Junai

Japanese Rock for Fucks Sake...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:12:15 +0900

…is the name of a decent blog, the subject of which you can probably guess, and which is worth checking out whether or not you have any interest in the genre. The link goes to one of my recent faves (which, I should note, I actually bought on CD), Yosui Inoue’s folk-rocky Kori no Sekai (World of Ice). But there’s a load of other stuff up there, from pop to scary 70s psychedelia with lots of deranged screaming on it, to more straight-line rock, most of it excellent and worth at least a listen.

Analog Industries Tattoo drum machine

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:23:56 +0900

Analog Industries Tattoo drum machine:

I’m more of a hardware than software user when it comes to percussion, but Analog Industries’ Tattoo drum synth and sequencer looks like something I could get into using. The ability to have envelopes that modify each drum sound over the course of a pattern, plus the randomization that’s one of AI’s hallmarks, sound like they could be very musically useful.

First thoughts on the new Korg Wavedrum

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:21:15 +0900

1. Built very solidly, though it understandably makes a certain amount of noise when you whack the hell out of it. The casing is metal, which surprised me initially but I imagine is necessary to withstand the whacking.

2. The included samples are crisp and the presets layer multiple sounds nicely to give some tonal variation depending on how roughly you go at it. If you’re habitually playing with your hands rather than sticks the default sensitivity will need dialing down a bit; as is, some of the patches require that you belt the hell out of them to get the “loud” version of a snare sample assigned to the rim, for example. I particularly liked some of the synthesized sounds using the Wavedrum’s models, which have a nice organic-but-unfamiliar character, though.

3. The included delay and reverb are welcome, and I suppose could be helpful playing live to give things a dab of presence. Their deployment in the presets can be gimmicky in places.

4. Korg really should have included either USB, MIDI or the option of an external editor (as with the previous Wavedrum). A quick scan of the editable parameters in the manual suggests that extensively tweaking them on a three-digit LED is going to be a chore on a par with brushing your teeth via your anus. I suspect the main issue is going to be that the limited knobs and buttons will control different things depending on patch and model, requiring that you have the manual around to refer to. This could well be profoundly annoying. (I stand to be corrected on this point, however, having not tackled it yet.)

5. On the upside, you can edit quite a large amount of stuff, and there are several algorithms that treat the sound from the internal pickup, plus a dual-oscillator analogue synth model and so forth.

6. The presets in places remind me of why I grew so frustrated with digital synths in the 80s and 90s; there is an overabundance in places of words like “jungle,” “midnight” and “alien,” which signal the whooshings, rumblings and watery noises that you might expect.

Overall, though, buy it if you have any pretensions at all toward being a percussionist, which I’m assuming all keyboard players do. It is a decent piece of kit that will reward technique and experimentation and is an instrument with its own character, and as such a rarity these days.

Too much.

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:32:00 +0900

Current reading list:

Queen of Candesce, by Karl Schroeder The Neddiad, by Daniel Pinkwater Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter Gofun-go no Sekai, by Ryu Murakami 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

More music soon, I hope, when things stop getting in the way.

Record

Tue, 12 May 2009 22:25:00 +0900

I think Propellerheads protest far too much about the usability problems with most DAWs. In fact, the interface for Record looks like a lot more clutter than I’m used to in Logic, as others have noted already. I used Reason for quite a while and liked it, but I did find its interface inflexible in some ways, notably its vertical tallness; with wider screens becoming the norm I often found myself wanting a double-width rack instead of just the single column. Record looks like a step backward in terms of clutter. For one thing, if its mixing desk is always that size it would drive me batshit. I barely use Logic’s mixer; I find myself tweaking levels, panning and effects by track rather than messing with multiple tracks at once.

The timestretching is useful, yes, but the comping feature (for putting together vocal takes etc.) doesn’t seem to me to be very different from the way that Logic does it.

And what this bullshit is about it not being a DAW, I have no idea. I can see the distinction they’re trying to make, but it amounts to little more than spin in the real world. It comes across as an attempt to avoid disadvantageous comparisons with competing products.

None of which goes to say that I wouldn’t give it and Reason a go again; in fact, I’d been dithering about upgrading to Reason 4 recently anyway, the ability to use effects like the Scream on audio, and the modular tricks you can do in Reason using Combinators and chained effects would also be interesting.

But the closed nature of the system turns me off somewhat. Having to run three applications (Record, Reason and Logic) just to use an AU plugin on one channel strikes me as utterly absurd. And I think by delaying the addition of audio recording to Reason for so long they may have talked themselves into over-egging it when they did add it.

Extreme sample stretching for OSX

Tue, 12 May 2009 22:03:17 +0900

Extreme sample stretching for OSX:

Had a quick play with this OSX port of Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch and, while the interface is a little rough, it seems stable and the ability to stretch a sample of a few seconds in length into literally hours of sound is fascinating. It’s a fun process listening back to the stretched versions and picking out interesting bits for use elsewhere, too.

(via Waveformless)

Sorry, couldn’t resist this: kari-shma: Cupcake Ninjas!...

Mon, 11 May 2009 17:54:25 +0900

Sorry, couldn’t resist this:

kari-shma:

Cupcake Ninjas! (via Lilley1)

So, to work.

Mon, 11 May 2009 17:45:47 +0900

I’ll gloss over the radio silence around these parts recently, if you don’t mind, since “normal service now resumes” posts are, for the most part, tedious. Suffice it to say that I’ve had a slightly difficult couple of weeks.

As for progress, I have one new song 99.5% written (I literally need to fix the tune for the last line) and am battling an unduly complex arrangement and trying to get the vocal right because the tune is, I now realise, incredibly hard to sing. This one’s called “Last trains,” alluded to previously.

I also have a polite little ditty called “Baby steps” that is written—I think—but may need the key bumping up a notch from the demo and a bit of arrangement work. This one, finally, is the “use all the old analogue gear” approach that I originally started out with; it’s mostly played on a Roland RS-09, SH-101, x0xb0x and MFB 503. I was listening to The Smiths again recently and thinking on the fact that some of their songs were better for not overextending a simple idea, so “Baby steps” is essentially two verses, a chorus and an outro. The “I think” above is because I can’t hear the outro in my head yet, and I want to have an idea before I start noodling away.

From next week things should assume a more level course, so the pace at which I’m able to finish and upload stuff should pick up rapidly. As will, no doubt, the twittering and tumbling and audiobooing. Bear with me.

Pyrotechnics in the key of nothing at all HD version at the...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:34:00 +0900

Pyrotechnics in the key of nothing at all

HD version at the ‘Tube looks a bit better.

Ironic that I should have watched this at about the same time...

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:13:58 +0900

Ironic that I should have watched this at about the same time the iTunes Store premium pricing came in. As Reznor notes, you can pretty much get any item of music for free these days on the web. Demand elasticity is no longer predictable, it’s infinite. Unlimited downside if you’re unlucky, or greedy, enough to put prices up beyond what people are willing to pay. Break the business model. Go ahead.

TR also gives some thoughtful advice for bands starting out and attempting to go the NIN route. Nothing earthshattering, but at this point he’s probably the most successful person to have played the game in all its permutations; so whereas coming from other people these might be useful suggestions, from him you suspect they’re backed up by science; that is, trying lots of stuff and seeing what works.

Can I just say that this, if it works as advertised, induces in...

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:27:00 +0900

Can I just say that this, if it works as advertised, induces in me a severe case of gadget need? The idea of playing live alone with a laptop thrills me about as much as it probably would an audience, and I’ve been trying to rough out setups that involve something more — and this is perfect, in that it crams mixer, recorder and effects into something small enough to schlep in addition to, say, a smallish synth or two. Pluperfect, in that you can even eliminate the laptop. Await news of pricing with interest.

Create Digital Music » Cakewalk V-Studio 100: Mixer + Recorder + Computer Audio Interface + Controller

Not that you want any cold...

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:25:04 +0900

…but you definitely don’t want the one I have. After a day of endurance, 24 hours’ sleep and another day of endurance, I am now coughing sporadically, cannot breathe through my nose, am seeing double and feel that slight sense of unreality you get when your body temp is out of whack.

Have written half of two new songs in the midst of this, but cannot sing worth shit. So a bit more time before anything gets recorded. Sigh.

Mentioned this briefly on Twitter, and it’s by no means...

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:16:53 +0900

Mentioned this briefly on Twitter, and it’s by no means recent, but I thought it was worth a repost here as I found it immediately motivated me to get deeper into Quartz Composer. In short, it epitomises what a tutorial should be—it quickly allows you to do something cool that both gives a hint of what further possibilities lie ahead, and is worth showing off to people. In this case, creating a rotating, lighted cube that changes height in response to audio input.

Week Two

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:38:36 +0900

I should note that these are Martian weeks, made up of Arctic days, and should not be confused with any normal Earth unit of time. But wince-inducing excuses aside, the next song has finally got a head beyond other similarly half-formed ideas. The hungriest tortoise in the plodding race toward the lettuce, if you will. Working title is “Last Train”.

By the way

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:14:51 +0900

It’s pronounced joo-nigh. Rhymes with “you fly” or “blue pie” or “shoe dry”.

An hour in your embrace

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:00:31 +0900

An hour in your embrace

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:47:18 +0900

An hour in your embrace

The Motus Mavis Star Synth. Puts me somewhat in mind of what...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:07:05 +0900

The Motus Mavis Star Synth. Puts me somewhat in mind of what modders might get up to if you let them at the Tardis’s centre console. Via Matrixsynth.

Geek notes

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:03:16 +0900

A little premature given we’re still at the demo stage, but just to go through what’s making the noises on the recording:

Floating-around-your-head bleeps: A blippy analogue sound from a Tenori-on processed through a bitcrusher, pitch shifter, LFO-controlled filter and delay.

Drums: From the iPhone, using an app called IR-909. I do own a real TR-606, but this whole thing was done in a couple of hours in the living room and I already had the loop programmed in the phone.

The strings are a Mellotron sample, slightly downgraded; the bass is a slightly-tweaked Logic sample. Both played using a Korg nanoKey on my lap.

Twitter

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:05:12 +0900

I’ve opted for a widget in the site’s sidebar rather than importing tweets as blog entries — less annoying overlap that way, I think.