The AlphaNumerizer

Here's another Flash application for young kids - The AlphaNumerizer. I tried to find a simple tool for my son Nico. He's a year and a half old and he loves letters and numbers - seeing them and hearing them pronounced makes him very happy (in fact, he's playing with my wife's alphabet cookie cutters as I write this).

Every letter/number game I found online was more complex than what I was looking for - most commercial educational sites clutter the screen with lots of links to additional content and branding elements, and many of their tools and games have animations and other images that supplement each letter as it's typed. That's fine (and probably better suited to kids older than Nico), but I didn't want those kinds of visual distractions - I tried a couple with Nico and I actually had to point to show him where the letters were on the screen.

So I built The AlphaNumerizer. It was a very quick Flash build - about four hours of work total. The audio was recorded on my new Blue Mikey external microphone for the iPhone. It's an excellent quality mic - you can hear the clarity on the samples. I gave the audio very little compression when exporting from Flash - so it's a fairly large file for such a simple application (about 500k ) but it's worth it for me in terms of the quality.

I used typical color scheme, though a bit desaturated - I don't like the kind of overblown colors that you usually find in websites and games for kids. I went with VAG Rounded for the typeface - it really represents the letters and numbers in a nice, traditional typographic style but with rounded ends, which keeps things looking kid-friendly. We wouldn't want kids to get hurt on sharp-cornered letters or - heaven forbid - serifs.

Nico likes when I use the aggressive, excited voice I wound up using for the AlphaNumerizer - we have foam letters that he plays with in the bathtub, and the way I pronounce those letters when I hold them up for him is the same way I voiced them in this application. I exaggerated the pronunciations while still keeping them as clear as possible.

I put the featured letter on a colored card and animated it so it would fly in quickly, slowing to a gentle stop. I also added a timer so it would fade out after a few seconds, essentially clearing the slate.

After I got the basic functionality working (I spent an hour wondering why only certain keys worked while I was testing in Flash before I found out the Flash test environment was "stealing" my key presses - I had to disable the keyboard shortcuts to fix that), I thought about tracking which keys had been pressed. It seemed like that would be a helpful feature, so I added a little strip of letters and numbers at the bottom that fade out as each key is pressed. I kept them small so as not to distract from the main huge letter, and added in another function that fades them back in when the mouse rolls over them.

And besides a title bar and an About section, that's the whole thing. Some early testers have suggested adding a other features, like detecting when certain words are typed. I'm not sure I'd go that route, but if I did, I'd still keep this version as it is. There's something nice about a full screen devoted to one primary element to focus your attention on. Now if I could only find a way to prevent Nico from hitting keys that get him out of the browser window...

Check out The AlphaNumerizer.

GarageBand Two-Track Recording Setup Diagram

My old, pre-Logic, two-track mixer/GarageBand recording setup. Click for larger view.

This is more of an example of an informational graphic than an explanation of my audio recording setup (I've since upgraded), but it really works as both.

I started recording with GarageBand around 2005, when version 2.0 came out. At first I used a crappy USB mic, just plugged directly in the the computer, but the results there weren't really worthy of using a professional multi-track recording program, so I bought a small, cheap two-track mixer and worked out a simple set up.

GarageBand can record up to eight simultaneous tracks - but to do that, you need a real mixer with a Firewire interface - if you're only going into the 1/8" audio jack, as I was with this setup, you can only get two separate tracks into the computer at once (using kind of a trick that I'll explain below) - and as I started to ask questions on audio recording forums, I got a lot of non-helpful answers (and that's being kind) - because anyone with an 8- or more channel mixing board is not using GarageBand - they're using Logic, Reason, ProTools or other more high-end multi-track recorders at that level, so they couldn't really help me out with my setup.

What I eventually learned was that, using a two-channel mixer like I had, you could pan one track to the extreme left, the other to the extreme right, and they would then come into GarageBand as two separate tracks, recorded at the same time, that I could then mix as I pleased. So I could record a simple drum/cymbal setup with brushes using two mics in different positions, or two guitars, or bass and guitar, or vocals and guitar - all using two tracks. That's all I wanted, and it worked well.

The image above is actually the second version of my setup - eventually I figured out a bit more in terms of monitoring the recording (either with headphones or a small amp - or both) and how I could could control the output, and add in MIDI instruments. It got pretty elaborate, though I hope it's easy enough to follow - especially for anyone looking to emulate it. I used FreeHand for all the elements and layout, keeping it simple with only black and white outlines - very "technical drawing"-style.

I posted the link on a few audio forums, where some people found it helpful, and others were surprised at the level of detail I went into - but I wanted it to be totally clear, especially when dealing with audio, where the lack of a single adapter can throw everything off and cause confusion, a trip to a store, and delays. I did receive a couple "thank you"'s from people just getting into recording, who wanted to create a similar setup who couldn't find much help elsewhere. That made me happy.

When my wife and I bought a house in 2006, the basement became mine, and I started setting up a recording studio, which is far from complete - I'll have to detail that in a future post. When I started in on the basement studio, I wanted to be able to record a few instruments and my full drum set at once, so I got lots of mics mics and cables, an 8-channel Mackie mixing board, MOTU Firewire interfaces, and I started using Logic, Apple's high-end multi-track recording software.

It's a much more elaborate setup, and the software had a huge learning curve (I'm definitely still learning, even after reading three books on the subject) but it paid off nicely - I can do much more than I could with the original GarageBand setup. But that original arrangement still comes in handy - I have a very similar setup in my office now, which I use for more limited voiceover or simple recording situations. It's nice to have the flexibility to whichever setup is appropriate - though my neighbors are definitely partial to the smaller one.


Control room setup - small 8-channel control surface at left, MIDI
keyboard, MIDI drum surface, two 20" Apple Cinema Displays, small
mixer and mic for playback (control room talking into external
headphones while recording is in progress), reference monitors and
my old Mac G5 holding it all together below.



Main instrument recording area. Eight cables lead from the channels
in the mixing board into the Firewire interface, which goes into the
control room via a single Firewire cable.



Drum recording setup - there are seven mics total - one for snare and
hihat, one for the kick drum, three for the toms (one between each set
of two), and two overhead condensers.

Simmer Down

Simmer Down with Sharon. Click for the full animation.

Another half-completed idea. I created this in 2004, not long after meeting Sharon, turning her real-life career as a pastry chef into an animated mockery. Not really. But it was a fun little experiment in creating an animated version of the woman who would become... my wife (I tried to make that sound dramatic)


Umberto, the irrepressible spatula with the overdone Italian accent.
I did the voice, and I'm 100% Italian, so it's okay - I cannot get in trouble
for the ethnic stereotyping.

And yet, it's really more of a rough idea awaiting completion, which will hopefully happen someday. The lip synching for Sharon is rough - I just created some semi-random movement and never got around to finalizing it. In fact, the sound is a clipped, giving it a static quality when the sound peaks. Blech. The theme song was done in Easy Beat, a program I used for music recording pre-GarageBand, so it's pretty weak. And Phillipé the Whisk is only shown in the intro - the scene ends abruptly and he's not even shown. Poor Phillipé.

I did enjoy voicing Umberto, brief as his lines were, and his interactions with Sharon seemed pretty funny. And I like the way the kitchen "set" turned out. So I'll consider this post a kick in the butt to revisit this project someday and at least get one episode done. Then Phillipé can finally have his moment in the spotlight.