Record your voice, your fridge, your dog or let your iPhone or iPad speak and make rhythms out of the sounds
You can beat reality! Record your voice, your fridge, your neighbour’s dog or let your iPhone or iPad speak and make rhythms out of the sounds immediately.
RealBeat concentrates on simplicity and fast results. No steep learning curve or cluttered screens! Get creative in an instant!
RealBeat is a sampler that enables you to record sounds and create rhythms out of them. It also features an easy way to let your device speak and use the sound as a source material for rhythms and loops.
website:
http://apps.piringer.net/realbeat
Low cost tangible interfaces for music :-)
This is really funny, but serious – check out this card board type interface
Audio d-touch is a collection of applications for real-time musical composition and performance, with very special user interfaces. The collection includes a drum machine and a sampling sequencer, both are controlled by spatially arranging physical objects on an interactive table surface. Each object represents a sound, and its position with respect to the surface is mapped to certain playback parameters. For example, the horizontal position of an object represents the timing of the sound. The system is extremely low cost and now it can be freely and fully downloaded from http://www.d-touch.org/audio. All is needed to get audio d-touch to work is a standard computer (PC or Mac) with a webcam and a printer.
The following video shows the d-touch sequencer and the drum machine in action:
Enjoy and stay creative
Donut lets you record loops in two dimensions
Here’s a new interesting concept for those of you who like to manipulate loops – as of course we all do 😉
You can use it like a phrase looper, by recording horizontally while using the step controls to step through vertical recording position. You can use it as a realtime processor by using ThruRecord mode. You can record and playback at completely differently speeds. You can even record backwards! You can record and playback diagonally across the Donutâ„¢ surface, creating glitchy staccato sounds. You can record and playback with multiple heads, recording or playing multiple positions at once. You can spread the heads vertically to access different portions of the Donutâ„¢, or you can spread them horizontally to create an echo effect.
Imagine two dimensional time!
Polychord virtual MIDI – future of iOS based music, or…?
The upcoming MIDI update to polychord lets you do some exciting and powerful new tricks with your iPad. Now you’ll be able to have your music apps talk to each other, while they run in the background, and use polychord to control them.
In this video we show how polychord can control another app (MoDrum) running in the background — all through virtual MIDI, all without any cables. Polychord sends MIDI clock signals out, keeping everything in sync.
Chords made easy
Polychord gives you instant access to a lot chords. By wrapping the different types of chords around each circle, we were able to fit a lot into a small space, while keeping them big enough to press easily. This gives you easy access to over 60 chords at any time!
Auto Accompany
Turn on Auto Accompany, press any chord, and the drums and bass will play along in tune –there’s also an arpeggiator which dynamically plays the notes of the selected chord. Switch to a different chord and they’ll follow you. Beginners can button-mash their way to a song, while more seasoned song-writing pros will find that polychord is a great way to break out of a rut.
Picking & Strumming
This is what truly sets polychord apart. Have you tried to play a piano keyboard on a small touchscreen? It’s not ideal. Polychord’s strum keys change automatically with the chords, so it doesn’t have to make room for keys you don’t need. They’re incredibly fast and responsive, so you can slide up and down the keys with many fingers at one time.
Take 5 interview with Diego Stocco, Composer
Background information:
Take 5 is a video web series published exclusively on the FIDMDigitalArts.com Blog by FIDM/Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising at www.blog.fidmdigitalarts.com.
Take five on Take 5 to get inspired, to get motivated, to get inside the minds of creative professionals. Join FIDMDigitalArts.com as we take five minutes to interview film directors, graphic artists, composers, illustrators, 3-D modelers, creative directors, motion graphics designers, photographers and other intriguing industry pros. Learn what makes the creative pros “tick” on Take 5.
In the video above, meet composer/sound designer, Diego Stocco, who uses cutting-edge techniques and unorthodox instruments to develop music and sound for film, television, trailers and video performances.
For more episodes of Take 5, visit http://blog.fidmdigitalarts.com/take-5-video-channel
Being creative – Polycheesy GX-800
This guy knows how to save some bucks 
No normal man can afford to own the synth of all synths: the Yamaha GX-1. So I decided to get creative. This is what I came up with It’s a Yamaha CSY-1, Yamaha’s first organ with an integrated analog synth. It actually contains GX1 technology. I made the synth fully programmable and exchanged the lower keyboard for a Korg Poly 800 . So now this isntrument contains an organ,a fully programmable monosynth with aftertouch and a polyphonic synth! This is just an improvisation but it gives an impression of what the isntrument can do.
The Polycheesy name comes from the row of yellow modulation wheels on the programmer. Bad joke, I know.
The GX-1 on the other hand was Yamaha’s first big polyphonic analog synth, and it was a beast! Considered the predecessor to the CS-80 (another huge poly-synth), the GX-1 featured a triple-tiered keyboard, pedalboard, ribbon controller, eight polyphonic voices, chromed pedestals and a $50,000+ price tag! OK, so it wasn’t designed for your everyday musician – less than 10 were ever made and have been owned mostly by legendary synth/keyboard players including Keith Emmerson, John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, Rick Wright of Pink Floyd, George Fleury, Richard James of Aphex Twin, Benny Andersson of ABBA, and Hans Zimmer who bought Keith Emerson’s.
Although it may look like an organ at first glance, it’s all analog heaven inside! The two main keyboards have 61 (velocity sensitive!) keys each, and are supplemented by a smaller (3/4 scale, pressure sensitive) 37-note keyboard and a 25-note pedalboard at your feet – 184 keys total! Eight voices of polyphony plus an additional monophonic are available and can be shared and layered or split up among the different keyboards. There are also organ-style drawbars and a ribbon controller for tweaking the sounds. Additional programming buttons are hidden away under drawers and panels on the front-panel.
The GX-1 used two analog oscillators per voice which are pretty much the same one’s used later in the CS-80, along with a mild 2-pole VCF filter, standard LFO and some ADSR envelopes. The GX-1 also had two “swell” pedals and a spring-loaded knee controller. It was truly a lush synth for its time, and its frequent use by many rock-legends helped cement its place in history as well as pave the way for the legendary CS-80.
Please note that there are no built-in speaker in the GX-1 as with many other organs, they are external. See the speakers on each side on the photo.
Dynamically Create Interfaces via OSC
This video shows how you can create interfaces on-the-fly via OSC messages sent to Control v1.3. Widgets can be added, removed and modified. Arbitrary Javascript can also be executed to manipulate multiple widgets simultaneously. So, if you’re looking to turn an Android phone or flashy, new Android tablet into a touch controller for music, you’ll be really glad to see OSC and MIDI controller Control.
Control enables users to create their own interfaces for controlling musical, artistic and virtual reality applications. It is built on top of the WebKit rendering engine and allows users to define their interfaces via JSON files. Features include:
– Outputs Open Sound Control (OSC). MIDI coming soon!
– Handles multitouch on capable devices
– Bi-directional communication: use Control to set values on your computer, use your computer to set values in Control
– Dynamically add and manipulate widgets via OSC messages
– Reads and outputs data from Accelerometer and Compass sensors (on applicable devices) with adjustable update rates
– The ability to script behaviors for widgets using JavaScript
– Auto-discovery of wireless networks via Bonjour
– Interfaces can be pushed to the phone via OSC or downloaded from the web
– Supports both portrait and landscape interface orientations
– Interfaces work on both phones and tablets (tested on Droid and Asus Transformer)
– Free
If you’ve never used wireless MIDI or OSC before, Control (and all other wireless MIDI / OSC apps) will have a little bit of a learning curve to get started. Please visit the Control support website!
Free music creation app for mobile producers
This video shows some of the features of a FREE, new studio.M multitrack music creation app for mobile producers and songwriters. Based on the top-selling studio.HD app, it offers 4 audio tracks, mono or stereo (upgradeable to 8) with recording, editing, an extensive loop library plus automated mixing and effects all controlled by a fast and creative touch interface. Get ideas down fast and work with them anywhere!
Grab a beat and throw down a rap, capture the spark of a song before it’s gone or produce dance tracks on the go. It’s even great for making custom soundtracks for your next YouTube movie!
Features:
– 4-tracks of CD audio quality playback (with recording one-track-at-a-time)
– Streaming recording/playback engine for long recording times limited only by storage
– Automated mixing and effects
– Effects include Compressor, Reverb, Pan and Low Pass Filter
– Loop library spanning popular music styles (including Pop, Funk, Industrial, Hip Hop, Trance, Reggaeton, House, etc.)
PLUS there is an in-app Store that offers:
– The “MX” upgrade for:
— 4-more tracks (8 total)
— More effects (Delay, Flanger, Gate, Stutter, BitCrusher and Glitchy Repeater)
— 130 more loops arranged in loop construction kits called “Loop Sets”
– Loop Store
— Featuring 100’s of loops arranged in Loop Sets by both large 3rd parties (like Beatport, Sonic Reality, etc.) and indie producers
studio.M requires iPhone or iPod touch on iOS 4 or above. It will also run on iPad in 2x mode.
Exploring chaotic sound synthesis
Double Pendulum Music is an autonomous installation, nonlinearity and chaos are explored sonically (chaotic sound synthesis) and visually (chaotic motion). Establishing itself somewhere between generative composition and kinetic sculpture, the chaotic motion of a double pendulum is used as a source of uncertainty to create chaotic harmonic and rhythmic auditory events in real-time. The natural laws at work create complex aural and visual behaviour from simple interactions. As a result, the events heard and seen are never the same twice, making Double Pendulum Music a celebration of unpredictability and sensitivity.
Sound synthesis realised in the SuperCollider programming language. Recorded at Modes sound exhibition, Truman Brewery London, 5th June 2011
For more info: theblackplume.com
Understanding the basics of warping full tracks
Ableton Certified Trainer and Dubspot Instructor, Michael Hatsis, a.k.a. !banginclude explains and demonstrates basic and essential warping techniques in Ableton Live in the part one of this three-part video tutorial series exploring creative ways to warp tracks in Live. Using a standard house track with a 4×4 drum pattern, Hatsis shows how to set Live warping preferences, determining and entering an approximate tempo by tapping the tempo Tab along with the song, figuring out the downbeat and set where the track starts, in this case – first kick, transient marker. Stay tuned for part two and three, as Michael Hatsis delves further into Live and offers more creative tips and techniques for warping.
For more info – http://bit.ly/gmwhsZ
DATAMASKIN
