November, 2007 archive

Brian Eno discusses painting & sculptures in this video from 1984. Note the generative ambient soundtrack.

Here’s a cool ambient track from Monolake, the guru behind Ableton Live.
The track is based on some of the source material for the 2004 album release Signal to Noise, and it is mainly a single recording of a longer pad sound of a yamaha sy 77 synthesizer. It has been sampled, transposed, filtered and layered [...]

Vember Audio has released Shortcircuit, a free sampler for Windows.
Shortcircuit was created as a reaction against the ongoing trend where software samplers are being designed with the primary intent of library playback. It is intended for people who consider a sampler to be a musical instrument in its own right, and not just a way [...]

Manhattan art space The Tank and New York artist collective 8bitpeoples have announced the Blip Festival 2007, a four-day music and multimedia event focusing on the modern artistic exploration of primitive video game and home computer technology.Featuring 40 musicians and visualists from around the world, the Blip Festival showcases artists adopting and repurposing familiar but [...]

Cakewalk is shipping Martin Atkins’ Beat Fetish Volume 1.
Beat Fetish provides actual drums and grooves that were programmed, designed, and recorded during recording sessions spanning over 25 years with some of the biggest names in Industrial and Post Punk music using some of world’s most highly-regarded engineers.
Description:
Produced by Martin Atkins, Beat Fetish Volume 1 [...]

Flower Electronics is a boutique synth manufacturer that sells several small modular synths based on the designs of Jessica Rylan, an electronic musician and sound artist who lives and performs in the Boston area.
According to the company, their goal “is to produce unique musical instruments with ultra high build quality, and total freedom of sound.”
They [...]

 

 Cody Ranaldo Little Boy Blue Demo [3:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Analog Tara Little Boy Blue Demo [4:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 
MHC Synthesizers and Effects announce the release of Industrial Tones 1.5 for Windows (VST). The Mac OS X version will be released in the next 2 weeks.
You can preview some of the sounds of Industrial Tones below.
Version 1.5 includes the following changes:

New graphical user interface.
13 of the samples/waveforms were either improved or replaced.

Features:

1024 presets [...]

 

 Industrial Tones Demo [0:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Industrial Tones Demo 2 [1:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

CME is shipping their new M-Key portable MIDI controller in the US, priced at $99.
M-Key is a 49-key MIDI keyboard featuring an ultra-thin, full-action semi-weighted keyboard, a joystick control, a mobile phone sound module, trigger pad, knob controller, U-CTRL and speaker.
M-Key also ships with the “CME MusicPack”, a CDROM with free versions of popular professional [...]

VirSyn has announced the release of VTAPE—The Analog Tape Suite.
VTAPE is a set of two plugins based on a thorough simulation of the sound of analog tape machines. The saturator simulates the recording and playback of an analog tape mastering machine. The delay combines this sound with a modern, step sequencer-like tapped delay engine.
You can [...]

 

 VTAPE Delay demo [0:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 VTAPE Saturator demo [2:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

NuDSP’s Mod271, pronounced as “Mode”, is a virtual modular cum DSP playground with unified audio/MIDI support. According to its creator, Mod271 is supposed to exist somewhere in between Reaktor, reacTable and Reason.
Features:  

ASIO/MIDI support
built with portability in mind, a mac/linux version shouldn’t be terribly difficult.
everything is a full audio-rate signal which means you can do [...]