AfroDJMac has released Nintendo Rack, a new download in a series of free Ableton Live racks.
Dirty, lo-fi, 8-bit, nostalgic. This weeks Ableton Live Rack was created with the sound card of a Nintendo Entertainment System. Maybe it’s just because I grew up spending more time playing video games than I’d ever admit, but the bleeps and blips that come from this magical machine have a warmth and familiarity that hits home. The samples that make up the virtual instrument were made by connecting a MidiNES cartridge to a Nintendo and sampling certain notes.
The Nintendo Rack for Ableton Live is available as a free download from AfroDJMac.
Good people, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the "clean" version of our new album, The Hot Sauce Committee pt 2 has leaked. So as a hostile and retaliatory measure with great hubris we are making the full explicit aka filthy dirty nasty version available for streaming on our site. We hope this brings much happiness, hugs, and harmony. Enjoy Kikoos for life!
The armies of the earbuds are everywhere, as people – since the dawning of the Walkman – tune out their surroundings. What if, instead, your surroundings became soundtracks? That’s the question posed by a mobile app research project, partnering between New York’s Times Square and a creative team at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
UrbanRemix invites users to capture geo-tagged sounds with a free iOS and Android app, then to string them together into sound compositions on the Web
Codebending is the exploration of software with “patch points.” Patch points expose the inner workings of computer programs, and allow for atypical connections between things like games, music making software, office suites, etc.
Every movie blogger is obligated to devote a post to The Wilhelm Scream AT LEAST once in their lives. And they’re all pretty much the same: A quote from wikipedia, the compilation video on YouTube, and the latest movie they found it in. This post is a little different. Starting last year I started collecting Wilhelm Screams, planning on making a video showing some favorites. That project spiraled out of control, and the result is a (pretty) complete collection.
Max Mathews is best known for his involvement in the debut of digital synthesis, but he contributed much more. His Radio Baton predicted gestural controllers that arrived much later from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, and it may be his code design ideas that outlast even the memory of the computer’s first musical utterances.
Slewpi is a new type of app that lets you create music and synthesized sound and animation by painting on the screen with your fingers.
Slewpi is super easy to use, just paint with your fingers and choose different colors and brushes to change the strokes and sounds. Slewpi records what you do and plays it back in a loop.
Choose different brushes to change the visual style as well as the sound of your strokes in real-time. The different brushes correspond to different synthesizer waveform and vibrato settings allowing you to create new and diverse audio/visual compositions.
Strings of numbers are everywhere in our world, tucked just outside our awareness alongside identifiers like bar codes. Dutch media artist and inventor Leo van der Veen simply plucks that information and brings it to the fore.
A few months ago I published a post on how to make a MIDI Ribbon Controller with Arduino. In the meantime I had a few ideas to improve both hardware and software and also felt the need to change many parameters without having to reprogram every time Arduino. Finally I placed the controller in a case, thanks to Laura who built it. So this is version 2.0 of my MIDI Ribbon Controller, which finally becomes a much more practical tool.
Bedroom Producers Blog has released Game Boy LSDJ Noise And Glitch Sessions, the fifth pack in a series of free sample collections.
Ok, here’s a brand new free bpb sample pack. It’s called Game Boy LSDJ Noise And Glitch Sessions, and contains sounds recorded from a black Game Boy running LSDJ software. I’ve created the sounds using LSDJ’s awesome synth engine, combined with the built-in pattern editor.
You’ll probably notice that the included sounds are much more aggressive than what you’d expect to hear in a standard Game Boy video game, for example. I was going for a glitchy, noisy vibe, and the LSDJ synth engine turned out as a great tool for creating such sounds.
All included sounds are 100% clean recordings of the Game Boy sound output, no post FX added. This is also my first sample set recorded in 24bit.
The Game Boy LSDJ Noise And Glitch Sessions sample pack is available as a free download.
Les Productions Zvon has released Bonus Pack 01, a sample library that comes free with the purchase of any Les Productions Zvon product.
The Bonus Packs are sample sets that are given for free with purchases of my regular sample sets. They contain some odd sounds, all original samples released as bonuses because either they’re too small to release as a regular sample set or due to lack of time to fully develop them.
Bonus Pack 01 features
Black Swan bell: A small handbell recorded and processed through a Nintendo DSi, guaranteed LoFi! 44 samples (7.85 MB).
Cheap Bells: Two handbells bought at a dollar store for the Holidays. Contrary to the Black Swan bell, it’s the bells that are cheap not the recordings. Includes single hits and hand ringings. Only the 4 samples with stretch in their name are processed. 25 samples (6.67 MB).
Honks: Samples made with 2 different vehicle horns, 17 honks with or without the sound of the air pump release and 3 “air” samples. The air pump release can easily be trimmed if you don’t want it, as I did with Honk 14 that has the 2 versions. These samples were a popular giveaway for the New Year 2011 but now also contain some K3 mappings and processing including random pitch variations and 4 melodic Honks. 21 samples (1.15 MB).
Spindle Chair: Collection of samples made by hitting the spindles of a wooden chair with a drum stick. Was recorded simultaneously in stereo and mono with 2 different recorders. Thus both sets of samples sound different. There are 19 patterns and 16 single hits, the hits are NOT extracted from the patterns. K3 mapping of the single hits has the Harp Glissando script in the performance view. The patterns are not mapped. 73 samples (5.59 MB).
The Bonus Pack 01 is available in wave, sfz and Native Instruments Kontakt 3.5 or better formats. A free demo can be found on the Les Productions Zvon website.
Retro chip music appeal and the occasional Super Mario Bros. game aside, you probably think of the Nintendo NES and Famicom system as something collecting dust at garage sales. You probably don’t think of this NES running as a self-contained music production workstation, syncing to MIDI and Android, or exploiting new software for producing elaborate musical sequences, drum and bass lines. Think again.
What might to outsiders seem like the nostalgic draw of video music has become something else entirely – the NES is taking its place as a serious, studio synth.
Christian Kleine has released a number of Max for Live devices, including timestretching, delay, extreme chorus, spring reverb, ringmod, drum synth, comb filters, audio recorder and more.
The devices are available at no cost. Donations are welcome.
I made a basic Max/MSP patch that allows one to use the Korg NanoKontrol MIDI controller as a periodic waveform editor. Each of the first eight faders controls a point along a periodic waveform. The ninth fader controls the frequency of the waveform.
refreq is a really customable music player. I mean really. You can load music files into refreq, but also images (bitmaps, imgs, pngs). When you load a song, first the program analyzes the track, then it draws its frequency spectrum. After tracking, you can generate the spectral image / bitmap back into music.
At this point, it's getting really interesting. After you have the image of the track, how you want to play it depends on you, You can play with the timeline, to play the sound from an other aspect. You can see where exactly the notes are, but the harmonies are also really visible. You can rotate the player, then the notes will be the same, but the harmonies will be changing
Oliver Wittchow has released Nanoloop Lite, a free version of the iPhone app that combines sequencer, synthesizer and sampler in one package.
Nanoloop was originally developed for Game Boy (first release in 1999) and is a popular platform for mobile music creation. The new iPhone version presented here follows the same basic structure and design concept but otherwise it is an entirely new program. It does not simulate the Game Boy’s sound or other functions but has been fully optimised for the iPhone’s capabilities.
Nanoloop Lite for iPhone features
Straight, minimalistic graphical interface.
Pattern-based stepsequencer.
6 channels, each can be synth or sampler.
Song editor with loop function.
Synth with envelope, filter, lfo etc.
Sample on the fly.
Re-sampling.
The Lite version is fully functional and shares all features of the full version, except for the following limitations:
Projects can not be saved or sent, only the current status is kept in memory. The curret project can be exported to the full version (if installed on the same device).
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