The seasonal streaming event that used to take place every new year's eve at electro-music.com seems to have expanded into celebrating all turning points in our planet's position in relation to the sun. It started with the summer solstice event last year, and now we've just gone full circle - the Spring Equinox shoutcast event took place on the night that was 2010-03-20 - 2010-03-21, with 16 hours of great, disparate performances spread out over the globe. Check them out here: http://electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40217
I played a half hour set titled "The 140 BPM Blues", trying out some clip switching, looping and vocoding. And blues. Here it is.
söndag 21 mars 2010
lördag 13 mars 2010
VG-99
Got a VG-99 and a GK-3 the other day. Acronymn fun! Anyway, here's an image of a GK-3 mounted on a guitar:
That's not my cheap Squier strat, but you get the idea. The deal with the pickup that is wired to the control unit at the bottom here, is that it treats each string separately, sending six individual signals to the control unit and into a 13-pin connector. You can use a suitable cable to connect these 13 pins to an identical socket on a VG-99, which is capable of doing stuff with these signals that you may not have thought possible before.
That's the VG-99. What it does is take each signal and treat it, playing sounds based on Physical Modeling in one way or another, or detecting the pitch of each string and sending it as MIDI note data to whatever synthesizer you'd like. The models include a variety of electric and acoustic guitars, basses, banjos and sitars, and never-before-heard-of synthesizers. These synths don't work like a keyboard-triggered kind, they rather are excited in ways similar to the aforementioned guitar models, creating new kinds of sounds that I (in my admittedly G.A.S-enhanced excitement for a new piece of kit) am very excited about. Here is a test run I did with some synth sounds:
Knotwork
I've posted about this here and here.
It will be fun to see if this leads anywhere :)
That's not my cheap Squier strat, but you get the idea. The deal with the pickup that is wired to the control unit at the bottom here, is that it treats each string separately, sending six individual signals to the control unit and into a 13-pin connector. You can use a suitable cable to connect these 13 pins to an identical socket on a VG-99, which is capable of doing stuff with these signals that you may not have thought possible before.
That's the VG-99. What it does is take each signal and treat it, playing sounds based on Physical Modeling in one way or another, or detecting the pitch of each string and sending it as MIDI note data to whatever synthesizer you'd like. The models include a variety of electric and acoustic guitars, basses, banjos and sitars, and never-before-heard-of synthesizers. These synths don't work like a keyboard-triggered kind, they rather are excited in ways similar to the aforementioned guitar models, creating new kinds of sounds that I (in my admittedly G.A.S-enhanced excitement for a new piece of kit) am very excited about. Here is a test run I did with some synth sounds:
Knotwork
I've posted about this here and here.
It will be fun to see if this leads anywhere :)
onsdag 17 februari 2010
Antimon On the "Air"
Wow, apparently I used to post to a blog here once! A lot of stuff has happened - I'm hanging out at electro-music.com, and I've participated in a couple of events, the most recent being streaming events on the summer solstice, the autumnal equinox, new year's eve, and "A Winter's Dream - an Evening of Ambient Music 2" a couple of weeks ago. The last event was the first where I felt I didn't lose track of what I was doing at some point in the performance. Fun!
Next up is a radio show that's sent on shoutcast at radio.electro-music.com. I'm calling it The Antimon Plays Some Doodles Show, and I'm going to be playing all tracks from an album called Doodles, that I've put up on Tunecore, which distributes stuff like this to online music stores, most notably iTunes. I did it mostly to get a kick out of seeing myself on iTunes I guess.
Next up is a radio show that's sent on shoutcast at radio.electro-music.com. I'm calling it The Antimon Plays Some Doodles Show, and I'm going to be playing all tracks from an album called Doodles, that I've put up on Tunecore, which distributes stuff like this to online music stores, most notably iTunes. I did it mostly to get a kick out of seeing myself on iTunes I guess.
lördag 27 september 2008
Two More Tunes
Posted this at Kontrollrummet and electro-music.com: Invulnerable and this at Kontrollrummet: Talon.
"Invulnerable" is an experimental thing that I enjoy listening to myself but I'm not sure if it really works outside my brain. The reception at Kontrollrummet was varied - some like it and some didn't like the quirky percussion.
"Talon" was writted yesterday while walking to work. I take a long route to and from work everyday that includes a 40 minute walk, during which first the chorus words and then the main bassline crept into my head in the morning. Having bad experiences in the past with great ideas in the morning that evaporate during the work day, I kept humming the tune to myself and did an attempt at score notes when I got to the office (I got the note pitches wrong but the timing was right). I managed to keep it in my brain until today, and recorded most of it before lunch. It's a simple pop tune.
fredag 12 september 2008
The Modern Sport
Posted a new tune at Kontrollrummet.com (swedish forum for musicians) a while ago, called The Modern Sport. The responses were varied. I am starting to think that a lot of people don't enjoy monotony as much as I do. Though my reckless attitude towards recording techniques and polishing takes may have something to do with it.
tisdag 5 augusti 2008
The monome
When I saw the monome 40h (8x8 grid of buttons that light up) on a YouTube vid, I thought that it looked like a really cool thing, but didn't think much more about it. Then, when I noticed that they were making a 256 button version, my mind started racing so hard, that the only way to stop it (besides being constantly drugged or jumping off a cliff) was to get it. So I did. And i don't regret it. The obvious comparision is Yamaha's Tenori-On, but from what I gather that isn't as configurable as I'd like, and it doesn't have that gorgeous OSC support that makes programming the monome such a pleasure.
A simple usage of LiSa in combination with the monome makes a great fun samper/sequencing experience.
The accordeome is a kind of MIDI keyboard with a layout that facilitates playing chords.
The note sequencer is one of those sequencer apps that you instinctively make on the monome - though I made a piano roll like thingy instead of sample grains or parts. I think it works fairly ok.
I've made a couple of ChucK apps for it since I got it:
A simple usage of LiSa in combination with the monome makes a great fun samper/sequencing experience.
The accordeome is a kind of MIDI keyboard with a layout that facilitates playing chords.
The note sequencer is one of those sequencer apps that you instinctively make on the monome - though I made a piano roll like thingy instead of sample grains or parts. I think it works fairly ok.
Software - ChucK and stuff
I enjoy programming, both professionally and as a hobby. Here are some small applications and utilizations I've made:
Keyboard Trainer is a little game that plays notes and then checks if you play it right on a MIDI keyboard. The linked thread quickly diverges into a lot of advanced stuff - I only posted stuff at the start.
Sample Composer is a larger project that uses Java to display a GUI where you can freely place samples in sequence or parallell, pitch shift them and change their start and length. The GUI communicates (using OSC) with a ChucK program that makes up the sound generating back-end.
I've been enjoying a fairly new programming language called ChucK for a while now. ChucK uses a thread-like thing called shreds (non-preemptive, locking) and makes the clock behave in a deterministic way, aiming at being useful for making sound. I think it does a very good job at that!
The Command Line Sequencer is an attempt at making a sequencer that you control in real time with typing on a computer keyboard rather than a point-and-click interface or some MIDI controller. If you doubt the usage of something like this, find an old Unix system administrator and ask her or him for a demonstration of the "vi" text editor. You'll be suprised at the speed at which you can control something via a keyboard. Also, the way you type is somewhat akin to the way you learn playing a piano keyboard (logical, really), meaning that practice makes perfect. I've managed to pull some tricks from this, and I'm thinking of adding some new improvements.
Mouse Harmony is a little application that takes the input from several mice, each controlling its own sound generator. Not very useful in itself, but I am pretty entusiastic about the prospect of hooking up a load of trackballs to a computer to make music.
Keyboard Trainer is a little game that plays notes and then checks if you play it right on a MIDI keyboard. The linked thread quickly diverges into a lot of advanced stuff - I only posted stuff at the start.
Sample Composer is a larger project that uses Java to display a GUI where you can freely place samples in sequence or parallell, pitch shift them and change their start and length. The GUI communicates (using OSC) with a ChucK program that makes up the sound generating back-end.
SoftMusic is a Java app I made on my hotel room while being on a dull job in Stockholm for half a year. It uses a set of homespun algorithms to generate MIDI music, depending on a large set of configuration parameters. I don't think it works properly, I have been meaning to check it out to fix bugs for a time.
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