wire to the ear

Real analog synthesizers, hairspray and makeup. What more do you want? If I had a time machine I would spend a few hundred years in the 1980s.

via Best Free Documentaries

By now we all have a bunch of old spare controllers lying around so why not hack the hell out of the them? Luckily Brooklyn native Moldover has posted this video showing us exactly how to do it. You need controller (duh), a screwdriver, some plastic, rubber, scissors, glue and a permanent marker. The marker is optional because it’s only to make things, “look cool”.

The hilarious thing is all he does is pull out some keys, glue rubber on the rest of them, draw on the case and assign controllers to stuff. I have to say this is completely stupid and awesome all at the same time!

Related post: To perform live with controllers: Controllerism

Vocal manipulation with Ableton Simplers. from wiretotheear on Vimeo.

There are thousands of ways to mangle audio in weird and wild sound. Here’s a screencast of a trick I sometimes put to work. Here is the end result (4 samples are loaded in this player):

Here is the original sample I used:

The technique uses multiple Ableton Simplers in a Device Group. If your an Ableton wizard you will know this stuff  but if your not a regular user of Simpler and Macros you will learn something.

Sample credit: Incarnadine

I’ve been asked by a California startup to help get musicians to take their survey. They use the data to get VC funding and make their product better. They do have something unique in the works for musicians so I agreed to post the request. I also get access to the data which could help grab a few advertisers on this site. The good thing is the survey is one browser screen, eleven multiple choice questions. It will take you less than a minute so take a clicky and please help us out:

Take the survey: click here

photo credit: tray

I’m showing up to my next DJ gig with this. 100% awesome!

via Music Thing on Twitter

Yesterday I took a trip to Ikea in Berlin. To get from Prenzlauer Berg to Spandau takes about thirty minutes on the S-Bahn. I had my camera with me which also takes decent video. However, it wasn’t visual imagery I was after. I hit record but left the camera’s lens cap on. I was only after audio recordings.

There are a myriad of hot flash recorders on the market but I used what I had with me and I think the recordings sound great. Another advantage of recording this way is people aren’t really aware of what your doing. If I had a Sony PCM-D1 in my hand people may not speak naturally. I’m planning on using some of these recordings on my next album but your free to use them too. Remember it’s not the sounds, it’s how you use them!

The audio player will play each sample in succession:

You can download the 24bit Wavs by clicking here:
Berlin_S-Bahn-24bit_Wav.zip

Berlin_S-Bahn by Oliver Chesler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.wiretotheear.com.

photo credit: leralle

One of the golden rules of modern times is: Never ever leave stuff in a truck unattended. Every first of the month in any city you see moving vans guarded by college girls as their boyfriends haul Ikea crap up into apartments. If they all know this rule why didn’t The Stooges management? Nevertheless we can’t blame them; it’s the dirty thieves that we have to be pissed off at. Let’s hope they are dumb enough to try and hock the gear on eBay because one thing the management did right was record all the serial numbers. Here’s the story:

IGGY AND THE STOOGES
EQUIPMENT STOLEN ON AUGUST 4, 2008
OUTSIDE THE EMBASSY SUITES HOTEL
208 SAINT ANTOINE OUEST,
MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA

All equipment was in a rented penske 15 foot yellow truck with u.s. (michigan) license plate number AC46493 parked immediately outside the hotel, the theft had to have happened in the morning, between 6:30 and 7:30 am - truck and all gear stolen.

if anyone has information, ANY INFORMATION! Please, please, PLEASE as soon as possible contact Eric Fischer at: nycentral13@gmail.com, cell phone: +1 646 932 1907

By the amount of “please’s” above, I’d say Eric is in deep shite. I know Montreal has a big biker community so maybe they can help considering they probably agree with Iggy’s demeanor. Then again… maybe they pulled this heist off. Let’s hope they catch whoever did it.

For a list of what was stolen and each item’s serial number: click here

Related posts:
Hard drive stolen right out of computer during set.
Secure your recording studio from thieves.

Photo credits: 3pom and Robert Scales

I often say that the arrangement is the most important part of a song. For some people it’s also the most difficult task. Anyone can make an incredible short loop but developing it into a 4-5 minute song takes some practice, thought and planning. A trick my friend Miro Pajic uses which he calls “negative arranging” consists of copying every track’s parts across the entire 4-5 minutes. Next, he goes in and deletes parts instead of starting blank and adding clips/parts as he progresses. I don’t personally work this way but I was surprised to see Miro is not alone.

As I was doing my nightly troll though the Ableton forums I came across a post by uber Live geek Tarekith. He posted a link to his guide to song arranging and it’s definitely worth a read. He also uses the “negative arrangement” style but he calls it, “subtractive sequencing”: click to read

This is a technique I call subtractive sequencing, where we start with all the song elements and remove bits and pieces to form the structure of the song. - tarekith.com

Have you ever tried this technique? Personally I fill up Session view with many tracks, clips and scenes and drag them into a blank Arrangement view.

Infrasonik is a Canadian company which produces sample packs for electronic musicians. They just posted an outstanding video on YouTube of their top 10 Ableton Live shortcuts. This is one of the best Ableton Live tutorial videos out there. I knew most of the shortcuts but this was a nice reminder of a few forgotten tricks. If you use Live I am sure you will learn something.

On the Wire to the Ear YouTube channel I have created an Ableton Tips & Tricks Playlist. So far I put five videos in it and will be added more as a come across videos I think fit.

I’ve been recording music since 1989 and each year since I’ve saved my songs, stems and album covers on Cassettes, DATs, Zip Disks, CDs, DVDs, assorted hard drives and even in the cloud. Today with each new important music social network or online music retailer that arrives I have to upload my entire catalog again. The past few times I’ve done this by digging into all the old CDs repeatedly. Today I put an end to that madness. I purchased a portable bus powered USB 2.0 drive that is the new grand central station of all the music I ever created (and all the music on my record label). Each release is in its own folder containing the song in all formats, artwork and remix files. When it’s time to upload to Trackitdown I have 320kpbs MP3s using the Lame encoder ready. Beatport? No problem Wavs are at hand. Oh yeah, I also keep 30 second previews saved too.

This is a novel idea but I feel good that I finally got around to it. I think this massive futz was just in the nick of time as my old Tascam DA-30 DAT machine was making squeaking sounds. The next step is to use SuperDuper! and regularly clone the new baby. It’s true that someone could steal my entire music catalog all in one swoop but those interested are already doing that online (har har). I put a .txt document on the drive titled Contact_Me.txt. I hope if the drive ever does get lost, stolen and found a nice person will be kind enough to reach me. I’m considering also encrypting the drive. I’ve heard Leo Laporte on the TWIT podcast mention software to just that. What was it called again? As long as it’s not too tricky or kill the performance of the drive why not.

So what exactly did I get? I’m in Berlin so I walked down to Alexanderplatz to Mediamarkt and grabbed a Western Digital “My Passport” 160GB bus powered USB 2.0 drive. I know Firewire would be a bit faster but I am purely just using the drive for file storage and I have more USB ports than Firewire ones available. This drive was only 67€, anything with Firewire was over 150€. Check out the photos of this thing: click here I know its geeky to look at hard drive photos but this thing is uber nice. It’s white, tiny and has a white LED power light that also blinks when the drive is in action. To top it off it came with a short white USB cable.