As an amateur musician I’ve always tried to find better and more practical ways to create my own music, so I use to take a look (I mean to buy, try and keep or discard) at the different apps and gadgets available in the market to see how has technology improved the way the artists create their stuff nowadays, specially on music because recording a song 20 years ago required years of study, loads of money, a recording studio and of course, good taste.  Today you just need to mix some samples and you’re pretty done, but the good taste is still up to you.

So the challenge was to put in practice everything I got after research.  I always noticed how the apps try to sell the idea of converting your iPad into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) with a lot of features and samples to allow you creating a song by just dragging stuff with your fingers, however (and as expected), they still have the common compatibility issues that could add a little frustration on the way.  To avoid you having the same issues I’ll explain the Pros/cons of every app and gadget used.  Here we go:

Software

 Music Studio 2

 Pros: The best multitrack app available; a simple interface, great MIDI instruments and fully compatible with other apps.
 Cons: Understanding the effects logic is a little bit tricky; there’s no way to bounce tracks.

Sample Tank for iOS

 Pros: Outstanding MIDI instruments in high resolution
 Cons: Complex interface, poor usability and compatibility conflicts.  What a shame.

 iSequence

 Pros: Nice instruments and good resolution, looks promising to use it as a MIDI controller
 Cons: Too hard to understand; maybe it could work for electronic music and sampling I guess, I just discarded it.

 Meteor

 Pros: Well designed interface, the Wave and MIDI editors are just great.  Huge potential.
 Cons: Poor and low res MIDI instruments, mapping issues and there’s no way to work in background so it does not receive signals from other apps.  I discarded it as well.

Hardware

Sonuus i2m Musicport - It converts your guitar/bass/keyboard/voice into MIDI signals.  it’s great for solo tracks but it doesn’t support polyphony.  I liked it anyway.

iRig - It allows you to connect your guitar or bass to the iPhone/iPad with a full set of options and effects through Amplitube or StudioTrack.  To be honest the recording quality is not what I expected but it’s enough for home recording I guess.

iRig MIDI – This is a Core MIDI interface, which means that you can import/export MIDI with your iPhone/iPad.  I use it to connect my drumset to the iPad and record percussion or drum tracks (hopefully through SampleTank one of these days).

Instruments

There’s nothing much to say about it, I’m still enjoying the mid-range instruments so I used an Epiphone SG Custom, a Warwick’s Rock Bass and a Roland HD-1.
And finally, after three 2-hours composing sessions this is what i got:

Cheers!

Since I started working on Digital I got the habit of first taking a look at the current tools and methodologies that have been developed around the topics I’m discussing about to see if is there a better and faster way to resolve them; you have no idea about how these new ways of working could improve your projects performance and the most important fact, they keep you up to date.

The thing is that when you learn something new it’s common to stop doing it the old way (you know, from Frontpage to Dreamweaver, from Freehand to Illustrator, from PhotoPaint to Photoshop…), but it doesn’t mean it stopped being useful,  so I thought about how could you do more with these daily skills you get when working on this area.  I couldn’t ensure they will make you rich (it’s all up to you) but for sure if you keep them up there will be a reward someday.

Here they are:

Assets development

There are some details that add a big difference when developing projects and these are the assets. Sometimes they make the difference between a functional and a cool site, and that’s because these details give the user the sense of not finding “holes” in the experience (when they find nice pictures, nice iconography or a well chosen background music and sound effects.  If you have experience on this specific piece of the project you could offer your services as an Assets Developer.  Some useful tips to start your business are:

- A simple and well focused portfolio (on Flick, Deviantart or Behance) supported by periodic communications through Facebook and Twitter)

- An efficient files transfer system (Try Dropbox or WeTransfer).
- Your price table with detailed specifications and unit/pack prices.
- A Paypal account if you want to work remotely.

Batch processing

I remember a couple typical scenarios when developing Web projects where the clients give you these options: or we re-use the assets from their current site or they provide new assets.  In both cases I’ve noticed it’s  practically impossible to make the assets specs fit into the new templates so the assets need to be re-sized, retouched and re-built in some cases.  This is different from assets production because there’s no creativity involved in the process, it’s about applying some additional features to the current assets as required.  Some recommendations over here:

- Design a file naming system that lets you find your files intuitively.
- An efficient files transfer system (for this case it’s better to go with an FTP server).
- It takes less to process a batch and fix the issues than processing items one by one.
- You’ll need a Paypal account if you want to work remotely.

Remote learning

Learning languages is one o f the key skills in a world without geographical boundaries and global communication, so probably you will find a few people interested in learning your native language.  if you take a look at the Online learning websites sites you will notice that they use a very didactic set of materials to explain the basics for free and when you’re ready you purchase a membership to receive personalized lessons.  Based on this scheme you could prepare and sell your training sets about different topics depending on what you want to teach, the goal here is to prepare good topics for every session, otherwise it will become just a regular chat.  To start with this business you would need then:

- Lesson materials (PDFs explaining the terms and topics to be covered on the session)
- A Skype/Facetime/Messenger account with free streaming
- Try to make business with people you trust (your friends’ friends, verifiable contacts, etc).  It’s better if they are referred from someone you know closely.

By the way, now that I read this post again it sounds a little bit obvious, but sometimes things are too evident to make you ignore them.  For  sure there are other jobs you can do from home (I’m actually working on one project I’ll talk about later) but I wanted just to highlight these three because it’s a nice way to recycle that stuff you learned and probably does not make part of your current job functions but still are productive. Whatever, in case you need assistance just contact me.

Sometimes I feel surprised about how fast the technology affects the way we work, to a point where we need to re-define our current work statements and priorities in order to perform the same tasks with less time and people.  I found this interesting because you can find a lot of tools to improve your daily challenges nowadays but sometimes the need of avoiding risks makes you proceed just as usual (or “how the things are done around here” if you now what I mean).   Some common issues I’ve seen when working with projects planning and development are:

• Mismatches between Hours/resources assignment and planned schedule
• Functional inconsistencies between Wireframes and development releases
• Missing strings and “Lorem Ipsum” contents on QA stage
• Unplanned post-live fixes

Curiously I found the best example of resources and results optimization actually “out of duty”.  Last weekend I was dinning at a restaurant with my family listening to the guys playing on the background, and I noticed that all songs sounded like it was the complete set (drums, two guitars, bass) but there were only two guys on stage, so at the end of the show I got to talk with the singer and asked if it’s cool to play with pre-recorded tracks and stuff.  He replied that there were no additional tracks, they found a way to play all instruments (or at least the most relevant of each one) to take more control over the show and therefore improve the quality and of course, the profit (well, the fact of being an outstanding guitarist helped a lot).

So I thought “ooohhh right, if they have all the information they just evaluated their capabilities and tried to centralize all they needed before thinking on assigning tasks to more resources” and they got it.  So I started working on how to improve the projects flow by gathering and sorting the project’s information with the less possible resources without getting out of the assigned schedule and the keeping resources “healthy”, sort of speak:

1. Support on semantics to understand the project’s nature

Helping our client to understand what the project is from the functional perspective helps us define what the project should not become at the end; that “mind blown app to make people win awesome prizes” could be just an animated register form for a sweepstakes or that “cool web game to make kinds have fun on the page” could reach the same interaction complexity as Grand Theft Auto; the simpler is to describe what needs to be done, the more accurate the functional specs will be.

2. The User Experience starts from home

We actually deal with different types of users along the project development, most of all when we need approvals from our client to finish/start the project stages.  When creating documentation it’s important to first think how “friendly” the documentation is to allow our stakeholders approve what they are reading; they will reject your 500+  lines .xls file the same way they will reject your 250 pages fully commented Wireframes set just for the fact of being “too much to read”.

3. If you label it you can track it

It’s common to find missing “states” or strings when testing user flows due to these minor flows that appear when the user clicks on this new last-minute-GoLive-critical feature that our client requested a couple days before actually going Live.  The fact of having everything labeled with a flexible naming system could help us out detect and sketch the component behavior before adding it to the code, giving us the chance to at least anticipate where are the potential issues (let’s be honest, unplanned features will have less time to implement them but require more time to make them work accordingly).

4. Your project is as flexible as your visitors

Let’s take into account that we didn’t have metrics, SEO, tablets, smartphones and behavioral targeting a couple years ago, therefore your main (for not saying “the only”) customers you had in scope were mostly local.  Nowadays, since customers have the chance to buy, rate and comment what you sell from everywhere your contents should aim to support them  the same way.  Consider flexible contents management practices such as .xml based contents, multi-language contents moderation and legal disclaimers to make your visitors understand the game rules.

5. It’s up to you to reinvent the wheel

Seriously, after reading a little bit about CMS, object-oriented programming and re-usable contents you realize that a lot of functional components just need to be created once but flexible enough to be easily re-used in another project, optimizing the development times and assigning less time consuming tasks to resources (if everything was well programmed, adapting components should take less than creating them).

NOTE: All facts come from personal project development experiences.

One of the good things of traveling is that you meet cool people from everywhere and learn cool stuff about other places.  On a recent business trip to São Paulo I had the chance to work with three guys from Finland; their challenge is to manage the contents deployment and ensure the highest level of quality of the new version of the company’s website around the world.  On that journey Nik, the head of development told me that he has a photography website with a great collection of the pictures he has taken along the way.  So if you guys think that a cellphone camera and a couple filters on Instagram (sorry, hipsters) will do the magic you’re too wrong, this is the real way to take pictures:

Click here toVisit The Static Picture Company

Enjoy!

Recently I was talking with someone about those things you’d probably edit from your past if would had the chance, so I took a couple examples to explain it better:

The first one was about a speech that Steve Jobs gave at Harvard (maybe) when he said that he realized how some -apparently irrelevant- things he did in the past (a typography course) became crucial years later when he used them to innovate on the computers business through Macintosh (by adding font types to the text editor). Simply smart.

And the other one was about a movie called The Adjustments Bureau where (regardless of the love story) they used the term “Inflection points” to define these -apparently irrelevant- things that radically change the way the events happen for a person or in that case, for a couple. It’s something like this:

So I thought “oh well, sometimes it’s not just to make things happen”. In many cases those things will happen, not now, but if you are not there definitely won’t, so I found the importance of leaving a remarkable memory of you whenever is possible and rather than being cool or carrying a smile everywhere it’s about being you, the same guy that probably will meet that other person later to make things happen; I’m sure that if you’d had the chance to look back in your life you’d realize about the reasons why things are going on that way in your present  and what would you like to change them to make them run better; unfortunately the time is one way only, that’s why regret exists.

So first of all thanks for reading! if you’re watching this post it means you liked the site (or stumbled upon the Facebook re-post feature I installed), so I’ll talk about something that people used to post even before the “About me” section, I mean the Portfolio.

To be honest I wanted to talk about me first because there are some stuff you can’t specify well in your CV and I found it very important because there’s a thin line among the person, the employee and the professional dimensions you balance when working (and believe me, it seems it’s not necessary to get an A+ on all these areas to get a job) and I found interesting to get a clear definition of what I am selling by getting an accurate definition of who I am, What I do and What I love.

Anyway, let’s get back to the point.  Here are some projects I have worked in before plus some relevant details to give you a better understanding of my work:

Build your Scion - http://www.scion.com/buildyourscion/

When worked at Zemoga Inc. – 2010
as an Information Architect

It was cool because the UX director was out of office and I had to take the responsibility for the entire stage development (IA).  Some cool facts I got to improve after this project were:

• The stage timeline was planned for 6 weeks and I got to deliver all materials in 4 weeks
• Wireframes were designed to resolve specific areas during the stage, so they were client-based rather than process-based
• I remember a cool comment from the client after the first release when he said “great, we are making strides here”
• The key challenge was to help users personalize the Toyota Scion with a set of accessories in a very intuitive way and it was accomplished.

Porvenir - https://www.porvenir.com.co/

When worked at Zemoga Inc. – 2009
as an Information Architect

This was a good example of how a work team works.  At that time the IA lead prepared all user related documentation (such an interviews, research data and client expectations) and gave us all required information to resolve the IA stage.  After 3 weeks of hard work we got to create a complete customer service oriented website to help them learning and managing their pension funds, so the information become “in context” according to their products life cycle.  Some highlighted facts:

• There was sort of hand over stage within this project where the information had to be assigned to a new resource and we got to do a smooth transition without affecting the deadlines and keeping the stage goals consistent along the stage.
• There was and additional challenge about helping the client to understand how the information should behave on the digital environment; the client was very pleased to see how a simple and relevant experience could improve the consumers affinity to the brand.
• The team work was the key for the success of this stage.

Platforms production for Latinamerica (8 sites)

Currently working at Wunderman Colombia. – to date
as a Senior Digital Platforms Producer

As explained on the graph, the overall role as a Digital Producer is to facilitate and improve communications among all counterparts involved in order to provide the right contents and keep them up to date according to local/regional/global requirements.  There are some additional facts to consider:

• The client is located at different countries around the world as well as the production teams
• All contents are managed in three different languages
• Most of the team is non native English speaker
• All internal communications are in English
• Most of the final contents are in Spanish
• 90% of the team does not speak Spanish

So, since this is a challenge that requires time and expertise to keep everything in a good shape there are also some cool facts I have got to improve during this process:

• Centralization: I took the lead for all contents production from the UAT to the final published contents.
• Production management: Since the common fact around the contents was the language I got to manage them by language, so all contents are now created from three language packages instead of 8 countries.
• Communication: When you work with several counterparts at different time zones it’s hard to get them aligned, so I became the reference point for all communications and reduced the common long mail threads to resolve simple issues.
• Coaching: All the knowledge acquired is at the same time organized in such a way that other resources could give me a hand in case of needed by first having a couple quick training sessions.

And there are some other projects where I worked on but I think these are the most relevant ones; I’ll post another round later.

I just wanted to say thank you guys for the thumbs up and the cool feedback about the website, so please share this site if you liked it (I’ll give you a hand anytime you want too).   I’ll be posting all my pending projects during the next months so stay tune, some of them are intended to be collaborative so I hope to use this site to share your ideas as well.

Again, thank you

Update: I’ve also added my CVs (in english and portuguese, check the top menu).

At some point of my life when I thought about what to do with all the things I learned I set the goal to teaching one of these daays, or at least to have the chance to talk to a group of people to share information, experiences, etc.  Finally after several years I got the chance to do it at the same University where I studied and I felt glad to give the “return of investment” in terms of knowledge for everything I learned there.

So the challenge was to explain to students what have happened on the digital professional environment during the last years and how to start working on this area, because they were formed on the traditional advertising school and digital was considered as part of the media mix when creating a campaign.  There were other cases where I noticed that the creative approaches to the campaign’s objective used to move away because they understood the current digital media (like social networks and websites) as tools instead of platforms.  For me, the difference between these two terms is that a tool is something you use to perform a task and a platform is where you put these tools; once we got aligned with these definitions the results went much better and the costs specified on the media mix reduced dramatically.  So that’s the case where a little direction on the process was enough to get results beyond the expectations, even regardless of their short experience with real projects.

From my side I learned that good ideas come from unexpected sources and sometimes we judge them precisely by the source, not by their potential.

Here are some samples of the presentations (in spanish):

I have to say it, I really like the iPad.  Not for the fact of feeling cool or by its “simplicity”, I like it because it solved a couple of  issues I used to have when recording:  Hardware and Multitrack recording.

First let’s talk about hardware.  When using MIDI you probably stumbled upon latency, which means for the time required to process a package of data by the hardware; this is critical when you record because regular hardware normally doesn’t process this type of data as required so you get some sort of delay between the stuff you play and the stuff you record, therefore it’s very hard to record for instance a MIDI track while playing the base track simultaneously.

The iPad got to solve this out in a smart way by providing a strong hardware to cover this spot and of course a native app to prove it.  Garageband for iPad, apart from all the fancy features, the fun interface and everything you’ve you already heard allows you to record several MIDI instruments with more than acceptable quality in terms of fidelity and expression plus all the composing aids to make a song in minutes.

However, in spite of being cool the MIDI will never beat what you play on a real instrument so I started looking for something to also record and mix stuff from a real bass or a guitar, something like this:

* Recommended to 9gag some for a complete understanding of this diagram.

So I found that the guys from IK Multimedia noticed the huge potential of the iPad as a platform and developed a series of accessories to let you record anything you want, so you just need to plug your guitar to the accessory then plug it to the iPad and there you go.  Couldn’t be simpler.

And now that you have the basics let me share what I consider the top music production apps for your iPad (in any order):

1. Garageband – Make your own music in minutes with a cool set of instruments to play with.

2. Thumb Jam – It includes wind instruments like Saxophone, Flute and Trombone with outstanding response and expression.

 3. Amplitube – Once I got this app I sold my Digitech RP-90.

4. DAW Multitrack – An intuitive multitrack interface.

Also look for  iRig and iRig MIDI to connect your musical instruments to the iPad.  Good recording!

In spite of getting more complex and hard to handle sometimes, human relationships still follow the basics of nature.

Recently I had the opportunity to give my first workshop at the University to a group of students that will start their internship this year; one of the challenges was to show them how get into the digital business considering their background (marketing and advertising) because their projection around their profiles at that time was very limited, so I felt glad when commented about working on areas like social media or Information Architecture at the end of the workshop.

During the sessions I explained that interaction could be quickly understood as the relationship between the user and the object through an interface and the influence of other internal/external factors that could affect this interaction process to later define the whole thing as an experience.  That thought kept me thinking about how this statement could be applied in daily situations because sometimes you start a conversation with someone with a specific purpose but you don’t always get the expected result, right?  probably you didn’t use your best cards or maybe the question was not clearly defined, so neither the answer .  The thing is that at some point the objective fails because the trade goal faded out while arguments were exposed during the conversation and there is when you start hearing conclusions like “I was about to say it but I couldn’t find the right moment” or “close enough, maybe next time”.   You can quickly check if have this happened to you when you keep thinking about the “ideal conversation” you should have had with the person you wanted to talk to but never happened in the real life.

So I wanted to explain it in a very didactic way to also help me organize my ideas in a better way the next time I need to find the essential result of any conversation:  Answers.

As you noticed the objective for user A failed due to several factors around the conversation that made impossible to achieve it; however the objective for user B seemed to be clear since the beginning.  If we would represent their objectives as coins, the coin for user A could be support and for B could be maybe concentration; since support means for providing additional effort  to an additional task and focus is about driving all the effort to a specific task, this transaction was not naturally possible.   Well, probably this conversation would be completely different if it would happen 5 minutes later but that’s another story.

To summarize, human interactions work pretty much like those natural relationships you learned in school (mutualism, predation, parasitism, etc.) where two individuals trade something to get something else; the success of this process depends on the way the obtained result matches with the intended objective, so if is not clear since the beginning, the result rather than good or bad will be always unexpected.