So I stumbled across this...

[Pete]

I was looking for tutorials for Adobe Illustrator and ended up looking at a bunch of tutorials until I ended up on this one:

 

 

It's pretty good as tutorials go, and the end result was very good as she's a talented artist, but then I got to the end credits and it turns out she composed (reasonably sure - could be wrong, but see track 4) and played the music...

 

...intrigued I ended up on her website. Watch the video where she plays a load of different musical instruments really rather well.

 

Then watch the end credits where she did THE ENTIRE VIDEO HERSELF FROM PAINTING TO 3D EFFECTS TO BLOODY EVERYTHING.

 

Erm. I'm impressed. Normally if we're lucky we're reasonably good at one or two things, but she's got talent in spades and this clearly shows why the rash of TV talent shows over the last decade are a bunch of crap when compared to real talent.

 

So there we go. Made my day anyway

 

EDIT: Erm. It appears she can sing a bit too: https://www.stval.fr/index.php?option=com_c...5&Itemid=65

 

Stop now, you're hogging all the talent, but I like it.

[FullAuto]

EN : I've been playing the classical violin from the age of seven, I also learnt the flute,piano, accordion and accordina. I'm learning guitar since few months ;-) I have a 5 strings electric violon (Zeta). I love to play different styles of music: russian music, gypsy, country, rock, blues, irish, jazz, lounge, electro...

 

At my best I could barely play the bass guitar!

 

Some people are just ridiculously arty, I suppose. I think more people would be, but you might need a massive amount of encouragement, and time, and money to get to being good at more than one art, and most of us will never have that sort of upbringing or be provided with those resources. It's one of the things I currently do not like about my society. We're very keen on the technical, but try getting funding to be a writer, or a musician or a painter or sculptor. Try getting into those arts in the first place. This sort of multi-disciplinary expertise especially seems to be the preserve of the middle classes and upwards. If you don't have to earn money, all of a sudden you have loads of free time.

 

/rant over

 

She's not bad looking either, that doesn't hurt!

[Pete]

I think it helps living in a more passionate, arty country as well. My personal view is that England is a bit shit when it comes to those two things combined - that or I'm just a lot more interested in what this lady is doing than what anyone over here seems to be doing anyway.

 

There's saying you're passionate about something and actually being passionate about something. She is clearly passionate about art, music and life in general.

 

It would be nice if more people could learn to do awesome stuff like this and give back to the rest of the world rather than trudging through life. I'm getting all depressed now.

 

Can someone buy me a piano for Christmas? I reckon I've got the hand span and I can move my fingers reasonably quickly across a computer keyboard at least, though I only use the index and middle fingers on my hands albeit at pretty high speed.

[FullAuto]

That might be a French stereotype or then again it might be true. It seems like a lot of other countries still have singing, playing musical instruments, painting etc as everyday activities, whereas we don't seem to bother, unless we're retired or at a loose end or it has a connection to our jobs. If we do participate in an art, it tends to be just one.

 

It's a shame because I look around and I see colleges of technology springing up but I don't see colleges of art appearing. I don't understand why not. It's not like we're going to get heavy industry back, we can't compete, so why not have a bit of culture? There's money in it.

 

I often wonder how many virtuoso violinists, painters, writers, etc are stuck working in factories, having never got the chance to actually try something that they have a talent for. Infuriating.

[Bomb Bloke]

Back in the day, me mum had me taking lessons for piano, violin and acting. I wasn't terribly interested in any of them, and had dropped out of all three by my mid-teens, but I did learn that most people into that sort of thing started due to parental influence.

 

However, to really get "good", you really do need that sort of time. Kids have lots, so by the time they hit adult-hood they'll be pros. There's then money to be made playing in orchestras or teaching the next generation.

[FullAuto]

If I ever have children, they're going to be made to pick up an instrument, learn at least one other language, and I'm going to bully them into dancing classes, painting, etc as much as I can. Absolutely no way are they going to be stuck with my level of exposure, which, aside from literature (thank you local library), was minimal.

 

A lot of these subjects at school, if you're not interested, you can effectively feign lack of talent (art, music, etc) and simply waste your time. I know I did, because I did not have the slightest interest in playing the triangle or watercolours.

[Pete]

Pretty much the same for me. Why are instruments in school over here always shite? I mean, glockenspiel's aren't all that much fun and only the teacher ever got to play the piano.

 

Fortunately when I did Design Technology I started getting into some of the technical drawing a bit and then in a couple of projects this linked into my messing about on computers and I think that's partially what pushed me in the direction of web-based stuff. Back then they didn't even teach anything on PCs except how to use them - I was always bored because I knew it already.

 

I do remember the ridiculous grading system at GCSE. Basically there were 5 sets (classes) depending on how well you were doing. I was in the top set (swot) but I was struggling with maths in the top set. I was actually advised that it might be better if I dropped to the second set. What made me choose to stay in the top set was that the exam marking meant that you had to only get 55% of the GCSE exam questions right in top set to get a B-grade. In the second set GCSE exams, I'd have needed something like 80% or more and no hope of ever getting an A as B was the highest you could get outside the top set (madness, I know - they've already categorised you as not good enough before you sit the exam).

 

I answered about 57% of the questions in my maths exams across the 2 papers because the questions were making my brain ache. Fortunately they were the 57% of questions that I was pretty sure I knew the answer to. I ended up getting my B-grade. Job done and I'm reasonably sure I dind't have to try as hard as those taking the lower set exam.

 

There's a lot of things that were "broken" in terms of how school worked back then and I suspect there are still lots of issues now. I did hear that in the bottom set for maths one year that the kids were told they'd got no hope of getting a grade worth anything (as in the top grade they could have got was an E or something and that's if they got 80% of the answers right in the exams) so the teacher told them to do what they want whilst he sat there and did other, more important stuff like plan for lessons for the higher sets. Sad truth of it is that with an E grade being the highest you could get and the percentage bracket being so high he was probably right, but that's still not a good enough reason for a teacher to give up on teaching.

[FullAuto]

One of the things that annoyed me was the uniformity of the things we had to do. In music, whip out xylophones or keyboards or tambourines for everyone. Could they not have purchased half a dozen cheap guitars? A fiddle or two? God, how I hated the maracas. It's depressing that music essentially never had my attention all the way through school, not once was I faced with something I wanted to learn.

 

The same with art, actually. I was hardly ever interested in what we were doing. As for IT class, we should be teaching kids programming (Perl?) right now. That falls into the language/art area quite firmly.

[Pete]

Ewww, not Perl If it's programming then C (of some flavour) or Java would be good.

 

For web stuff it's trickier - you're more likely to be able to find jobs knowing ASP .NET, but I much prefer PHP as nearly every CMS I've used is free and you don't find that spirit of free stuff with the ASP crowd, possibly because they're of the mind that "everything related to Microsoft costs money so why should I do anything for free?".

 

I think web design itself - HTML and a dash of JavaScript would be a good thing to teach. You don't learn anything by simply setting up a Wordpress.com blog or a Twitter or Facebook account, but there's money to be made if you learn the basics and take it further if you're interested by learning a server-side language like PHP or ASP.

[Bomb Bloke]

With the music classes, the idea wouldn't've been so much "how to play" so much as it would've been "this is how music works". It's a heck of a lot easier to learn scales on a keyboard or xylophone then it is, say, on a violin.

 

It's also a heck of a lot easier to repair or replace a xylophone...

 

When it comes to programming, the best language would depend on the age at which you want to introduce them to it. I started with BASIC, which, being an interpreted language (heck, a lot of the programs for the computer I first learnt it on were distributed in the form of BASIC source files, as said interpreter was built right into the hardware) was very easy to debug, and also let you skip all the tedious variable declaration work.

 

QBASIC was even better, in that you could pause your code mid-execution and edit it on the fly. If the code hits an error, the interpreter usually jumps to the line causing problems, tells you what's wrong with it, then allows the program to resume from there once you've sorted it. Also let you run commands instantly, separate to the program you're writing (eg, "release these file locking handles", "show the current contents of these variables on the screen", etc).

 

I won't say it's the most useful language (even if I still rely on it heavily, eg), but my point is it makes it easy to demonstrate how programming... basically... works, without spending ages learning the "technical" details about how to accomplish boring tasks like defining your own screen mode or working out whether you should make your class files private, public, static, etc...

 

HTML/JavaScript would likewise indeed be good starting points. They can't "do" as much, but the kids are more likely to be interested in the results, and for the most part they're a lot easier to pick up and play with.

 

The downside to all this is that before you know it, every machine in the school computer lab has a homepage set that leads to ten million videos of Rick Astely opening...

[FullAuto]

Another disgustingly talented lady, songwriter, vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and techie enough to use her own loops.

[Zombie]

I'm speechless, that was amazing.

 

- Zombie

[Space Voyager]

"Hmmmm, who would fit my voice best as a back-vocal? Hell, meself!"

 

She's phenomenal. I'd be lost at stepping on them switches. And well, you wouldn't want to hear me singing.

[FullAuto]

I've never got past the 'fascinated chimp' stage of using loop pedals.

 

"Look, box repeats sound I make! LOOK!"

 

I sat last night and listened to everything she did. She must be good, because I even liked her Bruno Mars covers. And I bloody hate Bruno Mars.