Some interesting things I found recently:
# Arduino Piano Squealer Synth
Marc Nostromo developed the Arduino Piano Squealer Synth for the Arduino Pocket Piano, an arduino shield produced by Critters and Guitari.
The engine implements a small monosynth with a few waveforms, a HP/BP/LP continuous resonant filter, decay and a few little own tricks that generate a LOT of aliases, making a great dirty digital synth. Since the Pocket Piano has only 3 potentiometers available for control (the 4th one being hardwired to the volume), I use a “page” system to implement series of 3 parameters to fiddle with. To switch “page”, use the rightmost note of the A.P (NOT the one under the led, the one left to to it). To help you know which page you are at, you can use the led: it will flash a number of time equivalent to the current page you are at.
The source code of the Arduino Piano Squealer synth is available under GPL License V3.
# Flux Twitter Syrah give-away quiz
Flux is giving away some Syrah licenses to three lucky Twitter users:
To celebrate 200+ followers of FluxPlugins since mid May 2009, we are introducing a little Syrah give-away quiz. Fill the form and answer both questions correctly, and you are participating in the give away of one of all in total three Syrah licenses.
Answers need to be in before the end of the day on Monday 9th October.
# Digital Mixtape
Digital MixtapeJustin Cole writes:
My new design uses a small mp3 player that I disassembled and placed inside a cassette tape adapter for an ipod. This allows for mp3's to be played back through a tapedeck. This has all of the ease and technology of an mp3 player with the retro coolness of a mix tape.
# Waveformless: Free Sample Friday: Sample Pack from Portion Control!
Tom Shear writes:
I've got something very special for Waveformless readers today. As you may remember, a couple weeks ago, I featured an interview with electro-industrial music pioneers Portion Control where I hinted that we might have something special coming from the band. So here it is… a 16MB sample pack of loops and one-shots from the band themselves.
# Lackluster: Portal EP
A lovely free album available to download in high quality mp3 and lossless FLAC formats. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License
The Portal EP was supposed to come out on another label in 2008, but the label went bankrupt and closed up shop. In email conversations with Lackluster, I offered to master the EP and do a net release on Cornwarning. So, 4 years after its original intended release, it is finally here.
Covering a variety of tempos and styles, from the beatless epic "Eons" to the mutant techno of "Lubiszewski Beats", "Portal" covers a lot of musical territory. What unifies the work is Lackluster's musicality. For me each track here is deep in emotion, despite their lack of lyric or explicit program.
# JSGB v.0.02: a JavaScript Nintendo GameBoy Emulator and Debugger
Play GameBoy games in your brower. Recommended browser: Chrome/Chromium 4+ Other browsers may be slow or don't work at all!
# How to build an Air Guitar with Arduino, aka the AIRduino Guitar
The idea here is to build a wearable virtual guitar that is to be controlled with two hands much like playing Air Guitar. It has been created and prototyped during a two weeks project at ChalmersUniversity (Sweden) for a Physical Computing class.
The aim is to get the feeling of playing a real guitar. The AIRduino Guitar is made of one glove and one stick. The glove is used to set the tone and the stick to trigger the sound.
# Digital Sales Up, But is Apple Monopoly the Price? NPD, Mint Data, Editorial Analysis
Peter Kirn writes:
Mint.com, the online financial management tool, has put its numbers together with market researchers NPD Group to analyze music spending. The results: when it comes to consuming recorded music, digital music continues to rise. At the same time, so does Apple’s grip on the music consumption market, a combination that includes proprietary control of a music store, a music player, and the leading mobile device.
# Is this the ultimate male playroom?
For many men, their house is their castle. For one Canterbury man, his play room is a submarine complete with working periscope.
Wayne Eyre has turned part of his Spencerville property into a wrecked submarine featuring "plutonium-leaking" torpedoes, at a cost of $100,000.
In the rusting interior of the submarine, which appears to have beached on a deserted island, Eyre has all the creature comforts reclining chairs, a three-metre big-screen TV and a top-notch surround-sound system.
# Novation Releases All MIDI Details for Launchpad
Novation’s Launchpad, its affordable (<$200) "grid" controller, may have a big Ableton logo on it. But underneath, it's just a MIDI controller. Bi-colored LEDs, containing a red and green element for red, green, and amber output (amber = red+green), can be triggered using simple MIDI note and control messages. That means, whether you're looking forward to Max for Live or you're sequencing in a tracker or writing Processing sketches, you can use the Launchpad just like any other MIDI controller.
# Qeve: Free Live Visual – VJ Software, Built in Pd
From Create Digital Motion:
Qeve is a promising-looking, open-source visual performance tool built in visual patching environment Pure Data (Pd). It was built primarily on Ubuntu Linux but should also run with some adjustment on Mac. (Pd itself runs on Windows, but some of the visual dependencies are not available on that platform. I’d still recommend Linux.)
# SampleRadar: 703 free grime samples
A fresh batch of samples from SampleRadar.
The samples are split into seven self-explanatory categories: Bass, Beats, FX, Guitar, Kits, Synth and Vox. All the samples are supplied as 24-bit WAV files so can be imported directly into your DAW of choice. Because they're royalty-free, you're welcome to use them in your music in any way you like – all we ask is that you don't re-distribute them.
# Eric Beam Nebula Programs
Eric Beam has recently posted some programs for Acustica Audio’s Nebula: Tube 1500 “instant analog” & MCI Heritage EQ “I like it dirty”
