On June 4th, 2011 is the 4th Annual Experimental Garage Sale! This craft fair focuses on circuit bending and DIY musical instruments at the Experimental Sound Studio space with 12 sellers who will have plenty circuit bent devices, un-bent toys, electronic parts, kits, experimental instruments, contact microphones, guitar pedals, art, and more. The sale will begin rain or shine at 12:00 PM and last until 6:00 PM.
Here’s the Facebook Event page.
Here’s a cool mini-documentary on the Roland TB-303, by Nate Harrison, the same guy who did the Amen Break documentary.
via Michael O’Shea
Here’s a nice article over at Memeshift with a lot of resources from all over the intertrons for getting started making electronic music. Even though it’s a bit old (2008), it focuses on basic principles and components, like oscillators, filters, synthesizer programming, and sampling. A nice resource for people just getting started.
The author recommends Ableton Live as the sequencer of choice, because it allows for both live performance and more traditional sequencing and I agree. I would also add that to get some really advanced sound and have control over it at a very granular level, look into MAX / Msp. Despite the steep learning curve, and somewhat unintuitive interface, it allows for some very interesting, interactive and experimental projects, like these over at Musicthing and these over at Create Digital Music. There’s a guy who uses turntables to video mix, someone who created an invisible violin using a wii controller and bluetooth with MAX/Msp, and a crazy balloon + lights + sound installation by Monolake at Mutek.
If you just want to play with something online and get the feel for making electronic music, Audiotool (pictured above) is pretty awesome.
“How to Start Marking Electronic Music”
Also, if you live in Chicago, there are other physical humans that can help with your quest at
via
DJ Tech Tools has done a comprehensive comparison of the main players out there in the digital DJ World. With a chart!
Read more: “Battle of the 1s and 0s. Traktor Vs Ableton Vs Serato”
Last Thursday was beset by technical difficulties, so I’m re-doing the virtual release party tonight. Watch the post on the subVariant page in case I need to switch back to Stickam again: Robohustlin Virtual Release Party
Last.fm introduced a beta feature that can compare artists, genres and tags on a gender – age plot. Interesting.
http://blog.last.fm/2010/09/22/now-in-the-playground-gender-plots
Here’s one that’s particularly interesting:
Software, engineer, DJ, producer, and musician all skew male, while boyfriend, girl, email, outgoing, person, friends and love all skewed female.
Thoughts?
Here is a cool program I found to help with vocal practice, Tartini.
Tartini is a program designed as a practical music analysis tool for singers and instrumentalists.
Just plug in a microphone and instantly your computer will give real-time feedback including:-* Accurate pitch contours for visualising intonation, vibrato shape, tuning or just which note is being played
* Loudness graphs, to help analyse dynamics
* Harmonic structure of a note describing timbreThe program is named after the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini. In 1714, he discovered that if two related notes were played simultaneously on a violin, a third sound could be heard. The frequency of the third sound is the difference in frequencies of the two original notes. Tartini taught his students that unless they could hear the third sound, they were playing out of tune. Thus we see him as an early example of someone trying to apply scientific principles to understanding and improving musical technique.
Here’s the .tsi file for the M-Audio X-Session Pro for Traktor Pro that I used on my latest mix: “The Consequences.” The photo shows how I set up the top knobs and the rest is pretty standard, with soft-takeovers on the faders and effect knob. The file is not backwards compatible for earlier versions of Traktor.
