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Ableton teaches synthesizer basics from the comfort of a browser
From creating grungy music with drone motors to perfecting DIY digital setups and recreating 60-year-old music machines, there are plenty of cool things you can do with synthesizers. But synths can be hard to understand, and if you're unfamiliar with them, you might feel a little left out. Ableton wants to change that. The company's new Learning Synths interactive website offers step-by-step synthesizer lessons, followed by a "playground," where you can put your new skills to the test.
Apple’s free ‘Everyone Can Create’ curriculum is available on Apple Books
In March, Apple unveiled its Everyone Can Create curriculum, a program aimed at helping educators integrate drawing, music, video and photo skills into their lessons and assignments. Now, the company has made that curriculum available for free through Apple Books. The program includes four guides, with projects that help students progressively build skills in a creative medium, as well as a teacher guide that comes with 300 lesson ideas.
Fender's music instruction app now includes bass lessons
Fender has added bass lessons to its Fender Play platform, providing users with bite-sized exercises, a number of instructors to learn from and a slew of skills to master. Those working on developing their bass-playing abilities will have access to a concept glossary, can work from multiple camera angles including close-up finger placement shots and over-the-shoulder views, track their progress and choose which style they prefer -- like funk, rock, R&B, blues or pop.
GarageBand lessons are now free for aspiring musicians
GarageBand has long been a useful tool to record music, podcasts and more. Even better, the app is free to download and use on your Mac or iOS devices, making it easy to try. Recent updates have brought enhancements like a portal for free sound packs and a better drum sequencer (on mobile), along with Touch Bar support and realistic-sounding drummers on the desktop. Now, Apple is upgrading its music creation suite yet again, offering it's previously $5 artist piano and guitar lessons for free, along with more additions to its drummers, loops and sound effects.
Fender Play doesn't judge -- it just teaches you guitar
If you ask Ethan Kaplan, chief product officer of digital at Fender, about the death of the electric guitar, he gets a bit incredulous. And it's easy to understand why. As he's quick to point out, "for some reason, there's still a guitar on every stage." But while he's adamant his company and the industry is perfectly healthy, it's clear some of the cultural cachet of the guitar has dried up. Fender is hoping to turn the tides.
Kevin Spacey will teach you how to act for $90
Masterclass is an online education service with a twist: all of the teachers are household names in their chosen subject. The website launched with an acting track that included five hours of video coaching from Hollywood royalty, Dustin Hoffman. Now, however, the company has decided to add another two-time Oscar winner to its stable after signing a deal with Kevin Spacey. He'll be offering five hours of pre-recorded clips across 29 lessons as he takes a group of students through his process, plus guidance from Masterclass' slightly less famous online coaches.
The Daily Grind: What real-world lessons have you learned from MMOs?
Back in January, a Lifehacker op-ed chronicled six things the writer had learned from playing World of Warcraft -- useful, real-world things, not just how to spec out a frost Mage. For example, he learned that things you like can feel like a grind, and he learned how to quit something wonderful with grace. I've learned even more practical things than that from my years in MMOs. I've learned leadership skills, honed math and spreadsheet skills, and worked on mastering the art of patience -- OK, so I'm still working on that one. I've also watched ESL guildies perfect their language and writing skills and seen still others parlay this hobby of ours into careers in gaming and coding and journalism. What about you? What real-world lessons or skills have you learned thanks to MMOs? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Mog Log: FFXIV lessons from Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XIV is in the final push to launch now, with phase 4 right around the corner and early access shortly after that. This is good news for me, since it means I can get back to actually playing the game that I write about every week after nearly a year. And, you know, the game is pretty awesome, so that's a bright point as well. It also means that the future isn't what it used to be. The relaunch has been The Future for a very long time, but now the relaunch is The Almost Right This Second, and The Future consists of patches and expansions and new classes and the like. All good things, all welcome, and all things that could take a few lessons from Final Fantasy XI. I've said before that Final Fantasy XIV was designed to fix some problems from Final Fantasy XI that it never was going to have, but that's not what I'm talking about. Instead of talking about preventing players from leveling consistently or hunting the possibility of RMT with McCarthy-level vigilance, let's look at some simple lessons to internalize in the future.
Ghostcrawler on the lessons learned in Mists
Long-term WoW Insider readers will likely remember the post-Cataclysm dissection where the developers discussed the mistakes they had made and how they planned to rectify them for future expansions. Well, a twitter user has asked Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street the same question, for Mists of Pandaria, and Ghostcrawler had the following to say in reply: @stephenreis123 Hmm. I'd say two things off the top of my head. 1) We wanted to offer options but didn't offer *enough* options (e.g. GL). - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) April 24, 2013 @stephenreis123 2) As many difficulty levels as we offered, it wasn't enough. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) April 24, 2013 @stephenreis123 I said 2, but also we didn't do a good job of providing direction at L90. Also wish we had added some dungeons in maybe 5.3. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) April 24, 2013 Firstly, one of the great things about Ghostcrawler is how readily he owns up to the team's mistakes here. There's no shame in getting things wrong, but maintaining that you're infallible is both irritating and generally untrue.
360iDev: Lessons learned from four years on the App Store
Andreas Linde is the developer of an app called WorldView+, which is designed to let you view webcams from around the world on your iOS device (we took a look at the app here). He released the app on Apple's App Store over four years ago now, and this week at 360iDev in Denver, he went through some lessons that he'd picked up working on Apple's platform. A lot of what Linde has learned echo what we've heard before from other developers: Polish and stability are extremely important when you're creating iPhone apps, because if a customer can't use the app for what it's designed for, it's just not going to be successful. Linde talked about how, when his app first arrived on the App Store, it was crashing about every one in 50 times. But as he did more and more work on it, the app now crashes only ever 0.01 percent of sessions, and that's a much better figure. One of his big recommendations was that developers look very, very closely at every single one of Apple's apps, both the released public apps from Cupertino (to see the design patterns and UI elements used), and the sample code included in Xcode's documentation, to learn just how it's all done. He also said that every developer out there should get a designer to work with, because "it really, really, really matters. Take your time, plan it early and find the right guy," said Linde. Linde also gave a few pointers on how to handle customer support -- he suggested to developers that "the customer was not always right." Obviously, developers shouldn't completely avoid customer requests, but Linde says that users don't always know what they want, and even when they send requests to a developer for a certain app feature or fix, it may not exactly be the one they'll actually use. Linde also suggested that developers do their best to keep support requests and communication out of iTunes reviews, where it often ends up if not otherwise handled by developers. Early on in WorldView+'s life, Linde created an option for in-app support, and he says that helped a lot in terms of getting support requests to him through the right channels. Linde also asked customers to rate his app directly, and he saw ratings go up substantially when he did that. "You can get better ratings just by asking," he told the crowd. Finally, Linde said he's still learning. He has gotten some press on the app, and that exposure has encouraged a few bumps in sales, but even he admitted that he's not sure how or why that coverage came about. So even as an experienced developer, says Linde, he's got quite a bit to still learn about how the App Store works. Linde's experience seems typical of a lot of developers out there -- there are certainly plenty of great lessons to have picked up from the App Store over its lifetime, and things are still changing so much that there's also lots left to learn.
Ryan Shwayder revives MMO lessons series
Former 38 Studios designer Ryan Shwayder is using his time off to work on his personal blog and share his perspective as a developer. He's revived a series from years ago called MMO Lessons, adding the 37th and 38th entries over the past two days. His 37th lesson is to create memorable moments. "It is impossible to make every adventure in your game memorable, exciting, and unique," Shwayder writes. "But you can create incredible moments for your players and purposefully distribute them throughout the experience so players experience highs as they play the game." Shwayder also defends kill quests but says that they usually need context or a twist to keep them fresh and fun: "Kill quests get a bad rap, but there's nothing inherently wrong with them."
4 lessons from 5 years of Officers' Quarters
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. Amazingly enough, exactly five years ago today -- at 11:15 a.m. on May 7, 2007 -- the very first Officers' Quarters went live on WoW Insider. It was so long ago that I actually used Thottbot links. Since then, yours truly has composed more than 250 OQs. At about 1,000 words per column, I've written enough words on the topic of guild leadership to fill up a large fantasy novel. (Of course, I've also written an actual book on the topic.) For this column, I briefly thought about pulling out the best and worst of OQ to share my personal favorites (and my shame) from the past five years. I decided against it. Maybe some day I'll do that -- maybe right before I hang up my WoW Insider columnist sash -- but that day is not today. Rather, I thought I'd do something more personal. OQ has always been about learning how to do a better job as an officer and a guild leader, both for your members and yourself. During the past five years, I've done my best to give advice on exactly that. However, I've never claimed to have it all figured out. I've also learned a lot, too. On this anniversary, I'd like to share four things that I've learned over the past five years. (Five would have been better, but I'm long-winded.)
360iDev: Lessons from the design of Postage
Developer Chris Parrish hosted a talk this week here at 360iDev in Denver looking back on the development of Postage, RogueSheep's Apple Design Award-winning virtual postcard designer and sharing app for the iPhone. He walked the developers in the crowd through a few of the lessons he and his team learned during development and a few of the principles they stuck by as they built the app. Parrish said the first principle RogueSheep stuck to was focus. "Cut, cut, and cut some more" was the slide up on the screen. Parrish said that when they set out to make what's basically an image-editing app, there were a lot of things they could have done, like including lots of tools and items to edit images in intricate ways and help users line them up just right. But it turned out that none of that fit the app they were trying to make. Instead, RogueSheep decided to boil the experience down so the user could go from image to postcard to pressing send in just 60 seconds. Parrish called it "putting the user on rails" -- not limiting options, but guiding and rolling users along so the process is as quick and easy as possible. Instead of the desktop model (which is what the team might have done if it really wanted to create that full tool-based experience), the focus of the app became the postcard itself. Parrish said the team worked to make sure that at every step in the process the postcard was always in view and clearly being built. Instead of moving from screen to screen, the interface slides around the virtual postcard, zooming in and focusing on whatever part of the area the user is working on. Even sending the postcard brings up an envelope instead of going off to some separate email screen, so users are always acutely aware of what they're doing in the app and why. That email sending feature led to one of the biggest compromises the designers had to make with the application. When it was first introduced, they had to cook up their own solution to send an email with the image directly from the app, a solution which came with its own pros and cons. They were able to use a custom HTML form for the email, but some users -- and their spam filters -- wondered about the email address the message apparently originated from. After the app was released, Apple allowed apps to send email through the OS, and the Postage team eventually decided to create their only preference option: Letting the user decide whether or not to use the custom emailer or the official one. Even that preference was hidden, however. Old users of the app just kept the old feature, while new users got offered the choice. The team wanted to make things as seamless as possible. Parrish said that devs dealing with whether an option should be offered or not should make the best decision they think possible; 80 percent of users will be grateful, even if the other 20 percent would rather have made the other choice. Parrish also said that whenever you make an app, it's always worth it to go the extra mile on the interface, using custom animations and doing it "right" whenever possible. The team worked for a long time on the "bounce" that the postcard first does when it drops into view, making sure it felt correct and natural. The buttons on the app were sized so they clipped off of the screen in order to inform the user that the button bars were actually scrollable. Parrish encouraged developers to make it look good, blending animations together and making them move in a natural and real way rather than just snapping into place because it's easier to code. That said, Parrish also recommended making use of Apple's UI classes as much as possible. All of Postage's interface buttons are subclasses of the official UI elements, though they're styled and customized to fit in with the rest of the design. Parrish said that while it's worth working on making things look right, it's not worth writing up your own options only to have them break when Apple changes the system. Use Apple's elements and work hard on the code, said Parrish, but then design it so it works for you and your users. Parrish's insight was really excellent, and it was great getting a look behind the scenes on Postage's award-winning design.
Street Fighter pros offering paid lessons over Xbox Live and PSN
Let's face it: Nobody ever reached a professional level of Street Fighter superiority without the tutelage of their forefathers. Except ... well, except for the first people who were good at the game. Regardless, you can (probably) reach the upper echelon of Super Street Fighter IV players by signing up for a few lessons being offered by pros such as Justin Wong and Ryan "Gootecks" Gutierrez. Of course, these lessons come at a price ranging from $40 to $50 for one hour of help, and are delivered over Xbox Live and PSN. If those prices sound reasonable, you can find more info how to sign up on EventHubs. Or, you could just give us $50, and we'll tell you to Hadouken over and over again until the fight is over. You can't go wrong with the Just Keep Hadoukening™ strategy!
Updating doesn't help your iPhone app, but price drops do
Here are two different insights from Pocket Gamer about how developers can grow the profile of their iPhone apps. The first comes to us from the wisdom of Peggle, that game that I just can't stop playing. Apparently, they've coined the term "Peggling," which means lowering the price of your app, and seeing a huge benefit from it. Whenever a game drops its price down to 99 cents, much as Peggle did soon after release, it sees a significant bump in the charts. I'm sure there are many other factors at play here -- Peggle was a great game, so you can't sell more of a crappy game just by selling it for cheaper, and I saw a lot of Twitter and blog attention when the price dropped, so it pays to have people watching the price in the first place. But under the right circumstances, dropping the price can do a lot for a game that's already selling pretty well.But an update, apparently, won't. That's what the makers of Zen Bound told Pocket Gamer -- they say that when they released an update with new levels and new features, it didn't make a difference in their sale numbers at all. Games like Pocket God have made a reputation for themselves by providing regular and solid updates, and certainly it seems like those updates have at least spurred sales, if not made them blow up, but the Zen Bound guys say that singular updates on major products probably won't kick sales into gear.Interesting. We're at least a few generations into App Store sales at this point, and we're started to see trends and consumer behavior in better relief; developers are getting better and better ideas every day about how to price and service their apps and customers.
Sting, Sarah McLachlan are hiding in your Garage(band)
Apple has added new "Learn to Play" lessons to the latest version of GarageBand, including two lessons by Sting and the first one by Sarah McLachlan. Gordon Sumner (a.k.a. Sting, so named by his friends when he wore a shirt with black and yellow stripes) will teach you how to play "Message in a Bottle" and "Fragile" (in my humble opinion, one of the lesser-known but more amazing Sting songs), and Sarah McLachlan, who really likes ice cream, will teach you how to play her "Angel." I miss Sarah McLachlan -- it's hard to believe we had someone that was even more bland than Norah Jones.But excuse my musical snobbery -- all three lessons are now available in the GarageBand Lesson Store for the low low price of $4.99. And lest you think I am anti-McLachlan in any way, think again: I too owned a copy of Surfacing. If you wanted to hang out with girls in my high school, you pretty much had to have a copy around at any given time. That, and Crash. Ah, how young we were.
Todd Howard's 'greatest' lessons from Fallout 3
While on some futile quest to learn more about the inevitable Fallout 4, MTV Multiplayer asked Bethesda's Todd Howard what lessons he learned from the current installment. His answer: "Greatest lesson? Don't let the game end, and don't have a level cap."We're going to have to agree with Howard on both counts. Although it appears PS3 owners won't be getting a reprieve from the game's brick wall ending, PC and X360 owners have the third DLC pack, Broken Steel, arriving in March. The pack allows players to continue past the "end" and raises the level cap to 30. We'd tell Bethesda not to make the same mistake again, but the company is going to make $10 off every Fallout 3 player that cares enough to continue. P.T. Barnum would be proud.
Officers' Quarters: Four lessons from the inauguration
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.I have mostly steered clear of politics in this column. Very early on, in the second or third column I wrote for WoW Insider, I made an offhand joke about the current administration that set off a firestorm of argument in the comments section. It really had nothing to do with the column at all, so I found the situation extremely unproductive. I decided I'd never do that again.But I was there in D.C. last Tuesday and I wanted to share some of my observations about how to handle a transfer of power. It's a situation that can come up from time to time in a guild when a long-time leader has to step down for personal reasons -- or in democratic guilds when a leader is voted out. Let's talk about how Bush and Obama handled everything and what we can learn from their example.
Zon: the MMO that teaches you to speak Chinese
A team of developers supported by Michigan State University and the Office of the Chinese Language Council International have spent the past few years piecing together Zon -- a browser-based virtual world wherein users can learn the Mandarin Chinese language. The game is currently in its open beta phase; you can sign up to play right now.Users create an avatar and then find themselves in a representation of Beijing International Airport. From there, they may interact with NPCs and other world objects to learn more about Chinese language and culture, as well as communicate with other players to practice their language skills. As they progress through the system, they move up in rank from Tourist to Resident, and finally to Citizen -- at which point they may create their own content for the world.We learned of Zon through the blog of Areae president Raph Koster, who had an interesting anecdote to add. During his stint at SOE, the company worked with college campuses to use EverQuest II for total immersion language education. So this is not a new idea -- just a really cool one!
Top 5 real life lessons we've learned from MMOs
Game designer Steve Danuser, AKA Moorgard, recently posted a musing on his blog where he speculated on the greatest lessons he's learned in all his time playing World of Warcraft. After all, after investing dozens, if not hundreds, of real days into the game, surely he had to have learned something from the experience that was applicable to real life? For Steve, the lesson was, if they look different than you, and speak differently than you, kill them before they get the chance to kill you. While we know hope Steve is kidding, it did get the old gears turning.We've taken up Steve's line of discussion and mulled it over a little bit. What follows is our (mostly) sincere look at the top 5 real life lessons that we've learned from MMOs.
