New free stand alone four voice synth
16tone’s Vogue Quattro is a free standalone four-voice synth for Intel Macs . It has microtonal capabilities and it comes with a library of 3,000+ tuning files.
Specifications:
- four-voice polyphonic PCM synthesizer
- three oscillators per voice, each endowed with square wave sub-oscillator (1 or 2 octaves lower)
- true monophonic mode (plays three voices at unison, nine oscillators in total)
- 88 raw waveforms including white noise
- single LFO with 6 waveforms
- ring modulator
- easy-access modulation matrix
- scale-relative pitch-bend (self-adapting to tuning scale steps with microtonal precision)
- 64 factory preset programs
- receives MIDI tuning standard SysEx messages
- compatible with Max Magic Microtuner mtx – tuning files
- includes library of 3,000+ tuning files
This is a standalone synth so you’ll need Cycling ’74 (free) Soundflower to re-route its output and be able to record it .
8 bit Dark Side of the Moon
Canadian video game programmer and synth musician Brad Smith has with his Moon8 project created a note-by-note cover version of the whole album in an 8-bit NES video game style.
The whole thing was sequenced in FamiTracker and the sound rendered with NSFplug. Final editing was done in Audacity.
You can download the album as a zip file of MP3s from the Moon8 website, where you’ll also find YouTube links to the songs. Enjoy.
The real robots
Behold a programmable robot made of K’nex interchangeable toys. Recently featured on the how-to site Instructables, this robot can play simple musical sequences. Toys, as always, make for great rapid prototyping: this project makes use of an intelligent base unit and a system of interchangeable building blocks that make the design both easy to build and easy for others to replicate.
This is a mechanical view my brainchild, Zeeanobot. It’s a programmable piano playing robot that I built using knex. You can find instructions on how to build your own Zeeanobot at http://www.instructables.com/id/Progr…
Free MIDI metronome
KMetronome is a MIDI metronome with KDE interface, based on the ALSA sequencer. The intended audience is musicians and music students. Like solid, real metronomes it is a tool to keep the rhythm while playing musical instruments. It uses MIDI for sound generation instead of digital audio, allowing low CPU usage, and very accurate timing thanks to the ALSA sequencer.
New in v0.9.3
- Build system adapted to the changes in Drumstick-0.3
- Bundled Drumstick-0.3.1 library sources
Visit: kmetronome.sourceforge.net
So what is Devo up to
Take a look in their studio…
2for1 April offering at Soundcells
Don’t miss out on this
Soundcells are definitely among the top three Reason Refill producers on the market today, at least if you are in on electronic music
Soundcells has been featured in reviews on this blog before and gotten really high scores for their innovativeness, here is one example:
After listening in on hundreds of different refills for Reason it is quite seldom that I find something that feels totally new and fresh, but I am inclined to change my mind on this one. Sure other refills have been published in this space before but rarely with this amount of breadth. There are not just the traditional CMB files and NNXT files that you have become accustomed to but also a several new live performance CMBs that allows you to actually be very creative on stage. I really enjoyed bringing these up during some live jamming in the studio, and to spice things up there are a several really nice Dr.Rex loops also included – and not just endless variations of the same loop in different pitches and sounds but actually quite a nice mixture of experimental, bass and pure chip sounds – I like 
Playing 8bit on the SunVox
SunVox is a small, fast and powerful music sequencer with modular synthesizers. It is a tool for those people who want to compose music anywhere. SunVox available for desktop PC (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), pocket computers (Windows Mobile, PalmOS, iPhone/iPad) and netbooks.
| Key features |
- Modular interface.
- Highly optimized synth algorithms.
- Flexible architecture: SunVox can working on variuos devices. For example: PDA with slow CPU – 16bit sound (fixed point arithmetic); or big PC with powerfull CPU: 32bit sound (floating point arithmetic).
- Built-in synthesizers:
- FM synthesizer;
- Generator (saw,triangle,square,noise waveforms);
- Kicker;
- Sampler (supported formats: WAV, XI, AIFF);
- SpectraVoice (FFT-based synthesizer for analog-like pads);
- DC Blocking Filter;
- Delay;
- Distortion;
- Echo;
- EQ;
- Filter (Low-pass, High-pass, Band-pass, Notch);
- Flanger;
- LFO;
- Loop;
- Reverb (with DC Blocking Filter);
- Vocal Filter;
- Vibrato.
- Supported systems: Windows, Linux (x86/x86_64), Mac OS X, PalmOS, WindowsCE (Windows Mobile), iPhone/iPad.
- Export to WAV.
Watch JM Jarre in 3D
If you have a couple of these in your drawer, then check out this video from JM Jarre playing Oxygene and other cool classics
Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygene Live In Your Living Room 3D 2007.
Great new 1950s album from Steelberry Clones
Listen and download the new album from Steelberry Clones
Chopping up and being brutal on those old classic 50’s songs this is a new take on electrofying
So if you enjoy synthpop, bit tunes, 8bit, and electro you will love these up tempo songs
Not since Silicon Teens in the mid 80’s any serious attempts has been made to electrify the old classics. Telex made a Rock around the clock version as well, but the 1950’s library is far larger than that. The foundations of rock music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and quickly spread to much of the rest of the world. Its immediate origins lay in a mixing together of various popular musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues, gospel music, and country and western. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, and is credited with first using the phrase “rock and roll” to describe the music.
There is much debate as to what should be considered the first rock and roll record. One leading contender is “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, recorded by Sam Phillips for Sun Records in 1951. Four years later, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (1955) became the first rock and roll song to top Billboard magazine’s main sales and airplay charts, and opened the door worldwide for this new wave of popular culture.
GlaceVerb VST with acoustics
GlaceVerb is Dasample’s first attempt to implement its works on Residual Vector Modulation (RVM) in a VST plugin. RVM is a proprietary algorithm developed to calculate the deformations, the vibrations and the acoustic response of surfaces and materials .Imagine a big orchestra playing in a giant box builded with thin metal sheets. As the panels are not very rigid, the box will vibrate according to the energy of music and produce an audible spectral deformation. RVM algorithm is able to simulate such deformations and vibrations and apply them to the original signal. GlaceVerb is the only VST reverberation plugin able to modelize liquid acoustic spaces like water. Unlike other reverbs with presets named Room, Cathedral, Stadium etc.
Download here!
DATAMASKIN
