Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Simon J. Campbell February 7, 2011 - As you may have noticed, my posting hasn't been as regular as usual. In fact, I haven't even had a chance to check out the changes that were completed last week on the collaboration project! There are some pretty big changes happening in my life right now, and some of it is music related. Even though I'm easing back into a music schedule, it's hard to find time to actually write. Finding an appropriate ... Read More

December 19th, 2010 - With the amount of cool apps coming out for iOS, there hasn't been a whole lot of good hardware solutions for getting great sound in and out of the iPhone/iPod Touch. Sure there are some for plugging in a guitar, but they aren't exactly the highest quality. New Signal Process, a boutique shop out of Portland Oregon, has released the NSP BreakOut to remedy that situation. The BreakOut has an input to get your audio into whatever music apps ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Dylan Menzies November 22nd, 2010 - Lately, I've seen a lot of crazy instruments being created, and especially a lot leveraging MIDI in interesting ways. Some of it is interesting in an eccentric and fun way, and then there are some that have the potential to be straight up game changing. The most exciting I've seen in a long is Dylan Menzies' O-Bow. In a nutshell, an optical sensor tracks an object, in this case a "bow" made of wooden dowel, ... Read More

Photo courtesy of ThinkGeek November 21st, 2010 - The multitudes of other "instrument" shirts from ThinkGeek must have been immensely popular because they keep cranking out new stuff. On the tails of such classics as the guitar and bongo shirts, comes the Synth shirt. It seems someone over at ThinkGeek has been paying attention to the Rockband 3 news. The shirt ranges in price from $30 to $33 depending on size, and comes with a little belt-mounted "amp". It's back-ordered right now (on account ... Read More

November 1st, 2010 - It seems the majority of remix contests out there are for Americans-only, but this time I have one just for those in the UK. Audio-Technica has a contest going on for interesting takes on classic Christmas carols. It's open to all categories of music, from DJ's to indie bands. The winner will receive £500 with five runners-up winning £100 worth of Audio-Technica equipment. The first 100 will also get £30 Audio-Technica headphones. Fire up your webcams and post up ... Read More

September 5th, 2010 - Sometimes even your favorite songs become lodged into your head and it's difficult to get them out. That's the problem with catchy songs, sometimes they're too successful. Unhearit is a website that uses brute force to dig that earworm out. By cycling through another catchy song in a random playlist, the idea is that another song will take hold, forcing out the song that's been driving you crazy. Whether this new song will be better or not is ... Read More

September 1st, 2010 - You may not be able to live out your childhood dream of being aboard a spaceship (at least not for a few more years), but you can at least get your music played on a spaceship. It's at least something right? NASA is holding a contest (only available to US citizens I'm afraid), to get your song played during the final missions of the Space Shuttle. Listeners vote up your original music and the top two songs will ... Read More

Photo courtesy of iamaruntimeerror August 24th, 2010 - Gizmodo has a pretty damning article on the state of cheap earbuds. In the article, it outlines how all the companies making fashion earbuds likely use the same manufacturer and don't even have inhouse designers or engineers. Companies in China offer a-la-carte choices, and all you have to do is order a few thousand to sell, and you can have whatever you want made. I'm sure you all know that this kind of stuff happens with ... Read More

Photo courtesy of Native Instruments August 16th, 2010 - I'm a big fan of Native Instruments. I like their FM8 and Absynth instruments, and I have a fairly large Kontakt library. One of my next purchases will be Maschine, and I like Traktor Pro quite a bit. Well, today brings exciting news because they've finally released their own standalone controller, the Traktor S4 system. It's a hardware controller with a built in audio card (no doubt using their line of very well regarded audio ... Read More

August 7th, 2010 - If you've ever cut apart a song for samples, and then tried to a create a song in a different tempo with the pieces, you'll know the frustration of samples that end too early. While you can stretch and warp vocal and melodic samples within reason, percussive samples never sound quite right. AudioTuts has a tutorial that explains a technique to extend the tail of a drum sample. Essentially it involves copying another reversed version of the same ... Read More