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 time to work on writing has always been a problem for me. How do you find time to write music? Do you schedule regular Saturday afternoons? Do you work on it evenings after your day job? In between baby feedings?

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 you’re running in iOS, and an output to send to your outboard gear. There’s a gain knob and an on/bypass switch and that’s pretty much it; no muss, no fuss. You can buy the BreakOut for $115 at the New Signal Process website.

NSP BreakOut

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, and provides feedback for a modelled stringed instrument. In the video embedded below, the result sounds much like an urhu.

We’ve had wind controllers for ages, allowing more realistic modelled wind instruments, but even though strings are so common in productions, I’m not aware of any commercial device (I don’t really consider touch strips the same) that has attempted to emulate a string player’s bowing. Seems to me that bowing technique would be one of the first things that people attempted to bring into the DAW world.

Definitely check out Dylan’s video below to get an rough idea of what the O-Bow can do. Very exciting stuff!

O-Bow via Engadget

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 of the awesomeness) but if you order now, it’ll ship by November 30th. Video embedded below of the shenanigans.

ThinkGeek via Engadget

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 your songs on Youtube. For information on how to enter, you can check out their press release here.

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 a gamble you’ll have to consider. You also may want to watch out for rick-rolling. It didn’t happen to me, but I saw some tweets warning of the possibility.

Unhearit via Lifehacker

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 get played on the mission. It’s pretty steep odds of getting into the coveted 2 spots, maybe comparable to getting into the space program itself. Still, it would be pretty awesome to have that on your resume.

NASA’s Space Rock

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 cheap consumer gear, but what you may not know is that some companies that offer full catalogues of entry-level audio equipment are doing the same thing. There are a lot of cheap guitar pedals, and even audio interfaces floating around. I’m not going to call out any companies, but be careful and do your research.

The Secret Scam of Cheap Earbuds

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 cards), containing an effects section mirroring the Kontrol X1, high-resolution platters (using some fancy pants magnetic tracking system), and a special version of the Traktor software. Not only that, but while the hardware runs off of an AC connection, it is able to run in emergency mode off bus power, with lowered headphone output, and dim LEDs. Pretty snazzy! You’ll also be able to connect your Traktor control vinyl (for those who will use the S4 with a traditional turntable setup) in a forthcoming update.

The software has some new features, like replacing decks C and D with 8 loop decks with volume, filter, and syncing for each. That brings me to an interesting side-note about the S4: it was designed in concert with Ean Golden of DJ TechTools. Ean and the community at DJ TT have been extending the mappings of Traktor Pro for years, making gear like the Vestax VCI-100 a force to be reckoned with.

With Ean Golden and Native Instruments, the Traktor S4 must be something special. Of course, awesomeness doesn’t come cheap; the Traktor S4 system will be available this winter for a grand. It’s already got me salivating. I must review one!

Traktor S4 via DJ TechTools

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 sample, and adding it to the end of the original drum sample. From there, you fade out the reversed sample by ear to extend the tail. You can also automate the EQ to create an even more realistic tail. Quite a handy tip!

How to Recreate Tails of Drum Samples