"Down On Me" - Keenan Cahill featuring 50 Cent from Chelsea Lately

I'm not sure if you have seen this YouTube sensation already... Keenan Cahill, over 1.22 million views.







""Down On Me" - Keenan Cahill featuring 50 Cent from Chelsea Lately" > read the full post

Playbutton

I have no idea what to say about this little find... check it out and share your thoughts! -> Playbutton



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SonicWORX Isolate

Interesting find this - sonicWORX have released their Isolate software, that can extract the vocals from a mix.....

There's a few vids of this in action on YouTube - here's one at Musik Messe from last year, which shows them separating Peter Gabriel (but making him sound oddly like he's vocoding a pan pipe)..

But this shows them using the software to remove vocals....

Interested? Head to their website and try out the demo...

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Party animals

Cyriac's video for Oddity features "surreal bovine choreography"...







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Drum Gloves

Beat on the Block is a set of drum gloves that are designed to let you drum on anything. It was created during a school project by Kristo De Pooter, Arnoud den Besten, Sam Vesters, and Thomas Leterme at the Artesis University college of Antwerp, Belgium May 2010.

The system is made up of gloves paired with a backpack speaker system with a built-in looping system. Check out the drum gloves in action......



Pretty cool as an idea that could be developed.


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Pre-radar listening systems

In the days before radar, there were all sorts of acoustic aircraft localization systems. Here's one, but there's a collection of equally ridiculous looking ones here...

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Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age

Walking on Eggshells is a 24-minute documentary about appropriate, creative influence, re-use and intellectual property in the remix age. It is a conversation among various musicians, visual artists, writers and lawyers, all sharing their views on why and how we use and create culture, and how intellectual property law - originally designed to provide people with incentives to create - sometimes hinders creative production far more than it enhances it.

This film is our final project for the seminar "Intellectual Property in the Digital Age" at Yale University.

Directed and Produced by:
Jacob Albert
Ryan Beauchamp
Brendan Schlagel

Interviews with (in order of appearance):
Eclectic Method
DJ Earworm (Jordan Roseman)
Joy Garnett
Michael Cunningham
Dudley Andrew
DJ Ripley (Larisa Mann)
Jonathan Lethem
E. Michael Harrington
Edgar Garcia

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Here is part 1 of 3:



Read on for video parts 2 and 3.........






"Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age" > read the full post

Cracklin' Rosie, on 5 mobile phones

Who said iPhone OS, Android and Windows Mobile don't play well together?

steffest plays an interpretation of Neil Diamond's Cracklin' Rosie on 2 Android devices, 2 Windows mobile devices, and an iPod touch. Pocket Stombox is used for the real time effects and the main instruments are the iShred and Guitar apps by Frontier Design.

Check out the video......



More info can be found here.


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Binder clips make good cable organisers

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Glossary for sound engineers

Here's something else I randomly stumbled across: a glossary for sound engineers. If you're really geeky (sad) you can even print out all the pages alphabetically and compile your own hard copy glossary, to take with you to the park on a sunny day, etc.

My favourite definition has got to be:

Balls
1) The depth and thickness of a sound, usually on the bottom end of the EQ (as in "needs more balls").
2) The strength of the voice on the mic (as in "check it like you have some balls").

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Digital Musician dot Net - music collaboration

DMN = digitalmusician.net: a community of musicians connecting and collaborating on music projects together.

Is this thing well known? Has anyone tried it out yet?



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In B flat 2.0 - a collaborative music / spoken word project

(I don't know how, but) I stumbled across this online... It's cool and calming, and good for imagination. Check it out.


"In B flat 2.0 - a collaborative music / spoken word project" > read the full post

350 posts and counting...

This is post #350

I will celebrate this with a video of a guy (a talented one) playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' on a iPad in front of a bemused orchestra and crowd. It's at the bottom of this post.

If you like this blog please link to us from your website, facebook, blog etc.

Thanks to our readers and contributors and now back to work, looking for something else to write about.






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Free MIDI Step Sequencer for Pure Data

High-Pass Filter has a free MIDI step sequencer for Pure Data available for download. Read on....

The sequencer is locked to playing 16th notes, but the tempo and number of steps can be varied, and the pattern can be transposed. It also comes with a random pattern creation system, ideal for creating that "dead batteries in a 303" style sequence.

The top right window displays the pitches for the steps, selectable between -12 and +12 semitones. The centre-right window displays the velocity - where 0 means no note is played. The bottom window shows the currently playing step.

An audio demo is available at the site, as is the patch download link. Go here.


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Free Open Source Lead Sheet & Improv Tool

Impro-Visor is an artificially intelligent jazz improvisor tool... with a bit more to it. It can be used to make lead sheets, to experiment with jazz harmonies and solos, and as a teaching tool (by asking human students to fill in their own parts). It continues some of the legacy of Band-in-a-Box but it seems to be more in keeping with current generation software, it supports more platforms, and it's free and open source. (It even runs on Linux).

Rendered in low-fidelity, unaltered General MIDI soft synth sounds, I'm not sure you'll be tossing your Jazz numbers in favour of the computer's attempt. However, looking past the superficial quality of the sounds to the musical content, the software is pretty impressive in what it does, and, because it is a multi-purpose jazz tool and all-round lead sheet utility, I could see all sorts of uses. Read on........

Impro-Visor, by Prof. Bob Keller and students at Harvey Mudd College

Impro-Visor (“Improvisation Advisor”) is a software tool designed by musician and computer scientist Bob Keller to help jazz musicians work out, hear, and record solo ideas, including studying the work of others. It provides a notation capability for lead sheets that consist of a single melody line and chord changes. Melody content can be entered by a point-and-click interface, typed text, or a MIDI keyboard. Chord progressions are entered by typing the chord names or loading from an existing text file. Using the point-and-click interface, notes are sounded with the corresponding chord background as they are entered. Visual feedback is provided by an optional coloring scheme: chord tones show as black, color tones or tensions show as green, chromatic approach tones show as blue, and everything else shows as red.

A typical use of Impro-Visor is to ask students to compose a solo of one or more choruses over a tune being studied. By working out lines for the solo, a better understanding of both the tune and of line construction is acquired. In addition to the visual and audio feedback described above, there are various ways of getting suggestions for ideas, such as using scales, cells, licks, idioms, and quotes. These are part of Impro-Visor’s vocabulary and are automatically transposed to the chord of the moment. The user can then tweak the melodies as desired or choose alternatives. Ideas can be saved in the vocabulary for later reference. In one use, students submit their solos to the instructor, who then collects them and projects and plays them in the classroom, for mutual critique.

Another feature of Impro-Visor is the ability to generate brand new licks over a chord progression selected by the user. Lick generation is based on a specific “grammar”, and different grammars can be used to get different styles. Grammars can also be used in conjunction with Impro-Visor’s play-along capabilities to support trading fours or eights with the user playing in real time. Looping over the entire chorus or a small segment is supported. The accompaniment is generated automatically from the chord changes, and various styles can be specified. Grammars can be learned by Impro-Visor from a set of one or more transcribed solos that have been entered as leadsheets. A large collection of chord changes for standard tunes is available in leadsheet form from the Impro-Visor user group. Users can also create new styles, enter voicings using a keyboard interface, etc.

Links to browse, if you're interested:

Main Page

Tutorials

User Group

Solo Samples


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Mflow: The Social Music Store

Proposing a new, free access to music business model, this ad-free music-based social networking site promises to fuse the best elements of iTunes and Twitter in one site with a new approach - and potential financial kickbacks for its users. Read on.......

You can follow the profiles of friends, artists and record labels and receive full-length previews of any tracks they decide to "flow" your way. Flowing is a "click and recommend to your followers" process, which they say provides better results than the computer-based "related artists" or "genius" systems used by other competitor services. And with this particular community, if a follower buys a track you've flowed their way, then you get a financial reward! 20% of the purchase price is credited to your account and can be used against your own music purchases.

The full-length previews are a great feature and a host of respected labels have already signed up to the service - including Sony, Universal, and respected indies like Domino, Skint, Freerange, and Wall of Sound. A mobile version is due to be released later in the year, which should also help aid your musical digestion. The only slight downside is that, for the time being, the site is available to UK users only.

Mflow went live on April 15, 2010. Check it out.


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iPad USB Audio Interface, Coming Soon?

The Apple iPad could soon support USB audio interfaces, according to a posting on the Apple Core Audio API Mailing List from Apple software engineering manager William Stewart. According to Stewart, class-compliant USB audio devices will be supported through the USB dongle from the iPad camera connection kit; the iPad will support USB-Audio 1.0 class specification only, supporting full speed; iPad docks may be able to support USB audio device I/O; low-power audio interfaces will be able to run off the iPad (you may otherwise need a powered hub / device power); and the interface will support 16 bit audio (24 bit may be supported later).

At this point, USB audio support on the iPad is just a rumour - no official announcement has been made. Nevertheless a lot of people are excited about the idea. (Generally, camera accessory kits aren't a way of providing audio expansion!).

It's definitely one to watch.





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Make Music Online With Friends in Realtime

Exciting times ahead! Plugin developer Ohm Force (known for their plugins like effects Ohm Boys and Frohmage) recently tease an upcoming collaborative host. It looks like the sort of thing Apple could have done, but hasn't (when you see the video you'll know what I mean.. especially the whole "time machine" similarity... as well as the GarageBand-style MIDI and audio editing pane, etc. etc.).

It's an interesting - if not great - idea... one I think we'll see more of as connected applications become more popular. Ableton had promised something like this with Share, and then fell off the radar. Imagine-Line had a collaborative tool called Collab for its FL Studio, then abandoned it. The most significant competition comes from tools like Indaba. Indaba's edge comes from being powered by Web tech, allowing users to do all their editing right in the browser; serious users can then keep using their host of choice and just bounce out audio. While Indaba has an offline editor too, the addition of plugins in Ohm Studio is a big change. Read on.......

The real future here is collaborate editing in the "cloud" - sessions are uploaded to a server, which keeps track of versioning. The changes are realtime, though usually the trick to allowing international collaboration over the internet is to make things delayed enough that everyone stays in sync.

There's also an accompanying Web community for connecting with collaborators. Everything else about the product - detailed features, pricing, and specifics of how it all fits together - is as yet unknown. Mac and Windows are both supported.



http://www.ohmstudio.com/

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment!


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Maize Sampler v2.0 - Create Your Own Virtual Instruments

Maize Sampler 2 is a new cross-platform tool for sound developers that lets you create sample-based virtual (VST and Audio Unit) instruments. Read on.....

Maize Sampler v2.0 is now available for $89. You can download a demo for free, and the license unlocks its full feature set. More details and the demo download link are available at the MaizeSoft site.

If you've used it, leave a comment with your thoughts.


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MusicTechTeacher.com - Quizzes, Games and Worksheets

I'm not quite sure why this calls itself Music Tech Teacher...it's certainly not focused on tech stuff, but rather on music theory. I find it's a great way to waste time, so much fun!!!

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