Wave Alchemy has announced Transistor Revolution – a new Kontakt re-creation of the iconic TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines.
Transistor Revolution uses a custom user interface combined with Native Instruments’ Kontakt 5?s advanced sampling engine and over 22,000 drum samples. Transistor Revolution also mirrors the design of the original (hardware) TR-808 and TR-909 front panels.
Moritz Simon Geist created the MR-808 – described as ‘the first drum robot that reproduces the drum sounds of the 80′s. The installation is a version of the famous Roland TR-808 ? but with robots playing the drum sounds!
“I decided to go back to the roots of sound generation ? the physical sound generation ? but combine it with the electronic music structure,” explains Geist. “I couldn?t stop building my own drum robots, and ended up replacing all the electronic sounds of a whole drum computer, placed in a 3,3 x 1,7m² case.
This video captures a studio tour with Canadian duo Chromeo (Patrick Gemayel and David Macklovitch). They talk some pretty serious geek, show off their great collection of vintage and recent gear and demonstrate how they use it in their work.
via reader Stephen Langer
This video, via burnkit2600 (Justin Emerson), takes a look at how to circuit bend a Roland TR-505 drum machine.
iPad Music Software: Synthetic Bits announced today that they’ve updated FunkBox (App Store link) – their $2.99 virtual drum machine for iOS – to version 2.1.:
FunkBox v2.1 was approved blazingly fast today by Apple! If you are using FunkBox with CoreMIDI, or running it on an iPhone 3G with iOS4, or do a lot of drum box custom sample editing, you will definitely want to update as soon as possible.
If you have an iOS device that can do multi-tasking, you may also want to pick up the BassLine and MoDrum apps to play with the new multi-tasking audio features that allow you to run FunkBox simultaneously with other music apps. Thank you to Finger apps for leading the way with these extremely cool CoreMIDI features that we think are going to change music making on iOS dramatically for the better!
For iOS musicians, the FunkBox update is one more small step towards iOS MIDI nirvana. Details below. Continue reading
Oliver Chesler, aka The Horrorist, shared this cool video at his blog WireToTheEar. It captures grade 3 kids from Selwyn House School is an all-boys school in Westmount, Quebec, Canada.
We don’t have “house schools” in the midwest US, but figure that learning how to program that ’808 is probably a good place to start.