An 8-bit Black Mage graces a very special Jack-o-Lantern. Photo () .
If 16 bits spoil the mood of your All Hallow’s Eve, and you need some chips with your treats, the good peoples of the chip music community are hear to make sure the celebration of the visiting dead are properly accompanied by a free musical soundtrack. The download is free to grab, and fully for noncommercial, ShareAlike use.
The lineup:
The Guillotine Factory – Assembly Line
NESMETAL – The Throes of Wickedness
Heosphoros – A Traditional Childrens Waltz
Chema64 – Mictlantecuhtli
Norrin_Radd – Reciprocal Dimensions
Mr. Doom – Poison’d Candy
Nestrogen – Infernal Misanthropy
Dr. Zilog – Sanguinary Sect of Worship
arottenbit – Chemiotrails
FTF – Phobos & Deimos
Baphomania – Roaming Spectral Shores
Peter Swimm – illithid
H-Pizzle – Ghosts of a Fallen Empire
Enjoy!
And you can add this to our exclusive, blippy, delicious Liz Revision Mix:
Have you noticed that Twitter evolved to a new level recently? It’s not a news story that you have Twitter. Everyone does. But what this next level of Twitter is doing, is making the experience of Twitter more customizable and personal. You can use this to your advantage as an artist. So here are 3 Twitter apps that you should check out and see if they work for you:
- Tweet Deck is very good at organizing your Twitter world and giving it a sense of community that most don’t get with logging onto the Twitter page. Understanding what’s going on in your Twitter world will help you start conversations and answer back at people who may be trying to talk to you. The point is to stay connected and TweetDeck helps with that.
– Twibbon is like a tattoo for your twitter picture (avatar). If you belong to something, a group, a tribe, whatevs, you want to show that association. Plunk a poppy on your avatar to remember the veterans, or a NY Yankees logo to show the world that you have bad taste in sports teams. In both cases you’re spreading a message and saying something about yourself. BANDS DO THIS: Create a logo, join Twibbon, and get your followers to show their support by tattooing your logo on their face.
– This is pretty self explanatory. You post your music, then you tweet about it, your fans wanting the track must then tweet for that track (ah, ah, see that? Clever right?). I haven’t had a chance to use this app myself but it appears to be a pretty innovative way of sharing your music.
Wow! Wasn’t that the just the Top of the tops!? Maybe… there is a lot going on for Twitter these days… and yet with all this hubub, word is that Twitter’s growth is , and its number pale in comparison to Fbook. So it still appears that you need to be active in more than one social media network to get the most out of this internet thing everyone keeps talking ’bout.
The veil between the living and dead is growing thin, and I… uh, have some free music for you. Sorry, it turns out I don’t have a clever lead for this story, and my segue makes no sense. So let’s get to it!
Friend of the Site Liz McLean Knight aka aka Quantazelle of has put together a special, exclusive mix for CDM of 117-119 bpm musical goodness, excavated from the “_blippy” folder of sketches on her USB drive. Matt Moldover, who has been working on his album, lent his laptop. (Watch him assembling CDs in the video after the break.)
It’s all in celebration of a Halloweeen party Saturday night in Chicago, headlined by Josh Davis (BitShifter). Party ringleader Liz joins Josh on behalf of subVariant to represent the IDM-glitch-minimal-tech-house side of things, and Mr. Automatic (Front 312) and Onefiftyone (Chicago Workshop) will be joining in. If you’re in Chicago, this looks like the place to spend your Saturday. If, like me, you’re not, well, we have some music and videos for you to bring the party home.
Chicagoans:
And yes, while Josh is working on Game Boys in 8-bit, our CDM mix is fully 16-bit, baby! I’m telling you, 16-bit is totally the future.
Now, for a bit of Josh tearing it up in glorious 8 bits:
from on .
from on .
Bitshifter did an interview recently with , for more on his performance techniques and inspiration.
And here’s a video of what was up to as Liz perfected her mix on his laptop — assembling special-edition versions of his CD, which, thanks to custom electronics in the jewel case, can double as noisemakers instead of just packaging. (See our .)
NewsFactor - Apple and Palm continue to play a cat-and-mouse game, and this time it was Apple's turn to do the chasing. Apple on Thursday released an iTunes software update that once again blocks the Palm Pre smartphone from syncing DRM-free music, photos and videos from the iTunes Store.
It’s round, it’s mechanically-resistant, it’s tangible, it supports multi-touch and gestures. Yep – it’s the turntable, and outdoing it would mean reinventing the wheel, literally. And so it is that more than a few Ableton fans have wondered how they might work vinyl into their software axe of choice.
Ableton and digital vinyl vendor Serato have announced they’re doing “something,” and then announced at the beginning of October on January 14, 2010 at NAMM. Oh, and they said it will “unleash your creativity,” which sounds good. (It’s better than, say, “Ableton and Serato’s creative partnership will unleash two dozen angry badgers,” or “if you own Ableton Live, what we will say in 2010 is that we will unleash an unspeakable, nameless evil, known only to the ancients, which shall bring about the endtimes.”)
Here’s the surprise – you likely won’t have to wait for Serato to get integrated digital vinyl control. It’s already working with Ms. Pinky, and that means more choice, more DIY possibilities, and a broader variety of ways to integrate turntables and Live.
You see, there’s this little thing called Max for Live, which allows the use of Max patches inside Live as seamless instruments and effects. And one of the best – if least-known – vinyl control systems out there has long featured Max integration: . People have already made use of VST plug-in integration, but because Max for Live also connects to the Live API for control of Live itself, the functionality of the two can be expanded.
Via our friend Luthier.Lab, we get a first look at the Ms. Pinky plug-in. And this should be just the beginning, as Ms. Pinky and its Max/MSP support could be a great construction kit for building your own solution – something that may not be possible with Serato.
[Luthier.Lab - en Español]
(which has some very funny ideas about how to translate Spanish)
While you ponder the possibilities, it’s time for a video from Daito Manabe demonstrating that not all turntablists sound quite the same.
PC World - Store shelves will host cool gadgets that could be good buys as the holiday season rolls in. Some new cameras, including the Flip MinoHD from Cisco Systems and LifeCam Cinema from Microsoft, are lightweight devices that can shoot high-definition video. Another portable device, TwitterPeek, is a unique mobile messaging device exclusively for Twitter fans. For Apple's iPhone, Shure has released new earphones that can control video and music.
Reuters - U.S. digital media company RealNetworks Inc swung back into the black in the third quarter as cost-cutting offset sliding revenue from music and games.
“.” Wait — “Drum Machines Have Soul, Ableton Has No Soul.” Photo: Leo-setä.
Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.
It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have and Elton’ John’s classic call to (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a .) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a , among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, .)
No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.
Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… . (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)
I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.
Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.
The drum machine you might have bought then could be the , or perhaps a . They’re fantastic, unique-sounding instruments. But “the best quality possible” is not generally a phrase associated with instruments of this era. We love them because they aren’t 192kHz, 64-bit multisamples recorded from 30 microphones and shipped on a 100 GB hard drive, because “quality” isn’t actually everything. And if you bought a new mixer in 1989, I assume you picked up something like Mackie’s just-released LM-1602, rather than an SSL. Of course, you really could go do that now. In fact, Ableton Live recently added 64-bit processing in the signal chain; the software that does more aliasing to account for lower bitrates is actually Pro Tools.
Fear for the ghost not in the machine. Photo:
He goes on:
The thing is, you have the limitation of the program, the limitation of the digital mixing which is happening inside the computer, you have the limitation of the sound sources of the synthesizers—the virtual synthesizers. Even the sound engine is playing a very big role in the whole sound of the product. If you have a good turntable and good speakers, you can hear it is made in Ableton. Logic, for example, is very neutral in sound but Ableton…you can hear it in two seconds.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Live does have an overused sound – but that comes from people using effects presets as-is, people not knowing how to mix, people time stretching and warping without adjusting settings or taking care to think about the impact on its sound.
The idea that you have to use a turntable to hear these things, or generally to hear quality issues in a track produced entirely digitally is… well, an interesting theory. (It’d be like testing the fidelity of your inkjet printer by first taking a Polaroid of the output.)
They have all of these virtual instruments that are calculated by a computer, and you have a certain space where you have to put everything. And when you want to leave this space, you have to live with compromises, the compromises of digital mixes and recordings.
Now, perhaps I’m wrong, but I thought that if for some reason you thought you needed to mix on an analog board and record to, say, analog reel-to-reel, you were no less able to do that with the analog outs of your MacBook Pro than with your 606.
And what exactly was in those vintage drum machines, if not a computer making calculations? Eleven secret herbs and spices? Elves with slide rules?
But this is the beauty of interviews – you can say whatever you want. And it definitely beats boring.
There is also one statement with which I wholeheartedly agree:
People are finding it easy to publish something without any controls. And this is the problem with the internet in general. There is so much information, and no one knows if it’s true or not. It’s just there. It’s an information monster.
It’s almost as though the Internet is a place in which people can make any wild claim they wish, without anyone questioning its basis in reality or fact.
Commercial developers are now releasing music creation apps for mobile game systems, in the form of the KORG DS-10 for Nintendo DS and Rockstar’s Beaterator for PSP. But some of the best ideas still come from the homebrew community.
What’s most impressive about ToneSynthDS is not so much what it does as its interface, fitting all its functionality into the DS’ two compact screens. Its minimal interface finds an elegant arrangement of everything you most urgently need, with a sequencer screen on one DS screen and basic virtual analog synth parameters on the other. A 4 x 4 matrix next to the main sequencer grid lets you switch between patterns, in a step sequencer reminiscent of the monome and Tenori-On. There isn’t a whole lot of depth to event editing in this early version, but it could be a lovely way to sketch melodic patterns. (And some of those limitations come from the DS itself. Note, though, that this app gets a full 16 real-time channels on the original DS hardware to the Korg DS-10’s paltry two.)
Developer Fanta/Hotelsinus Sound Design has been posting mock-ups, demos, and now builds as he goes. That means that he gets feedback from an audience of readers and incorporates those as he develops the app – another key difference between the DIY/homebrew scene and conventional commercial development.
More good news: this DS app should also run as a PC VST in a forthcoming version, opening up the fun to folks using netbooks and laptops instead of the DS and creating a nice mobile-to-computer workflow.
In related Nintendo DS news: If you’re thinking about getting the new DS-10 Plus Limited Edition of the KORG DS-10, you’ll need to get it for the region coding of your DS. (In other words, you probably won’t want to import it.) The “Dual Mode” functions are region-locked, so North American and European users can’t use the Japanese DS-10. That’s not such a big deal, as North American distribution was announced, and other regions are expected to follow, but it’s good to know. . (Thanks, !)
Check out some demo videos and a quick run-down on specs, and if you’ve got the capability to run homebrew, you can give this a try. Thanks to Art/toitoy for the tip!
Two oscillators with fixed oscillators, ADSHR envelopes
Filter section (in development)
Ring modulation and “cross” mixing (cross-fading between oscillators)
16×16 step sequencer, 4×4 pattern selection
Clearly, there’s a lot of work still to be done, so test this build at your own risk. But it’s already good fun, and the coming roadmap looks logical, with filter options, disk rendering, song mode, and more in store. It’s also an interesting read as far as wrangling with emulators and some of the challenges of DS development.
