May, 2008 archive

GeeksDreamgirl has an interesting take on using Dungeons & Dragon dice to stimulate your musical creativity.
Here’s her take on two of the more important dice:
d8
The d8 is perfect for learning scale degrees and practicing sight-singing.
Your first step is to grab a piece of staff paper and write out the scale you’re going to sight-sing in, […]

Livid is now shipping the awesome Ohm DJ & VJ control surface.
While the Tenori-On and other new control surfaces look cool, the Livid Ohm combines great looks with an intelligent combination of switches and continuou controllers. The only way it could be more awesome would be if the center buttons were a 16 x 8 […]

Littlescale demos syncing Nanoloop, a real-time Gameboy sequencer/synth, to Ableton Live:
Part 1

Nanoloop on a Gameboy (whose audio is coming in on track 2) is synchronised to the drums playing in Ableton (track 1). This is to test out a new interface I have been working on that syncs Nanoloop to a MIDI clock.
Part 2

GetLoFi has a roundup of videos and images from the Minneapolis Bent Fest 2008.

Part 1
Part 2

Above, Italy’s EraSer demonstrates his approach to layering glitch and bent sounds over a repeating background.

i3L (pronounced “i thrill”) is a freeware music controller app,  developed using Max/MSP from Cycling74 and is a support application for akaRemote by Masayuki Akamatsu.
And guess what? You can use it to control Ableton Live!
i3L receives pre-defined UDP messages from akaRemote.app running on the iPhone, scales the values to MIDI, and allows you to configure […]

Telekenisis is a tool for remote control of Mac application using your iPhone.

The iPhone seems to becoming the new “because it was there” controller for Ableton Live.

Synth DIY is a site that collects together schematics and other information for building your own synth modules.
Information is organized by products and tags, with special pages for things like data sheets and owner’s manuals.
What really makes the site interesting, though, is that many of the component parts for the synth modules are cross-referenced with […]

Got a fever for more cowbell?
Dynamite cowbell, a free Windows VST, brings you “more cowbell than even Gene Frenkle can deliver”.
Features :

6 cowbells mapped to midi keys
5 velocity layers
close and room mic levels
damping control
5 bonus digibells
1 cow

Zero-G has released 5 new titles in its SoundSense Series sample libraries:

Street Beatz contains 1 Gb of brand new professional NYC hiphop at a bargain price. Full of Earth Shaking Beats, Dope Grooves, Cool Vibes and Full Phat Construction Kits from the streets of NYC.
LA Drums for Songwriters - Top LA session player, engineer and […]

Gnaural is a multi-platform programmable binaural-beat generator, implementing the principle of binaural beats as described in the October 1973 Scientific American article Auditory Beats in the Brain (Gerald Oster).
It can be used to synthesize sounds that affect the brain. Here’s a demo. It should be listened to using headphones:

 

 Gnaural [73:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

To promote his new 4 track mini album of minimal techno, Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet has produced a special 30 minute DJ mix of similarly minimal grooves, Ringer:

 

 Four Tet DJ Set [30:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Four Tet - Ringer
Liquid Liquid - Bell Head (Harvey edit)
Avus - Tear
Burial - Raver
Sam Clarence - Sextant daktari
Wookie - Manchu 2
[…]

The !Malfunctionator is a DIY synth project, designed to be “a handy UFO dector doubling up as a Electro Music Device.”
It consists of 3 oscillators, each modulated by 3 low frequency oscillators. The oscillators are based around the hex invertor IC known as CD40106 aka 7HC04; the wave froms produced from this logic device are […]

 

 Malfunctionator: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Analog Suicide’s Tara Busch visits Off The Wall Antiques to have a peek at the RCA-Victor “Electrified” Piano from 1939, a gorgeous Art Deco electroacoustic instrument.

Ueberschall has introduced Score FX, a sound library they describe as a comprehensive solution for professional, musical sound design.
Description:
This instrument includes 7 GIGs of brand new sonic stimulants. Featuring a progressive structure and layout made for building tracks from supplied “themes” and construction kits offering ease of injection into projects.
Thanks to the extended possibilities of […]