Weekly Pull Request: December 20th, 2024

Welcome to the Weekly Pull Request, a place where I share cool music, tech, and things I’ve been working on throughout the week.

If you’re new here:

👋 Hey! My name is Shawn aka Paps

💻 I’m a Software Developer & Founder of SPAP Technology Solutions

🎸 I play guitar, write and record music, and just generally enjoy creating!

🤝 Connect with me on social media!

Table of Contents

• Riffs

• Metaphor - Ichika Nito

• Mare - Mirar

• New Levels New Devils - Polyphia

• Code

• Remix.js follow-up

• Coffee

• Archetype: Tim Henson by Neural DSP

Riffs

Metaphor - Ichika Nito

I’m absolutely fascinated by Ichika’s playing. Nik Nocturnal recently did a video on the title track off of this EP titled “ICHIKA is the final boss of Guitar…” and I agree. With finger melting riffs, and that sweet, sweet buttery guitar tone, Ichika pushes all the boundaries of what it means to be a guitar player. Taking influence from everything from hip-hop to samba to j-pop and beyond, this EP continues to deliver good vibes and incredible compositions. Highly, highly recommend!

Mare - Mirar

THE THALL IS REAL.

I had to pick my jaw up off the floor after that opening riff in “Rachma” the opening track to this record. I didn’t know that guitars were capable of this level of heavy. If you’re looking for some nasty riffage, but don’t necessarily want a vocalist screaming in your ear, give this EP a spin.

New Levels New Devils - Polyphia

As you can probably tell, I’ve been listening to nothing but guitar music this week. I decided to revisit this album after messing around with Archetype: Tim Henson by Neural DSP (More on that in a minute).

Not much to say on this one other than it’s a must listen. Usually, a band will have one standout member, but in the case of Polyphia, every member is incredibly gifted at their craft. I mean, Steve Vai has given them his stamp of approval, what more could you ask for?

Oh side note, Tim Henson is also cooking up something with Hans Zimmer. Can’t wait to find out what that’s all about. 👀

Code

Remix.js follow-up

It’s been a week since I talked to y’all about Remix and I have to say: this framework is dope. The developer experience is fantastic. I use React frequently in my day to day, and this feels like an extension of that. I think this framework is best suited for apps with a lot of compartmentalized data.

For example, some kind of dashboard with several modules pulling data from many different sources, or perhaps an e-commerce platform. The reason is that components can be rendered within the <Outlet/> tag, but also be assigned their own independent URL’s. So if a component fails to load data from the server, it can show an independent error state without crashing the entire page.

TLDR for my non-technical friends: An error in displaying data will be isolated to the affected component(s) in your dashboard, not the entire dashboard, if we’re using our example above.

Although we shoot for no errors, this is the web. Sht happens, and this framework seems to make a solid attempt at maintaining user experience when it does.

Coffee

Archetype: Tim Henson by Neural DSP

I had the chance to do a deep dive into this guitar plugin this week and I gotta say.

This is the most creative guitar plugin I’ve ever used.

The tones are great, the effects are fantastic, and that multivoicer effect…bruh.

The multivoicer is a vocoder-y harmonizer that can be heard in several of Polyphia’s songs. It creates this odd, choir sounding effect behind your lead. But that’s not all, folks. The Multivoicer can be mapped to a MIDI chord progression, meaning that the sound can follow your song’s chord changes. Super cool.

You can check out a demo of me using this plugin on my instagram!

If you’re a guitar player or audio engineer, definitely check this plugin out.

That’s all for this week’s pull request. I hope that you all have a very Happy Holiday season. The holidays can be a stressful time too, so make sure to do something for yourself, even if that’s just sipping on a cup of coffee and “touching some grass” to get away from the noise.

Anyways, let’s go ahead and merge this to main. I hope you have an amazing weekend and a very Happy Holiday!

Gratefully yours,

Paps