The application that changed making music…

By

Robert Henke

When we started working on Live, and finally showed a first Version in 2001, the big music software companies did not take us very serious. “A laptop on stage? You must be crazy!” or “This interface looks horrible!” were reactions we got often. However, we are now the most successful music software company out there, with an incredible number of customers all over the world, and our software massively changed the way electronic music is created and performed.

It became very easy to make music. And this is bad. Everyone can make a boring uninspired piece of music in a lunch break, and it will sound good and ‘professional’. It became really very, very easy to make music with our software. And this is great! Because it not only allows highly musical people with limited budget to create fantastic and complex music, it also allows those folks like me to dive deeper into the creation and exploration of music, sound and structure than ever before. I never spent less time thinking of technology and more time making music with it. Well, apart from my engagement with the company.

. . . part of Music Mondays

Edited: March 8th, 2010

New Rubber Tiles could help with Soundproofing bass

By Alex Massaad

THE rumbling bass from the party animals next door need no longer keep you awake at night. Cheap and effective soundproofing can be yours in the shape of novel tiles made from latex and a few plastic buttons.

Low-frequency sounds, especially, seem to seep through most domestic walls. That’s because of their long wavelength, says Zhiyu Yang at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Kowloon. Bass sounds at 100 hertz have a wavelength of over 3 metres in air, “and several times longer in solids”, he says.

To block out all sound, buildings would need walls several metres thick. Now Yang and his team have developed soundproof panels made of latex and plastic buttons, that will do the job (Applied Physics Letters, DOI: 10.1063/1.3299007).

These noise-cancelling panels consist of a latex rubber membrane stretched over a 3-millimetre-thick rigid plastic grid of 1-centimetre-wide squares. In the middle of each square is a small, weighted, plastic button.

When sound waves hit the panel, the membrane and weighted buttons resonate at difference frequencies. “The inner part of the membrane vibrates in opposite phase to the outer region,” says Yang. That means the sound waves cancel each other out and no sound gets through.

Each weighted membrane only cancels out sound waves within a small band of frequencies. But changing the weight of the buttons alters the operational frequency, says Yang. By stacking five membranes together, each tuned to a specific band, you can create a soundproof panel that works in the range from 70 to 550 hertz.

With these panels you can soundproof homes, says Yang. And the panel’s weight is equivalent to ceramic bathroom tiles, “although it’s slightly thicker at 15 millimetres”, he adds.

The panels could be used “in noisy environments such as airports”, says Xuanlai Fang at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. “If these metamaterials can be manufactured economically, the impact can be very significant.”

Edited: February 27th, 2010

How to Drum on an MPC or similar pad controller

How to do mpc pad finger drumming from Brandon Murphy on Vimeo.

Edited: February 26th, 2010

Lady GaGa Plays the GaGatar, electro-modern style

We’re not quite sure just what the heck Lady GaGa is playing here, but it looks like she’s got a keytar slash bass slash MPC GaGatar in the Haus.

You can see Lady Gaga’s keytar thing in action in her video for Telephone & Dance in the Dark, below, unless it gets yanked by the YouTube police.

Check it out and let me know what you think of the GaGatar. And if you know anything more about it, leave a comment!

Edited: February 17th, 2010

Why waste your money at a studio? LCD Soundsystem has the solution

LCD Soudsystem have rented a mansion rather than a studio to record their latest music. This is the future of music, really awesome idea, create space!

clip 1 from lcd soundsystem on Vimeo.

Edited: February 11th, 2010

D. Ramirez Gear Review: Episode 1 DSI Prophet 8

A great UK House Producer, D. Ramirez reviews a piece of Dave Smith gear in his studio in this video.

About the video:
“He asked us if he could send us a load of videos of him fiddling about with sexy new kit – and so here we are.

The first episode sees him get his hands on the new DSI Prophet 8 keyboard synth – especially interesting for those producers out there who have never seen an outboard synth working up close.”

DT-TV: D.Ramirez’s Gear Review #1 from Ben Gomori on Vimeo.

Edited: February 1st, 2010

What the iPad means for music

Steve Jobs today introduced the Apple iPad, a handheld multitouch computer, and it’s likely to be the biggest music technology introduction of the year.

The iPad will be immediately useful as a musical tool, because it runs existing iPhone apps. As developers adapt their apps to the larger real estate, though, the Apple iPad should come into its own as a platform.

Pricing in USD:

• Wifi models
  • 16GB – $499
  • 32GB – $599
  • 64GB -$699
• 3G models
  • 16GB – $629
  • 32GB – $729
  • 64GB -$829

Look at what has been happening with the JazzMutant Lemur as a malleable music controller and what has already been happening with iPhone music apps, and it’s clear that music developers are going to have fun with the Apple iPad.

Take that as a starting point – day 1 for the Apple iPad as a music platform.

The iPad won’t replace the power of a dedicated music computer – but it is creating a new platform that will support new types of mobile music making and new ways of controlling and playing music.

And, while think the iPad is going to prove to be a big deal – we’d like to know what Apple has planned for multitasking, file management, access to the iTunes library, third-party device support and more.

Check out the specs for the Apple iPad and let us know what you think.

Is this thing going to change the way you make music this year?

Apple iPad Features:

• 9.7″ Full capacitive multitouch screen
• .5″ thick
• 1 GHz Apple A4 processor
• 16GB-GB Flash storage
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• WiFi 802.11n
• Built-in speaker, microphone, 30-pin connectors
• Accelerometer
• Compass
• 10 hour battery life in use
• Runs all iPhone apps
• 3G wireless options, with a $30/month unlimited plan, with international options by the summer.

Edited: January 28th, 2010

The History of the Boombox

This NPR video looks at the history of the boombox:

The boxes had to be big, to make that bass boom. The speakers in early boxes had extra-large magnets to push all that air around, and they were housed in heavy metal casing to deal with the vibrations from all the bass. Fab 5 Freddy says they got pretty big.

“I remember some boxes so big, they required 20 D-size batteries to an already heavy box,” he says. “So these boxes were so heavy that some cats that would carry their boxes all the time, they would develop massive forearms and biceps.”

The boxes were part of a style that included white Adidas and big gold chains. Freddy was a filmmaker and artist at the time, and he says he took his box everywhere.

“I traveled with my massive boombox,” Freddy says. “That thing moved with me, you know. I remember, like, being on the plane — it couldn’t go in the overhead bin, but that was my baby. It traveled first class right along with me.”

Doesn’t it make you want to go hunting for a vintage boombox?

via noiseforairports

Edited: January 27th, 2010

I cannot get enough King Unique “The XX & Alan Fitzpatrick & Reset Robot — Silicone Shelter” these days

As I wrote about recently, I cannot stop listening to this bootleg! It is totally one of the greatest productions going on through my head right now. It’s just so raw . . . sounds like a live remix . . .it would be wicked to see musicians start to go in this style live. Doing mash up remixes via Ableton Live . . . the future of music is exciting!

On a similar note I’ve been listening to a lot of “The XX” especially their “Florence + The Machine” remix!

Edited: January 24th, 2010

Fiducial Midi Controller for Ableton

Cool Ableton Live triggering system!

This is a quick demo of the Fiducial Midi Controller, a tangible controller built using ReacTIVision software with OSCulator to send midi signals to Ableton Live.

via gabeshaughnessy:

My DJ skills need some work, but you get the idea. One thing you can’t see in this video is the cards are color coded. They match the Ableton Tracks.

My ableton live mapping is not very sophisticated. Each clip has a card that triggers it, and you can rotate each card too, effecting something different on each track. The drum track, for example, changes the note duration, or time, when you rotate the card. On the bass track, rotating the card changes the vibrato, and for the bleepy melody, rotating the ard changes the auto-pan rate.

I’m using the free, open-source fudicial library called ReacTIVision. The folks who thought up the Reactor Synthesizer released ReacTIVision.

I’m using OSCulator to route the OSC signals from reacTIVision to Live as MIDI notes and CC values. I’ve also been messing with Quartz Composer patches using the OSC TUIO patch from Kineme (http://kinime.net).

Edited: January 20th, 2010