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.
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?
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.
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. 🙂
