Loopmasters has announced it is looking for tutorial content for publication on its blog.
We’re looking for talented content producers to share your expert knowledge of music production with our pro audio audience. We’re eager to receive your ‘Written Music Production Tips’ today.
Submit a short written text and image tutorial (500 words max) and get a custom link back to your site and your choice of ANY 2 Loopmasters products for every article approved.
If you’ve already submitted a tutorial and not heard back from us, please bear with us as we’ll endeavour to answer all applications within 7 working days of submission. We keep your text tutorials on file and aim to publish on the nearest available date within our release schedule.
We accept tutorials on all aspects of music production including DAW tutorials for Ableton, Logic, Cubase, Reason & Record, FL Studio and ProTools, music theory, processing & effects, and general music production techniques. If you feel you have something valuable to share to the music production community, we want to hear about it!
Image-Line has announced the FL Studio $1010 Comp, a chance to win some cash prizes by posting the FL Studio 10 news announcement on your blog or Facebook.
All you have to do is blog or cross-post the FL Studio 10 launch on your Facebook, blog or other web page and let us know to be in the draw.
We will randomly choose 5 people to share in $2450 USD of cash prizes at the end of April 2011.
First session with the Elektron Octatrack. Checking out some of the capabilities of this new machine. No drum loops used in this short jam. Just triggering single shot samples of nord percussion and analogue drum sounds. Using the three stages of LFO's for each track to control effects animation and various other parameters. Making some use of the re-trigger sample functions spanned across 4 patterns.
More info on the Octatrack at Elektron, and Peter Kirn at CDM has some more thoughts + a video by Matthew Dear here.
Dan Weatherall has some presets for the nanoPAD available to download.
I know there are quite a few of you out there that own at least one of the korg Nano range of controllers.
The most popular of the Nano range has to be the NanoPAD. While the NanoPAD is a useful tool for laying down drum beats, I feel that It really shines when using it to come up with cool melodic parts.
This Preset collection contains a few useful scales and chords that I hope will help you in your productions.
Brett Martin aka PCmofo has finished his DIY desktop speaker system project. Nice job!
Finally the speakers are finished! Now for the fun part….. The final pictures!
Assembly went great, I was able to stuff them and the bass sounds much better as do the mids. I am really loving the black coated screws, from some angles and distances they completely disappear, then up close the detail comes out and they look pretty cool.
I plan on using these speakers with Apples 27" cinema display, as they are both the same height. Unfortunately, I dont have mine yet so I borrowed a 26" iMac which is also the same design for a few photos to get an idea of the size of these speakers.
Jeffrey Melton has released two collections of ambient, freeform and microsound compositions.
melton.granular.01 and melton.granular.02 collect my recent work in microsound-scapes, featuring granular and pulsar synthesis, freeform rhythms and tone colors. Tracks can also be streamed on my Soundcloud page.
All sounds were created with Density GS and Pulsaret instruments (both the standalone apps and Max for Live versions). Arrangement, mixing and mastering was done with Ableton Suite. Processing effects were limited to resonant filters, grain delay, reverb and EQ.
For the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl Accident, Ambientaria Records has gathered many Dark Ambient artists, including famous ones like Northaunt or Atomtrakt, for a Compilation project.
The album will be released on April 1st, 2011.
All the benefits shall be reversed to Chernobyl Children International (http://www.chernobyl-international.com/), a non-profit organisation with United Nations NGO status, in order to help people suffering from Radiation Poisoning.
Louis Fleet wrote in to let us know about his blog “fleet music”, a site that focuses on the production of electronic music, using Ableton and its built in synths and effects.
It’s called “Fleet Music”, the strap line is “a blog that takes a critical and instructive look at electronic music production”, what this essentially means is that I will be focusing on current themes within house and techno and investigating the relevant production techniques.
Synthesis is the main focus of the blog but as I said previously there is a ‘critical’ aspect to the blog, this is not be confused with bitchy, but instead the idea is that all the video postings and other content is focused on a ‘theme’. This approach can be evidenced in my most recent post which is all about the ‘stab’ in electronic music.
The Top 100 Tracks Of 2010 features 100 MP3s in 320 kbps. Over 9 hours of music, over 1.2 GB, available to purchase until February 10th 2011, priced at £30 / $50 / €35
Electronic music has always had a funny relationship with musicianship. It isn’t playing a traditional instrument; instead, it lies somewhere between instrumentalism and composition, between playing and conducting. Sometimes, that scale is tipped away from virtuosity of any kind.
But lately, I’ve had an increasing number of conversations with people who make the tools with which we make music about what this all means. I’ll be able to share one of those conversations in a bit, but I’m curious to hear what readers think.
Jeff Mills comes to mind. He doesn’t just DJ with three decks, he also uses a TR-909 in his live sets.
Radium Audio Labs is a blog with some interesting sound design articles on things like frozen contact mics, recording guns, coil pickup and printer recordings, and more.
Explorative adventures in sound – Part of Radium Audio, a leading music and sound design company based in London. We work with agencies, cg & animation houses, digital agencies, game developers, brands and manufacturers.
Beatfly is a small illuminating blimp for entertainment. Its light and movement can be controlled via various interfaces such as MIDI controller, iPhone multi-touch interface, Flash interface on a web site, computer keyboard, mobile phones and voice, and music. It flies, filling the space with colorful light, producing diverse styles of performance in the air.
A limited number of Beatfly DIY kits are available to purchase for $65 USD. The kit includes a soldered circuit board, motors, propellers, structures, screws, and balloon. Size of the inflated balloon is about 110cm * 40cm * 80cm. You need some additional electronic parts (Arduino, XBees, Battery, etc.) and helium gas.
Bedroom Producers lists a number of quality free acoustic drums:
When it comes to working with sampled acoustic drums, the advantages of using dedicated software like EZdrummer, Addictive Drums, or BFD2 are more than obvious. But not everyone can afford these, as they all come with quite a big price tag. Luckily though, there are many free alternatives available online. I selected only the best free sample packs for this list, and choosing only the ones that come with mappings in sfz format (among others, of course). If you don’t own a commercial sampler like Battery or Halion, I recommend using the free Shortcircuit sampler v1.1.2, as it supports the sfz format and also offers multiple outputs.
Excellent article by Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music:
The history of music and the history of music notation are closely intertwined. Now, digital languages for communicating musical ideas between devices, users, and software, and storing and reproducing those ideas, take on the role notation alone once did.
Notation has always been more than just a way of telling musicians what to do. (Any composer will quickly tell you as much.) Notation is a model by which we think about music, one so ingrained that even people who can’t read music are impacted by the way scores shape musical practice.
Tom Shear has some tips on how to create some cool vocal drum samples:
Before hip-hop hit the big time, it was a very underground phenomenon and as a result, most of the artists at the time had to make music as cheaply as possible. Indeed, some bands couldn't even afford a drum machine, so "beatboxing" was born where a performer would imitate the sounds of a drum kit with his mouth to create the beat for the rapper to do his thing over. While it seems kind of hokey now, your own voice is actually still quite a decent source for new drum and percussion sounds. Here are some tips on getting the best results from your vocal drum sample experiments.
Some audio samples from The European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider and computer room. Here you can listen to the sounds and download mp3 files, numerical files and explanatory notes.
Tom Shear @ Waveformless checks out Ohmicide:Melohman, Ohm Force's distortion effect plug-in.
This is a product that has been out for a while, but when the Ohm Boyz themselves asked if I might like to take a look at it, how could I refuse? If you haven't heard of it by now, Ohmicide:Meloman (I'm going just called it Ohmicide from here on out) is a multi-band distortion effect on steroids. Multi-band distortion allows you to split a single signal into multiple frequency bands allowing you to process and tweak each band completely independently of the others. Let's see how it stacks up.
I don’t use distortion effects a lot myself but when I do it’s usually Ohmicide. Great stuff!
Takashi Kondo of Ogaki, Japan, created this amazing foldable paper piano printed with conductive ink and embedded with an ATmega328. I'd love to see a video of this creation in action, as well as some more details of its creation — like, where is it getting its power?
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