Pink Floyd’s ex-manager on the future of music
Former Pink Floyd and T Rex manager Peter Jenner, now emeritus president of the International Music Managers’ Forum, talks online music, copyright and the future of the music industry.
>Was the UK Digital Economy Act right to focus on copyright?
I can see what they were trying to do, but where they went wrong was in obsessing about piracy and P2P (peer-to-peer) filesharing. It became about how we stop P2P and in my book stopping P2P is like trying to stop it raining. The whole internet is built on copying.
The act focuses on a false problem. That is not to say that people not paying for music is not a problem. But P2P is just one of many ways in which you can access music for free. People have memory sticks, blank CDs, email, instant messaging, so I think it was a very facile look at the issue which was driven by the copyright industry.
>What angle should the government have taken when debating the act?
They should have looked at the question the other way round by taking into account how people access their music. If what we want is to make sure the creators are properly rewarded then we need to work out how we can find the systems which work and are consistent with the way the public uses digital material, technology and devices. My position, essentially, is that when you buy a broadband connection you are not using it to access your email, you are primarily using it to get content. What we should be doing is charging for use of music on the internet in an unobtrusive way.
We already do it on radio. People buy their BBC licence and one of the things it pays for is music, both in terms of employment of musicians and royalties. A lot of creative content is paid for by the BBC. We should be looking at a similar model for the internet.
>Will the act help stamp out piracy?
It might move P2P from unencrypted services to encrypted services and from major internet service providers (ISPs) to intranets. But if the major labels start suing people it will increase people’s hostility towards them and towards the music industry and will decrease the likelihood of people paying for music. And it will destroy revenue. The costs of administering the act will be phenomenal and that cost will rightly be stuck at the door of the industries who wanted it. It’s basically unenforceable.
Thanks to Strategy Eye and Sarah Vizard
Sylo Synthesiser features live time-stretching technology
Sylo Synthesizer is a free iPad synth that lets you build sounds from basic waveforms, or capture them using the iPad’s built-in microphone.
Sylo Synthesiser features live time-stretching technology based on granular synthesis, and a suite of filters.
Options include:
- Speed up or slow down a recorded sound to use as an instrument
- With a regular wavetable synthesiser, higher-pitched notes are also faster, like chipmunks, and lower-pitched notes are also slower, as though they are moving through treacle, Enable “Sync Speed” feature, though, and lower or higher-pitched notes still play back at the same speed, keeping them in sync with each other
- Adjust the speed control even while you’re playing notes: Slow, stop or even rewind the sound in the middle of notes — without changing the pitch
- Granular synthesis allows you to create instruments or effects from a recording, that do not sound like the original, yet retain its realistic, natural sound
- Frequency modulation, ring modulation, echo/delay, distortion, and a low-pass filter with resonance control are available
Sylo Synthesiser is a teaser for Sylo Synthesizer Pro, which adds these features:
- Use existing audio files as the building-blocks of your instrument: import audio from wave, aiff, mp3 and aac/m4a files
- Save recordings to your iPad or to Dropbox1 online storage
- Save your new instruments to the preset list for fast acces
On stage real-time synthesizer patching
Here’s the digest video of DenshiKaimen – ElectroSeaLevel – Modular Synthesizer Performance on 08062010 at uplink/factory Shibuya Tokyo Japan. Hideyuki eicheph Fukasawa versus Mr.Nobuhiko Nakayama on the stage of real-time synthesizer patching. It was a strange party ever.
Making modules for the Eurorack
I hope you are having a nice summer holiday, anyway in my spare time I’ve made a few modules for my Eurorack. The inspiration for these came from a Quad Slew design from navs modular lab blog. In that article I came across a link to a DIY page by Doepfer which I hadn’t seen before. There’s plenty of simple projects there and so I set to work and ended up building a Quad Slew, a Dual Inverter, a CV Amplifier, an Audio Mixer and an expansion port for my A-137-2 Wave Multiplier II. And here’s the result.
There’s some discussion about the Quad Slew over on the Muff Wigglers Forum
Exploring bass pedals
Nice intro to the Moog Taurus bass pedal
Keyboard Magazine video review (my full print review shall be available in the October, 2010 edition) of the amazing Moog Taurus 3 Bass Pedals. True to historical form laid out by the ’70s-era Taurus I, this is a wide-bottomed 100% analog synthesizer. I got to spend some time with one of the 1,000 units made, plaster my feet all over it and figure out if it actually possible to shred on this 13-pedal, 1-octave beast.
Anyine else tried it, leave a comment
Expert Sleepers unveils Augustus Loop v2.3.0.
Expert Sleepers unveils Augustus Loop v2.3.0.
Augustus Loop is an emulation of a tape-based delay effect for both Windows and Mac OS, with some extra features to facilitate its use as a looping device.
We’re proud to announce the release of Augustus Loop v2.3.0.
The headline here is that this is our first 64 bit Mac OS XVST, and
so is usable without a ‘bridge’ in apps such as the 64 bit version of
Reaper, and will be usable in any forthcoming 64 bit Mac release of
Cubase.The AU and Windows VST versions are also updated.
Changes:
- * First 64 bit Mac OS X VST release.
- * Improved handling of mouse events (dragging knobs would temporarily
- freeze the host UI on some platforms).
- * Improved accuracy of MIDI event handling.
Price: $49
Find out more on AudioMulch 2.1
Two patches featuring polyrhythms and non-Western beats.
This is a basic tutorial designed for new users of AudioMulch. It demonstrates how to use AudioMulch’s Metasurface parameter control interface.
The latest updates in AudioMulch, the cult-hit Windows-only app that’s grown up and now runs on both Mac and Windows. 2.1 adds dynamics processing devices, support for Mac Audio Unit plug-ins, an optional light grey color scheme (for those who missed the earlier skin), and updated help. Why use AudioMulch? This modular patching environment is packed with a carefully-selected array of useful objects, called “contraptions,” which make it relatively easy to patch together custom performance and production creations without the usual mucking around with low-level objects.
What’s New In AudioMulch 2.1?
Release Notes
Trailer from Apoptygma Berzerk
The live DVD trailer for the upcoming live DVD/CD from Apoptygma Berzerk, “Imagine there’s no Lennon”. The live set will be released on 22 October 2010. Watch the rather promising trailer after the jump!
The band are currently adding more and more dates to their tour and will see their fans in the US, Canada and South America from September 5th to 18th. After that they will return to the European stages from November 13th on.
The 50 best vocoder songs ever
“The vocoder was invented to improve telecommunications in the 1930s and re-purposed by the military to mask speech among officials during World War II. By the 1980s, artists like Afrika Bambaataa and Zapp began using it as a musical instrument. The sound caught on and has remained one of the most influential movements in music to this day, although Auto-Tune (not included on the list), has mostly replaced it. Writer Dave Tompkins is somewhat of a vocoder historian; the legendary music journalist wrote a book this year, How To Wreck A Nice Beach, chronicling the machine’s history. (The book includes a chapter on Talkbox, vocoder’s funkier twin sister, which explains its inclusion on parts of the list.) Musicians have been trying to sound like robots for years, and this Tompkins-curated list of The 50 Greatest Vocoder Songs is the ultimate guide to the machine’s best moments.”
Alien robots
This collection features royalty-free Vocoded loops, Android and Robot talk, cosmic Bot loops, one-shots and a collection of Vocoded drum loops and synth parts.
The Alien Robot Vox vocoded sample collection includes more than 260 loops between 90 and 126 bpm and tops the scales at just more than 350MB. This sound collection offers 61 Autotalk Android loops, 32 cosmic Bot Loops, 25 FX talk Bot loops, 36 one-shot Bot loops, 59 rhythmic melody loops, 32 Vocoded and processed drum loops, and 14 bonus synth parts.
It is available as a main pack including acidized WAV and Rex2 samples, or as a separate Apple Loops pack.
DATAMASKIN
