Results for collaboration

The Smalls has launched Street Sounds, a new site created in association with Scion to capture location-based sounds that together reflect our surroundings and define our lives.

Street Sounds is a collaborative and interactive Web site where lovers of art, sound and humanity can document their lives through snippets of sound that are posted on a 3-D map. Filmmakers, musicians and other artists can then search for sounds by keyword and location to use when creating new collaborative works of their own.

Streets Sounds allows users to listen in on everything from such rousing moments as a campus protest in Berkley or subway performers in New York, to funny and intimate vignettes, such as one’s laughter, a patron ordering a beer, or the rain. For contributors and listeners alike, the experience can be enchanting and addictive.

“With The Smalls Street Sounds, we aim to create the largest online collaboration of free, user-generated sounds that will encourage people to listen to the sounds of America and stimulate creative expression,” said Anna Grund, Founder, The Smalls. “Most of our lives are made up of multi-sensory experiences. The Sound Map provides people with the opportunity to focus on one – sound – to present and explore their world, and most importantly to let their imagination wander.”

Every month, the biggest contributors of sounds can win a free iPod.

More information: The Smalls Street Sounds

Native Instruments has released Abbey Road 60s Drums, the first of Native Instruments’ collaborations with Abbey Road Studios London.

This KONTAKT Instrument delivers expressive acoustic drums that combine detailed realism with flexible and nuanced control. Containing no emulations or acoustic modeling of any kind, this instrument consists entirely of high-quality samples of two vintage kits – beautifully recorded with period equipment in Abbey Road’s legendary Studio Two. The sound of ABBEY ROAD | 60s DRUMS can be easily molded from within the instrument itself, going from vintage to modern and taking in all points between.

Abbey Road 60s Drums features

• Two highly sought-after vintage drum kits:
  • The Gretsch round badge White Marine Pearl (Jasper Shell) from the early 60s includes a 24” kick drum, one 13” and one 16” tom.
  • The second kit is a Ludwig Hollywood from 1967 with a 22″ kick, and 12″, 13″ and 16″ toms.
• Snare drums include a Ludwig chrome Supra-phonic 400 (1966), Ludwig wooden jazz Festival (1966), Ludwig Mahogany (1959) and Slingerland Radio King (1964).
• A selection of vintage Zildjian cymbals were used from the early and late 60’s, including a rivet cymbal dating from 1963.
• Recorded using only the absolute best period equipment, including the legendary REDD.17 valve mixing desk from 1958, an EMI TG mixing desk introduced in 1967 as well as a valve Studer J37 4 track 1-inch tape machine from 1964.
• Executively Produced by Peter Cobbin, Abbey Road’s Director of Engineering, recorded by Mirek Stiles and assisted by John Barrett and Kris Burton. Native Instruments sound designers Paul Maurer and Nicki Marinic were on hand to oversee the sessions. Drumming duties were performed by one of London’s top musicians, Ralph Salmins.
• Over 29,000 24-bit, 44.1 kHz samples.
• 6.3 GB library size, using the new Kontakt 4 sample compression.
• Up to 30 velocity layers for a single articulation.
• Up to 6 variations of drum hits at the same velocity for added realism.
• Separate vintage and modern mic samples for direct, overhead mono, overhead stereo, and room mics.
• Two snare options for each kit.
• Separate Right and Left hand samples for the most common Snare, Tom, and Hihat articulations.
• Snare Top/Bottom and Kick In/Out samples.
• Optional snare bleed samples for many drums.

Abbey Road 60s Drums is available to purchase for 99 EUR. DVD Delivery starts on February 1^st.

More information: Native Instruments / Abbey Road 60s Drums

The monome Community has released HAITI2010, an album available to the public with 100% of the sale proceeds being donated to Médecins Sans Frontières (msf.org).

The monome user base is a collection of people from across the world (Pin drop map here: http://tinyurl.com/yh53lwf), brought together via the innovative, open source music production hardware that is the monome (monome.org), They pride themselves on a tight-knit, proactive, and helpful community (post.monome.org), where collaborations and projects are frequently happening, the outputs of which range from new software patches to share, to Creative Commons track and album collaborations.

When the community came up with the idea of a compilation album to generate charity donations in light of the terrible disaster in Haiti, einpuls started gathering tracks for the album and the monome community answered swiftly with more than 25 tracks being submitted in just a couple of days.

The community teamed up with Summer Rain Recordings (summerrainrecordings.net) to compile the compilation, with the end result being a 27 track album, each track contributed for free.

The minimum price for the compilation has been set to $1 with no upper limit. Every penny helps, so please donate what you can.

The 27-track HAITI2010 album is available as an immediate download in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire.

More information: HAITI2010

Some interesting things I found recently:

# bassdll – An arduino piezo buzzer sound engine by Drew Crawford.

Source code available at github

# Charting the Beatles – Exploration of Beatles music through infographics.

Charting the Beatles – Authorship and Collaboration

Michael Deal writes:

These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording sesion notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings.

# MISA digital guitar

The MISA digital guitar is a minimalistic looking MIDI controller.

# Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 Instrument: Hands-on, Videos, Why it’s Different

Teenage Engineering OP-1, portable synthesizer and controller

Peter Kirn spent some hands-on time with the current prototype of the OP-1 and had a talk with the developers of Teenage Engineering.

# mtXcontrol

mtXcontrol by Tobias Bielohlawek is an editor written in Processing to easily create image sequences for several output devices containing multicolor LED matrix.

mtXcontrol Editor auto detects and connects to your device. Once connected, you can draw points, lines & rows in different colors, create multiple frames and manipulate them. Add, delete, move, fill, copy & paste of frames is supported. Play all frames by different speed, realtime update the device and save your work as image file. If supported (e.g. Rainbowduino), update the sequence on your device and run it standalone. One special feature is typing letters and numbers. Future versions aim to support multiple devices, different color depth and many more.

Ableton and Serato have announced The Bridge, the missing link between digital production and DJing.

The Bridge spans the gap between music production and DJing, creating a natural link between Ableton Live and Serato Scratch Live/ITCH. The Bridge provides a powerful fusion of DJ and production tools, opening a world of opportunities for DJing, remixing and live performance.

The Bridge features

• Ableton to Serato — The Bridge provides Ableton Transport Control (ATC), giving you turntable-style control of your own multitrack productions. Simply drag an Ableton Live Set to a deck in Scratch Live or ITCH and use your turntables, CDJ or ITCH controller to control the transport.
• Serato to Ableton — The Bridge provides the ultimate mixtape creation tool. DJs can perform mixes in Serato Scratch Live or ITCH and save them as an Ableton Live Set. This way, the DJ can still perform the mix—better than cut and pasting it together in a DAW—but also has detailed editing options.

The Bridge is free for anyone who owns both:

• A registered version of Serato Scratch Live or ITCH hardware and
• Ableton Live 8 or Suite 8

Stay informed on the progress of this project by subscribing to the Ableton newsletter.

More information: Ableton / Serato

BBE Sound has announced the release Sonic Sweet and Stomp Ware, two new plug-in suites for Windows and Mac.

The Sonic Sweet consists of three pro-level easy-to-use plug-ins useful for every facet of digital audio production.

Sonic Sweet features

• D82 Sonic Maximizer: Heralded as the ‘magic black box’, the D82 Sonic Maximizer naturally restores clarity and depth to any instrument’s sound.
• H82 Harmonic Maximizer: Multi-band enhancer/harmonics generator for adding emphasis to frequencies; from low-end punch to top-end sizzle.
• L82 Loudness Maximizer: A simple yet effective mastering/dynamics limiter that fattens up tracks for a polished and professional finish.

Sonic Sweet is available to purchase for PC and Mac (VST/AU/RTAS) priced at a MSRP of $149 USD.If you already own the D82 Sonic Maximizer V2, you can upgrade for $50 USD.

The Stomp Ware plug-in suite suite is a digital toolbox consisting of BBE’s eight most popular boutique analog stomp boxes:

• Free Fuzz: ’70s fuzz.
• Green Screamer: Vintage overdrive.
• Mind Bender: Vibrato/chorus.
• Opto Stomp: Optical compressor.
• Sonic Stomp: Sonic Maximizer.
• Soul Vibe: ’60s rotary speaker simulator.
• Tremor: Vintage tremolo.
• Two Timer: Analog delay.

Stomp Ware is available to purchase for PC and Mac (VST/Au/RTAS) for a MSRP of $215 USD.

More information: BBE Sound / Sonic Sweet / Stomp Ware