Fun, innovative and incredibly annoying to everyone around you. iPhone and iPad native. $1.99. Get it: click here. Looking for a classic song to inspire you? Check out The Human Beatbox from the Fat Boys. By the way, the Fat Boys are not fat anymore!
“The app listens to the sounds you produce and recognizes them, allowing you to make crazy beats and be part of the challenge. Memorize rhythms and repeat them as fast as possible to become an expert. BoomClap also use a brand new adaptation mechanism: it can learn the sounds you want to use to play!” – billaboop.com
In general it’s easy to make fun of drummers. After all who chooses to sit behind the rest of the band? I do like EBM drummers… at least they have cool electronic drums and stand in front. Now that I’ve pissed some of you off here’s an expensive way to light up your recording studio’s waiting room: The 326 Drum Light. It would be cooler if it were an entire drum set that triggered lasers or something. Well hey it’s only $850!
“Designed by 326 this protoype is the first of its kind. Tap the drum and it turns on, another tap and it turns off. Sensitivity control stops other noise from activating the light.” – endemicworld.com
Lawrie Cape from England sent me an email this morning with details of a new project he/she has been working on called Cellular AutoMidi. It’s a generative audio app running inside Adobe Air. It has internal sounds but also uses the Flash Midi Server system so you can control VSTs with it. If you don’t have your copy of Audio Damage’s Automaton at work this could get your Cellular Automata algorithm fix in!
“I’ve just finished work on a generative audio app called Cellular Automidi. Cellular AutoMidi is a generative music app, making “music” based on a modified Cellular Automata algorithm. It can make music itself, or you can use it as a midi controller with other software/equipment. Each cell can be alive or dead. Once in a generation, each cell looks at it’s surrounding cells, and dies if it is lonely or overcrowded. If a dead cell has an optimum amount of neighbors, it will come to life! Each generation, all the cells which have come to life will sound a note. The notes are assigned based on the cell’s y position, and are all in the pentatonic scale.” – Lawrie Cape
You can’t be a ravetard without a Glow Stick. Here’s how they are made. This video also points out that these things are chemicals so when you’re on five hits of ecstacy and your stick breaks do not drink the liquid! Who knew yellow would be so much brighter?
PSP Audioware from Poland was one of the early great VST plug-in makers. One of their plug-ins Nitro is in my top 10 of all time. They have updated there very good delay plug-in the 84 up a number to 85. $39 upgrade until August 8th then it jumps to $99.
“PSP 85 successor of the PSP 84 which became the favorite delay plug-in for some of you. PSP 85 is the product of our eternal fascination with the endless possibilities offered by variable sample rate delay lines. PSP 85 benefits from aggressive algorithm optimization and adds numerous significant new features while retaining full preset and bank compatibility with our renowned PSP 84 delay. The plug-in comes with sixty wild and twisted new presets designed to highlight its exciting new attributes, in addition to a supplementary bank containing more ‘bread and butter’ PSP 84 factory programs.” – pspaudioware.com
Here’s some music I recorded for a German female producer. It’s in her court to add vocals for this and send it back to me. You’re hearing two slightly detuned Yamaha CS5 lines. Both are going through D16 Devator’s. You also hear white noise from the CS5 modulated through Ableton’s Auto-Pan. Assorted booms are my own recordings and swing is up.
Here’s a tasty new iOS vocoder from Germany software house Virsyn called iVoxel. When it comes to vocoders clarity is king. This is why in the past I’ve mostly used non-traditional vocoder type units like a Digitech Talker. It seems the iVoxel has some of that mojo in it performing some resynthesis of your own voice before the vocoder section to make it clearer. I also like that you can record your own voice and use a few samples spread over the keys. How many iPads are we going to want on stage with us?
“Voxel is a combination of a voice optimized synthesizer and a vocoder. The vocoder part is based on the Matrix vocoder from VirSyn used by many famous artists – one of them the well known german group Kraftwerk. The channel filters used by iVoxel are based on the Sennheiser Vocoder VSM201 resulting in a rich and fat analogue sound characteristic.” – virsyn.net/mobileapp
Pitch correction, harmony generation with presets, reverb, stutter effects, ring mod, and more for the iPad. This App called ImproVox makes me want a proper audio interface for the iPad. It would be fun manipulating my voice during a live show in real time via the touch screen. Of course it all depends if it sounds good… I’ll try this guy over the weekend and report back!
“Changing the sound of your voice is as easy as moving your fingers across the screen, and you don’t need to know any music theory. Because effect and harmony characteristics can be changed while you sing, the sonic possibilities are endless. Create reverberant rock hits and cavernous choral compositions, or just speak into the mic and transform your voice using abstract effects.” – museami.com
I’ve been a fairly consistent poster on Wire to the Ear. I almost always post something each day. When I fly off to Europe it’s a bit more difficult but more and more hotels have good net access. The past few days playing two shows was a bit different. Besides not having internet access (or handing myself a huge AT&T data bill) I was busy having major fun. The first night in at Row14 in Barcelona was great and the 40k event in Fraga on the Desert called Monegros was something I won’t ever forget. I landed at JKF (NYC) late last night, got home slept a rock solid 8 hours and I’m sitting here attempting to wash enough of everything I just experienced to the back of my mind so I can start with spreadsheets and the energy business. Life is full so there’s my excuse for a few days of silence here. I’ll follow up with some photos from the weekend shortly.
I love vintage hardware reverbs. My sole use of Altiverb is to load it up with old Lexicon Impulse Responses. There’s a lot of hype going around about a new plug-in from Relab called the LX480. It’s a obvious recreation of one of the all time best hardware reverbs the Lexicon 480.
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