Bibio – Sampling in the garden…
Something to try perhaps – bring out the samplers into the wild:
unshine in England is precious, so when the weather is fine it feels sinful to be cooped up in a studio, I’m very lucky to have the choice, so why not choose?
When the weather is fine, I like to take a few bits of gear outside and enjoy being creative in a different environment, plus there are all sorts of other sounds to explore outdoors, and in this case, sample.
A quick video of me making beats entirely out of recordings of objects found in the garden. No previously recorded samples were used.
Capturing sounds with a vintage Sennheiser MD-21 microphone, then using the EMU SP1200 for its inimitable fidelity, then resampled and sequenced on an Akai MPC 5000.
Videoed by me on a Canon 5D mkii.
New features explained – Symphonix Evolution 1.90
This video explains some of the new features in our Symphonix Evolution iPad app. Symphonix Evolution makes it easy to enter music notation, edit MIDI files and work with external MIDI devices through a suitable interface. With wavetable synthesis and audio quality that rivals dedicated synth keyboards, Symphonix Evolution is perfect for taking your music on the road!
New features covered are the advanced MIDI settings, piano/instrument finger positions and the arpeggiator.
Check out http://www.vinclaro.com.au/ios/symphonix/symphonix.htm for more information or our blog at http://vinclaro.blogspot.com
New iPad apps: Strange Attractor and Voco
Strange Attractor is a truly novel sound generator based on chaos theory. The outcome of PhD research, it uses a feedback system to process and generate sound. Unlike conventional synthesis techniques, sounds emerge in surprising and unexpected ways, almost having a life of their own. By moving your finger on the screen, you can navigate through a space of evolving sounds, that build-up, pulsate, and decay. Sound input through the microphone or headphone socket can be processed into fractal textures, or will trigger and control oscillations.
Voco is a touch controlled phase vocoder. Sounds can be manipulated by touching the screen, and played like like an instrument. Time is represented on the horizontal axis, and pitch on the vertical. The yellow bars display the sounds intensity. Sounds can be sampled through the microphone or headphone socket, or loaded via iTunes. There are also features to constrain the pitch to different scales, and to glide the playing point around the screen to make rhythmic loops.
iPad Experiment Controlling Sunrizer Synthesizer from TNRi
Here’s a new feature from Mark Mosher 
Background details:
In this video I’m experimenting with using an TNRi to drive the Sunrizer synth which is running in the background.
I’ve used the physical Tenori-On W for over two years. I prefer to run use it as a controller and run racks for virtual instruments running in Ableton Live or to turn external hardware rather than using it’s internal synth engine. So naturally, after getting TNRi for my iPad I wanted to replicate the same idea.
Luckily, certain synths such as the wonderful Sunrizer (http://beepstreet.com/) can remain running in the background allowing you to switch over to a controller app such as TNRi.
This video shows all this in action. Here is the setup:
1) Start Sunrizer and find or create a patch to your liking
2) In the top-right of Sunrizer is a button labelled ‘BCK”. Click it and it will start blinking yellow.
3) Click the Home button on your iPad
4) Start TNRi
5) Launch the menu by clicking the status window above the play button
6) Select “Preferences Menu” and turn “Local Control” to “Off”.
That’s it, now all the MIDI gets pumped through to the background app.
Experimental – musical table
This project by Kouichi Okamoto is awesome! 504 musical box movements which each play only a single note:
The musical table installed 504 volumes on the top plate,
and there are 504 musical box movements which play only a single sound
in the point of the 5-m electric line extended from there.
The motor revolving speed of the musical boxes are adjusted by the volume of
the table, and the musical boxes play sound at random.
Enjoy
Arcade: Alien space music game
PG Music Inc has released the Pitch Invasion app for iOS. Based on old-style classic arcade games, aliens descend upon your home planet, intent on destroying your prized collection of musical instruments. It’s your job to blast them out of the sky by recognizing the pitch that they are playing, and playing that pitch yourself before they reach the ground. If they reach the ground, one of your 15 musical instruments is destroyed. Once your instruments are all destroyed, it’s game over. As you blast the aliens, you can move up to harder, faster levels.
Pricing and Availability:
Free
New effect plug-in that turns any sound into melodic material
Sinevibes has announced the release of Reactive, its new AudioUnit effect plug-in that turns any sound into melodic material as previewed a couple of weeks back.
Reactive detects the input signal’s dynamic envelope, and converts it into pitch information via an eight-note keyboard matrix. The pitch and envelope are then simultaneously used to drive three distinct synthesizer engines featuring waveshape modeling, phase modulation, and subtractive with ring modulation. Sinevibes says that all this is easily accessible via a simple color-coded interface, and lets Reactive instantly create amazing new sounds – from synth and bass lines, pulsating drones, and stepped pitch glides, to glitches, blips, wobbles, and noises – which are all lively reacting to the input.
Sinevibes says that Reactive is great for:
- Using any sound’s dynamics to generate melodies, strums and arpeggios.
- Transforming rhythm and percussion parts into synth and bass lines.
- Creating unique instruments and effects in realtime out of vocal beat-boxing or even simple microphone tapping.
Reactive works with Logic, GarageBand, Live, Maschine, Studio One, ReNoise, Reaper, Bidule and other Mac software that supports AudioUnit effect plugins. It comes in 32/64 bit versions for both Intel and PPC, and requires OS X version 10.5 or later.
Pricing and Availability:
Reactive is available immediately for $29.
More information:
BeatCleaver – slicing made simple
BeatCleaver is a slicing tool for sampling from songs and cutting up beats. This new 1.2 release adds MP3/M4A support, smooth zooming, a new timeline bar, and more! Check it out at: http://www.oscillicious.com/beatcleaver
Here’s what they have to say about the update:
“With new support for MP3 and AAC formats, sampling from existing songs and recordings has never been easier. DJs can now easily save loops from songs to use with sampler decks and artists can cut samples for remixes and mashups.
The new Advanced Slicing menu facilitates slicing audio by fixed bars or beats, perfect for chopping multi?track exports for live resequencing.”
Additional – Santoni shares info on an open source library that they’ve been working on:
In partnership with Mixxx, the free DJ software, we’ve released an open
source library for decoding compressed audio in a cross-platform way
called “libaudiodecoder”. This library grew out of the common needs of
both projects, and we hope it’ll help other audio developers too.
BeatCleaver now ships with libaudiodecoder for enhanced audio format support.
BeatCleaver 1.2 is available now for US $15 /13 EUR. It’s a free update for existing users.
Korg MS20 – Creating a basic snare drum sound
“A basic snare sound made using the Korg MS-20. The trick is to use the high pass filter to add the punch/snap to the drum sound. Drum sounds are very easy to create on a MS20.
The MS20 can also create pretty decent hand clap sounds using the high pass filter, S&H and some other stuff. I will post a video later.”
Orphion – new musical instrument with a unique sound
Orphion is a musical instrument with a unique sound between string instrument and percussion. Everyone can play expressive, wonderful sounds and easy or virtuosic melodies on it just by moving fingers on virtual pads.
This update brings MIDI support to Orphion
Get it here:
itunes.apple.com/en/app/orphion/id495465097
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