Fringe, a series co-created by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, has captured my interest lately. It's a science fiction series and it's subject is "fringe science". What really lifts this series above average is the acting-effort of John Noble as the mad-scientist, Dr. Bishop.
Oh, and so far I've spotted an Roland MC-303 and several computer-screens sporting something extremely similar to Max/MSP or pure data (couldn't tell because of low resolution.) Makes you wonder who the prop-guys are.
My friend nitr2k01 just released a FREE "Micro EP" of 4 tracks made on Gameboy using only two channels, the pulse no.1 and the pitched noise channel. And not just that, the pulse instrument had to be really short.
Via Create Digital Motion "Multi-touch for visualists? It’s coming, and it may have nothing to do with names like Apple or Microsoft. But while many projects now are experimental and pricey, your hands do seem to be close to being liberated from the mouse and keyboard alone."
I can't wait to make a av-patch in max w. one of these!
Building instruments and effects in Reaktor is a lot like building your own hardware. But ever wished those fabulous UIs you’ve seen could be used via something other than … ugh … your mouse? View Reaktor with a touchscreen or touch-controlled projection, and it’s an entirely different game. We already knew Tim Exile was a fan of touchscreens, but here’s what it can do in the hands of another Reaktor master.
Above are videos of Metrognome a.k.a Karl White getting down with a custom ensemble on a touchscreen. Karl reveals on the NI forums:
That was a huge undertaking and is one very complex Reaktor mod. I’ll be making more stuff public on the user library once I get the documentation lined up.
His site sports a lot of cool reaktor stuff like the BushInABox:
This is the Bitfreak for Reaktor 5, it uses pseudo-random, or pitched noise (NES, Atari 2600) as it's main sound source, and more than 200 types of it!!!There is no other software synth that does anything even similar to this (I have no idea why, because it sounds awesome!). Now you have another good reason to get your hands on Reaktor 5!
Lovers of the sound of the original Nintendo Game Boy, the Minimoog of game systems with its distinctive, rich 8-bit sound, this may be the best solution for integrating it with other music gear.
Our friend trash80, aka Timothy, has completed a project with open-source code for the affordable, easily-programmable Arduino electronics platform. To make it work, he’s built his own custom cartridge, adding standard MIDI communication with other devices. An 1/8” minijack plugs into your Game Boy cart, but you get standard MIDI DIN on the other end for connecting to keyboards, computers, and the like. With all the code available, you should not only be able to build your own MIDI Game Boy, but apply some of trash80’s techniques to other MIDI hardware projects, as well.
via Kore Noisepages. The new spiral sequencer, created by lazyfish. Looks cool...
"Native Instruments has posted a teaser video of something new called Spiral. It’s a sequencing instrument, and as you can see modulation is represented by swirling squares. It looks fantastic, it sounds wonderful and fluid – it’s, naturally, the creation of Reaktor maestro Lazyfish, who brought us ensembles like the cellular automata-powered Newschool and the brilliantly inscrutable Gaugear in Reaktor 5.1. Lazyfish is the kind of person who can make you believe the future of software instruments is unlimited."
Update: Today our études were to be performed by professional musicians, although many of them were okay, I had the bad luck of getting a somewhat... disillusioned, to say the least, flute player as the person who was going to perform my étude. Now what really bugs me is that these guys were getting paid to do this and only one out of five seemed to take it remotely serious. If they could at least try...
Yet another time my love of electronics has been reinforced, not having to think about fumbling musicians ruining your ideas really helps when trying to be creative... Not to mention what computers can do to sound recordings. I did record it and just for you to compare I edited it to sound a bit more like I would have wanted it to be like. First it's his FAIL, and then the edited.
What annoyed me the most was his excuses that the piece was written way too fast and bla bla bla. Hey, this guy is supposed to be a pro right? How come he's not at least on par with most other flute players. If you don't take your profession seriously (not as in being overly proud of being a musician but as in being devoted as hell) you should just quit, especially when it comes to being a musician these days since information is so readily available no one's interested in semi-professional skills.
I wish I could work with someone like this instead:
Do you sometimes discover an awesome thing that's been around for ages but you for some reason haven't encountered it despite how cool it is? DtBlkFx was one of those things for me. My flatmate showed it to me the other day and I've been hooked ever since!
It's an FFT-multi-effect for Win and Mac and has a couple of different transformations you can perform on the FFT'ed material, but what really opens up some new oportunities is the masking, which lets you for example select all the even harmonics and perform the transformations on it instead of on everything.
And here's a little thing I made using a couple of instances of it, and some BO, with a lot of Random, tempo-synchronized LFO's controlling almost everything there is in both effects...
