We has a photograph

by | May 26, 2009 | Ninja Stuff

Believe it or not, Jude and Dan recently found themselves in the same place at the same time. Here is proof:

Jude is the one wearing a keyboard scarf. Dan is the bottle of ketchup in the background.

A Busy Week Ahead

by | May 25, 2009 | Ninja Stuff

I am working on the final mix of our next song as I type this. (I’m taking a break.) I have a good feeling about this one; I think people will dig it and it might have legs. Don’t wanna jinx it so I’ll leave it at that. If you’ve been following our Twitters, you may have caught a few clues.

From the beginning, this song was supposed to debut at the same time as a special project we’ve been working on. We do not control all the aspects of that special project so I am not sure exactly when it will be ready. I had hoped for Friday the 29th, but it remains to be seen. So that is the earliest you will hear the new song, as part of the launch of that project. The song will still be posted here as usual, and you won’t have to sign up for anything. But we were flattered by this invitation so we’re doin’ it right.

In the meantime, we will have a few other things to share this coming week, including a new logo and a way for you to support for Palette-Swap Ninja if you so choose (some folks have asked about buying our songs or donating a little cash; we have a solution). I also did a podcast interview with The Overseas Connection at CouchMercenaries.com, talking about the origins of the band (and also some stuff about my day job), and that should be going live Wednesday. I think I’ll be on lucky episode 13. (Not kidding — 13 is actually a pretty lucky number for me.)

So, for us, that’s a flurry of activity. Hopefully you’ll like what you see and hear.

Dan

A very rare live performance of “Viva”

by | May 10, 2009 | Ninja Stuff

Palette-Swap Ninja is, by design, a studio band. Jude and I used to play live pretty frequently in our previous band, but we’re not in the same state anymore, so there you have it. The gang at GamesRadar has been incredibly supportive of us on the TalkRadar podcast, letting us plug our songs, saying nice things, feigning interest — and the listeners have responded just as strongly. So when TalkRadar hit its 50th show, I thought…can we do something special and — gulp — live? Well, one of us could, because of that state thing. With Jude’s permission, I grabbed my trusty acoustic guitar and did something I’d never done before: I played “The Viva Pinata Song” live. Here is only slightly staged photographic proof:

You can get it only on TalkRadar 50 — it’s a true TalkRadar exclusive. It’s toward the end of the two-hour extravaganza.

In my defense, I am quite bad at playing and singing at the same time — as you will hear — and they were trying to crack me up throughout — which they did. They were also singing along in the background but too far away from the microphone to be picked up. They’re lucky.

If you can believe it, Chris Antista actually cleaned this up. You’re hearing the generous edited version. And sadly I was sober.

Don’t you wish Jude and I lived in the same state now too?

— Dan

How to download our songs

by | May 1, 2009 | Ninja Stuff

We want you to download our songs. We made a page just for them. And we thought the little haiku at the top made it clear exactly how to achieve that goal, but apparently not — I’ve gotten a few comments from folks asking how they can download the songs instead of just having them play in the browser. I thought that everybody knew how to do this with the right mouse button, but hey, we all have to learn somewhere. So we have revised the haiku and I’m writing this post to clarify, for anybody still having trouble.

To download our songs, right-click the name of the track to open a menu and, depending on what browser you are using, select…
“Save Link As” (Firefox or Chrome)
“Save Target As” (Internet Explorer)
“Download Linked File” (Safari).

They all do the same thing: They ask you where on your computer you want to save the MP3. (And if you do not have a two-button mouse, use Option-Click instead of right-click.)

Now, I had planned to make a “Download Now” button so as to remove that hassle altogether. But I’ve found that it isn’t as easy as it looks. If the browser sees the MP3, it wants to play it. In order to get around it, I tried changing my .htaccess file in the songs directory, but it did not work (it had an effect, but it broke file access altogether). Another suggestion was to put every track in a .zip archive, and I don’t wanna do that. For one, it makes counting downloads a little harder if there are two versions of each song being downloaded. For two, if people are a little confused by right-clicking to download, now I’m introducing file compression, which simply swaps one problem for another. And I have heard of PHP solutions around it but I don’t know PHP so I couldn’t make head nor tail of them.

So…for now, I’m keeping it as is. Please use the “right-click-save-as” method. It’s standard across the web and a good thing to know.

In a last ditch effort, you can try downloading from our page on Last.fm. But that didn’t work for me, even though I set it up for free download. I got a 503 error.

Next song is go

by | Apr 29, 2009 | Ninja Stuff

We’re locked and loaded; we have something in the works. Lyrics are done (which is a relief) and a few instruments had to be purchased. Small ones, but instruments none the less. Jude gets to take the spotlight a bit more because it has a strong and recognizable keyboard part driving it all the way through — a nice switch from the guitarapalooza that was “Vista Drivers.” I think it’s going to be a good song that a lot of people connect with. Kat actually came up with the main joke and we ran with it from there.

Anyway, hoping to make serious progress this weekend, as we’re both busy at our respective places of business right now. That and we have a few things behind the scenes that should be ready either at the same time or right after, and I’ll post about them when they come true. 🙂

New song: “Vista Drivers”

by | Apr 11, 2009 | Music

The new song is here — “Vista Drivers,” a parody of Survivor’s supreme cheese classic “Eye of the Tiger.” This one’s for all our homies who have ever built a PC from scratch. Jude and I don’t do it any other way!

It’s a first for us in several ways. It’s the first 80s song we’ve done, it’s the first song we’ve done that isn’t overtly about games, it’s the first time we’ve had a YouTube video of any kind on day one, and it’s the first time we’ve dared cover a song that Weird Al had already parodied first.

This is also the first time we’ve worked in conjunction with someone else’s production. The song was written for the Very Special 100th episode of the Maximum PC No BS Podcast. We are both fans of the mag — if you’re a geek and you’re into PC hardware, you should either be reading Maximum PC on a regular basis or you should feel deep and personal shame for not doing so.

When Editor-in-Chief Will Smith approached us about helping write some parody lyrics, we brainstormed this song (with some key input from Dan’s wife Kat) to fit into the show’s narrative. Part of the fun of their podcast is hearing their editors sing it themselves, but we wanted to do our own version too, so what you’ll hear on the podcast is totally different (and yet remarkably similar). There actually is a slight lyric difference between the two; we gave them some alternates and they used one of them. We’ll leave you to spot it. (Dan and Kat also wrote the parody lyrics for the very last song you hear in the podcast, but we won’t ruin the surprise.) In any case, we were honored to be involved, and it gave us a nice hard deadline for a new song.

Note to the music nerds who A/B this with the original recording by Survivor: Yes, we transposed the key, but so did Al when he did his parody. And we at least think we did a better job than Microsoft Songsmith.

Some info on the forthcoming song

by | Apr 9, 2009 | Ninja Stuff

Jude and I are going over final mix candidates now and trying to polish the track to a lustrous shine, but yes — since “Halo” just came out in March, there will be two PSwap tracks in as many months. We did not make you wait a year for our next song. Can you believe it? We cannot. It is unbelievable.

This new song will have a few things that are new for us. First, it’s technically part of someone else’s larger project, but even out of that context, it stands as its own song. (That said, if they are not ready, we are holding the release of our song until their project goes live. We are big fans and we are proud to support their special project.) And second, we will have one of those single-slide videos on YouTube the day we release the song. When we saw Weird Al do a one-frame video for his last song (his very awesome parody of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like”), we realized there’s no shame in it. “Halo” showed us that if we don’t do this ourselves, other people will get into a pissing match over who heard the song first, and they may even try to take credit for it. So, yeah, we’ll do that, thanks. After all, iMovie ain’t that hard to figure out.

I have been dropping hints about the next song on Twitter but I do not want to ruin the surprise of the larger project. But for the record:

– It’s a parody of a hit song from the 80s (and this is the first 80s song we’ve parodied, even though we met in an 80s cover band).
– The original band lost its lead singer due to health issues (and probably a few other factors too). He later healed and went on to a career as an in-demand jingle singer. You have heard him since and didn’t know it.
– My Variax guitar settings were Lester bridge, but I believe the original guitarist used an Explorer.
– 18 tracks in our recording, run time of 4m22s. I could not get all 18 tracks onto the screen at once but it looks something like this:

Stay tuned. ETA (with an accent on the E) is late Friday.

Ringtones? Here’s one…

by | Apr 5, 2009 | Ninja Stuff

A few weeks ago, Charlie over at SilverAge suggested we create some ringtones and post them, too. This had honestly not occurred to me — why would anybody but our immediate families even want to hear us on their phones?

But hey, if people would find that useful, we could do that. I guess if you wanted to you could just edit the MP3s down to your liking, but I do still have the master tracks from all our recordings — even if they are spread over, like, three different recording apps — and now that we’re doing things in GarageBand, we can make iPhone ringtones easily too. Would you want that?

Until I manage to get some stuff together, here’s the latest KOXM jingle, “Stick It to the Dan,” as an iPhone ringtone to whet your whistle.