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Moog Music as announced updates to its MP202 Multi-Pedal.

New features include:

• MIDI-to-CV conversion,
• Loopable Envelope Generators with four Envelope Shapes (Linear, Logarithmic, Exponential and Complex)
• CV Lag
• CV Scaling and
• The ability to trigger Gates and MIDI events.

These new features add to the existing feature list including, MIDI Clock Sync, Tap Tempo, Programmable Heel and Toe Voltages, four LFOs, four Analog Control Voltage Outputs, MIDI and USB connectivity. Many of the original features, such as Quad Mode and Noise Generation also received significant enhancements.

MIDI to control voltage conversion is a cool new feature, letting the MP202 double as a four-channel MIDI-CV converter. Read more…

Because it was there: Ableton Live 8 does Twitter, with a bit of help from Max for Live, MXJ and Jython.

“I sat and watched fifteen minutes of the Twitter public timeline while recording this video,” says Nick Rothwell, “and have now lost the will to live.”

Maybe if we could just use the Twitter stream to trigger events based on keywords in tweets……

Cableguys has released FilterShaper 2, an update to the VST filter effect that adds parallel filter routing, pan modulation, free-running LFOs and support for Mac OS X. Read more…

Is the Turntable a musical instrument?

Can it work as a ‘classical’ instrument?

These were the first questions posed by idea of a Concerto for Turntables.

Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntables & Orchestra (Heritage Orchestra Feat. DJ Yoda) attempts to answer those questions.

Should the turntable join the instruments of the classical orchestra?

Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

via apc

Earlier in the month, we brought you the news of the new Yamaha Tenori On Orange, aka the TRN-O.

The TRN-O is an entry-level version of the Tenori On, offering the same basic musical functionality, but using orange LEDs, stripping away the backlighting LEDs and using a basic white plastic case.

Yamaha has not officially announced the pricing for the new Tenori On Orange, but the pricing is reported to be £649 in the UK and $699 in the US.

Nobody seems to want to state the obvious on this, so I will. If these prices are correct, the Tenori On Orange looks like it’s $300 overpriced. Read more…

The BT Visit London Awards 2009 opened this year at The Westfield Centre, London to the sound of a 10 piece Tenori-On Orchestra.

The event, to celebrate and award the best of the tourism industry in London, was opened in style. A  string quartet began playing Beethoven’s 5th against a back drop of images of London. As the piece built up, a 10 strong Tenori-On orchestra took over, turning Beethoven’s 5th into a disco tune a la Walter Murphy.

You can hear the Tenori-On Orchestra’s version of Beethoven’s 5th at the Yamaha site.

The Tenori-Ons were programmed by Sound Designer and Yamaha artist Marc01.

“Taking on such a monumental piece of music (Beethovan’s 5th), and adapting it for the Tenori-On was definitely an exciting and challenging project,” said Marco1. “The Tenori-On is a very inspirational tool – having the ability to program it in a very melodic way, and to suddenly switch to the more experimental layers such as Bounce and Random opened up a world of possibilities.”

“Having the luxury to use 10 Tenori-Ons meant that I could really experiment with multiple layers, effects and processing to take the Tenori-On way beyond peoples expectations of what it can do.”

If any readers made it to this performance, leave a comment!

WOK has announced ClockWOrK, a MIDI step sequencer plug-in for Windows that promises to let you create hypnotic sequences like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream.

Here’s an audio demo:

 

 Step Sequencer demo [7:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Native Instruments has released Maschine 1.1, a free software update for its groove production studio.

The new version optimizes the workflow and increases the creative potential of Maschine through new MIDI I/O capabilities, support for the REX loop format, enhanced controller interaction, and more. Read more…

DJTechTools‘ Ean Golden demonstrates how he uses white noise “to create build ups and drama in your dj sets.”

via the Times UK:

This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see.

It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue – recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years.

We’ve broken each category into two sub-categories so that, for any chunk of revenue – recorded music sales, for instance – you can see the percentage that goes to the artist, and the percentage that goes elsewhere. (In the case of recorded music, the lion’s share of revenue goes to the record label; in the case of live, the promoter takes a cut etc.)

Hopefully, this analysis – and there’s more on the nuts and bolts of our method below – sheds some factual light on the claims and counter-claims that are paranoically sweeping across the music industry establishment, not least that put forward by the singer Lily Allen in this paper recently – and the BPI – that artists are losing out as a result of the fall in sales of recorded of music.

The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.

Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data – compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI – make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.

The long and short of it – the music industry’s “decline” isn’t as simple as record labels would like us to believe, and that musicians are getting a bigger slice of the music industry pie than they have in the past.