back then in the year 2000 (or so), I could record one stereo track of drums, a few guitar tracks, a bass track, and a few vocal tracks and mix them down with a few effects running and the computer could get by.

Eventually I started doing dynamics processing on each track (EQ and compression) and wanted to record more tracks for my drums. The old computer just became obsolete. I eventually purchased a Yamaha AW16G hard disk recorder:

This recorder allowed me to perform dedicated dynamics processing on each track and also allowed me to record up to eight simultaneous tracks of drums. This little machine is extremely useful, but by today’s digital audio workstation standards on a computer it has a clumsy user interface (it basically lacks a keyboard, mouse, and display).

Thus, I always wanted to get a replacement studio computer that would have enough horsepower to perform a good amount of effects processing on a large number of tracks. I’ll still utilize the AW16G for recording in some circumstances, but not for mixing or final production.

Now the new studio is complete with a new Dell (under the table on the left):

The new Dell has plenty of horsepower with a Pentium Core 2 Duo Quad.

I’m still running the first version of Sonar, believe it or not. It’s almost a 10-year old product. Maybe someday I’ll actually use some non-ancient software!

Anyway - this new Dell purchase pretty much finishes up the original studio plans. Hopefully I’ll crank out my next project soon and you can hear the results!

Photo

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:17:40 -0600

TwitterSynth - MIX10k coding challenge entry

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:27:00 -0600

My entry for the 2010 MIX 10k coding challenge has been posted:

Twitter Synth - http://mix10k.visitmix.com/Entry/Details/153

Please check it out and give it a nice vote!

The purpose of the app is to play Twitter search results as music. There is a very complex algorithm used to produce the notes - trust me! :)

Silverlight on Tumblr

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:01:49 -0600

Dear Tumblr, please allow me to embed Silverlight objects in my posts.

Thanks.

-Mike

Working on a Silverlight wave form editor

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:42:16 -0600

Just a quick screenie to show what I’m working on: a wave form editor in Silverlight. The goal is to allow someone to quickly “draw” a wave form and then immediately listen to it.

End of Year Update

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:20:37 -0600

I’m halfway through my time off from work and I haven’t done a single thing I planned on when the break started. Oh well - such is the life of a person with too many hobbies.

We were up in Duluth, MN for the Christmas holiday. They got 26 inches of snow on Dec. 24th and 25th. We stayed at my parents’ place, and my dad’s snowblower broke while we were there. My dad and I got our fill of shoveling.

I’m working on two apps to submit for the MIX10 10k Coding Challenge. One is “Twitter Synth” - a Silverlight app that plays Twitter search results as music, and “Off the Air”, which is kind of like a scaled down version of kSynth.Drone with a visual twist. Most of the work for these was done before the break but I’ve put a few final touches on each one. I plan on releasing both of these apps very soon.

I’m nearing the completion of a five-song musical saga (in the Rock genre, if I had to peg it) about a hostile takeover by robots. Trust me, it’s very dramatic. I’ll post the lyrics later when the work is done. All I have left is to record the vocals for the five songs. I wanted to get the vocals done during my break from work but that hasn’t happened. These songs will be released on HodsAudio.net and I won’t attempt to burn or press any of these songs to physical media like I have in the past. After this project is done, I’m hoping to make some breakcore-style remixes from the original tracks.

Nikki and I were fortunate to receive a Rock Band 2 drum kit as a Christmas gift. Rock Band 2 is kind of an old game but it’s still a fun game to us. Before we just played on a couple of guitar controllers, but now we have the new drum kit to keep it interesting. I’ve been busy trying to get 100% of the notes on Metallica’s “Battery” on Expert. I’m at 97% so far :) Unfortunately, the Rock Band game’s “looseness” on note accuracy doesn’t translate well to real drumset playing.

So for 2010…. I have no plans whatsoever other than a family vacation in the spring. I’ll keep making music and writing code and hope to keep traveling and do some camping.

Here’s to a great 2010!

Released: kSynth.Drone

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:40:00 -0600

Introducing kSynth.Drone - a digital audio synthesizer gadget written in C# for Silverlight 3.

Try it out: http://kindohm.com/kSynth.Drone. I’ve also included a help page.

kSynth.Drone is a gadget and is not meant to be a tool used to make music. It’s meant to be a fun tool to craft interesting sounds using well-known building blocks of digital audio synthesis, such as oscillators, amplitude and frequency modulators, and dynamic envelopes.

This is the third release in the kSynth “series”. If you haven’t seen the previous apps, they include the original kSynth and kSynth.b. Both of those apps are more musical in nature than kSynth.Drone.

The inspiration for this app came from the desire to create any possible sound from basic digital audio synthesis components and to create a flexible user interface that wouldn’t look like a synthesizer deck or a bunch of knobs.

This app also utilizes a fluent Silverlight audio synthesis API behind the scenes. I haven’t yet released this API yet for anyone else to use and hope to in the very near future. I’d love to see other developers utilize the API to create interesting audio synthesis apps in Silverlight.

Hope you enjoy!

Finishing the Skill Druids' Robot Saga

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:08:57 -0600

I hope to finish the lyrics tonight for my next Skill Druids release. It’s five songs about being abducted and held against your (my?) will by robots. Here is a snippet from the “battle” portion of the story:

Your end will be a singularity.
Sit back and watch as I circuit-bend your PLC.

Singularity: http://www.learnaboutrobots.com/glossary.htm
PLC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller

I am such a nerd.

kSynth.Canvas Screen Preview

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:34:47 -0600

I’m nearing another kSynth release named kSynth.Canvas. This app focuses on designing your own digitally synthesized sound through multiple waveform oscillators, frequency modulators, amplitude modulators, and dynamic (attack/sustain/release) envelopes.

The user interface emphasizes that each component in the software could be treated like a physical component that you would plug in to another component. The core of the UI is the concept of a “channel”, which most simply consists of an oscillator (sine/saw/square/triangle wave generator), panner (right-left), and volume control. You can add as many channels as you want to the canvas and they all get mixed to the final left/right channels.

Beyond the basic oscillator/panner/volume, each oscillator has a frequency modulator and an amplitude modulator. The frequency and amplitude modulators both have a dynamic envelope control that allow you to specify the attack, sustain, and release parameters of the modulation. The oscillator itself also has a dynamic envelope that allows you to create soft sounds that fade in and out or abrupt, sharp, staccato sounds.

Currently, I’m working on a sequencer that will allow you to play a simple melodic pattern with the sound you’ve created. I’d also like to add in a delay effect (which I’ve already implemented in previous versions of kSynth), pitch shift (also already implemented), and master volume.

Stay tuned.

"The Drow" Demos

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:45:26 -0600

I’ve released the demo audio from the time when I was writing the music for “The Drow”. You can get the demo tracks here:

http://hodsaudio.net/Album/Details/16

If you like The Drow, then I think you’ll like these demo tracks as they reveal all kinds of mistakes and incomplete aspects of the songs. One song in particular is a completely different version than the final one: Medium || Way.

Hope you enjoy.

This is a little ditty I created with kSynth.b. kSynth.b is a...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:32:00 -0600

This is a little ditty I created with kSynth.b. kSynth.b is a digital audio synthesiser I developed a while back that you can use in your web browser with Silverlight. This particular piece is complete with phasing stereo sawtooth synths and drum loops.

There is some silence at the beginning of the audio - please be patient :)

You can also download the mp3 here: http://kindohm.com/files/kSynth.b.demo.mp3

Enjoy.

http://snowpocalypse.com

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:19:50 -0600

http://snowpocalypse.com