I think Hank Shocklee’s contribution to Public Enemy, as a producer and co-founder, had a deep influence on the approach to sampled sound and digital sound ever since. In Brisbane, Australia in December, I got to sit in a room full of students at the Art of Record Production conference and listen to Shocklee walk through the album "Fear of a Black Planet." I realized it was a bit like needle-dropping Sgt. Pepper with George Martin.

Shocklee describes his role with Public Enemy as a kind of teacher, helping Chuck D, poet, meet digital production technology. In the years since, he’s expanded that teaching role to include young people around the world, and he’s got some strong opinions about the importance of learning the craft of recording and music in general.

Fittingly, we sat down for a few moments in a classroom.

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. I - On music making from cdm tv on Vimeo.

What a lot of people may not know about Hank Shocklee is that beyond being a Public Enemy veteran, he’s also been deeply involved in the music industry. Unlike so many armchair industry quarterbacks, Shocklee has worked with the major artists (from Madonna to Peter Gabriel) and had a significant stint as Senior Vice President for Universal MCA Records. That means when Shocklee criticizes the industry as musically illiterate, he speaks from the perspective of someone who’s been on both the inside and outside of the majors. (He’s now producing and scoring music independently, and drove his entrepreneurial spirit into his own Shocklee Entertainment.)

Criticizing is one thing — but Shocklee had advice for how artists can guide the direction of their own career. He talks about the limitations of the industry, how the music community can grow beyond it, and how visual media could finally become a serious domain for musicians. (We agree with that.)

Interview: Hank Shocklee, Pt. II - On music business from cdm tv on Vimeo.

Once the domain of the few, creating and customizing sophisticated DIY controllers is now more accessible than ever. That means, if you can’t find what you want, and you’re ambitious and knowledgeable enough, you go make your own. Josh Boughey was impressed by the Monome enough to buy one — but the Monome, a grid of on/off buttons, doesn’t provide any kind of variable control. So Josh built his own, combining a series of parallel touch strips with LED indicators. (The lights are the tricky part, requiring an obscene number of connections.)

The creation, dubbed “Stribe” by Josh, could have been a one-off. But instead, he’s working on making it into a tool for others, with completely open source hardware and software. The whole system is built on the popular Arduino platform, making it uncommonly easy to modify. It’s a work in progress, as you can see lacking an enclosure. But ten have made it out into the wild, people are already programming custom software, and more are coming.

I got to hang out with Josh while he was in town this weekend. Luckily, he’s a fan of early music, meaning we met at a concert of a viol consort that was playing my music — an unusual collision of 15th and 21st Century music technology.

Josh gave a demo of the Stribe, for myself plus Phil Torrone of Make and Limor Fried (aka lady ada), creator of the x0xb0x open-source 303 clone. It’s still a project in process– there’s more to be done in firmware and support software and documentation — but it already shows some real promise. I snapped some shots, studied the Max patches, and mostly listened to Limor and Josh talk about the challenges of starting a DIY hardware business. (I hope that DIY builders start to share experiences, even informally, as they work to make the business end work so they can keep building.)

Just what can happen when you let your baby go? Someone else can do stuff with it you didn’t expect. Here’s musician Stretta developing music ideas-in-progress with the Stribe (see blog post, Stribe forum thread):

A Brief Conversation Resulting in One Less Child from stretta on Vimeo.

Some tidbits from the hands-on session:

Cornelius’ Sensuous Synchronized tour, with The Cornelius Group, has been stunning American audiences over the past year. I got to a chance to talk to Cornelius, aka Keigo Oyamada, following the New York close to his American trip. The show blew my mind: constant visual stimulation, earnest performances (including audience interaction on Theremin), and perfectly-synced (true to the name) visuals that made the music into a dreamscape you wanted to live in all night. The interview was via email, though, and somehow I got strange and wordy with my questions — I think because I got excited. Cornelius, true to the sharp-edged economy of his music, responded in minimalistic fashion. So, given that too many useless words tend to surround music in general, I’ll be brief:

We all love Cornelius.

The Sensuous Synchronized tour is one of the best audiovisual shows on the planet.

When I feel artistically dry, I watch these videos and feel wonderful.

Cornelius reminds me why I do what I do.

The best way to get Cornelius and share him with friends is to watch the videos.

Go buy the album.

(For more on the visuals in the Cornelius tour, see Momo’s take and discussion on Create Digital Motion)

Now here’s what Cornelius had to say, with some of those videos mixed in because they’re worth countless words:

Okay, that’s my hand. But my feet are eager to stomp on this, too.

People looked at me funny when I told them the most promising gear I saw at the NAMM show was a foot controller.

Well, not just any foot controller. First off, the design and build quality are really exceptional, even in the pre-production model, as you’d hope from a premium-priced Moog box. But it’s brains, not beauty, that set it apart. The MP- 201 is a controller that finally gives your feet some intelligence.

Here’s Amos from Moog Music taking us through the MP-201 — including a peek at what’s coming between now and when the unit ships in the spring. And Amos is worth listening to, as he’s one of the folks working on presets for the unit.

NAMM08: Moog Multi Pedal Preview from cdm tv on Vimeo.

My first impressions of why it’s cool:

We’ve seen basses and turntables made from motorcycles, and bicycle parts turned into DJ setups, ensembles, and The Nutcracker. But The Car Music Project has gone further, building two entire ensembles out a single car, first a sound designer’s old Honda Accord and, more recently, deconstructing a brand-new Ford Focus into a full instrumental ensemble in just five weeks.

In other words, before — a five-door 2008 Ford Focus hatchback as built for the UK market looks like this:

… and after the Car Music Project gets to it, 21 parts from that car become 31 individual instruments:

The ad campaign premiered yesterday in England. Above: the extended, three-minute version.

More: More cowbell! Ford turns Focus into musical instruments [Autoblog]

I got to talk to New York-based sound designer Bill Milbrodt, who led a 22-person team to build the instruments, with Ray Faunce III managing fabrication. Composer Craig Richey, who scored The King of Kong, Friends With Money, and Lovely & Amazing (among others), wrote the music for the ensemble.

Bill describes to CDM the daunting task of going from Ford hatchback to chamber ensemble. It’s an incredible insight into instrument design and construction, whether your DIY instrument tastes tend in the acoustic or digital realms.

PS, to the Crave blog and other doubters: the music is real. They actually made some fantastic-sounding instruments out of that Ford Focus. I certainly know when I buy an automobile, I like the peace of mind that comes from buying one I could later deconstruct with 22 skilled metalworkers and play original scores on.

The Digidesign Digi 003 is a strong value if you need this much mixing and I/O facility. But is it overkill for our reader Lynn?

Gear isn’t everything — but getting geared up is the one hurdle that can hold up beginners. In the Ask CDM series, we’ll be answering at random some of the questions we regularly get in our inbox. First up, Lynn Morgan, who’s ready to make the jump to digital. Lynn writes:

My questions will quickly [make it] apparent that I’m from the old “tape” school of recording. But nonetheless, I do understand sound recording to some degree, having recorded 5 long-play projects in “Guitar City”.

I want to set up a home studio where I can record my own tunes. I’ll use guitar, guitar synth, bass and some keyboards and, of course, my vocals. I want the sound to be totally professional and I want the ability to interface with other users of Pro Tools, for possibly background vocals or drums, etc.

My question is this, What do I really need for equipment? The 003 Digidesign looks impressive but what would I need beyond that?

It turns out Lynn isn’t currently a Pro Tools user, but she added this when pressed:

I want to set up a recording system that will not be outdated in 6 months and sound quality to equal the best out there. The transition from “tape” to digital they say has its advantages and disadvantages. I’m just not sure what I need in the “digital” world to make it all happen.

Good questions — and ones I expect will spur some reader comment, too. But let’s divide this up into some smaller questions and look at it that way. I did intend to answer just this sort of question with my book Real World Digital Audio, but there are some specifics I didn’t get into there, so we’ll look at the specific questions.

This wound up being a huge answer, but I know it’s a very Frequently Asked Question.

What do you need?

I think the best way to begin is to think through what you need to do and work backwards from there. With audio hardware, you’ll want to think literally to inputs and outputs and how much you’ll be recording at a time.

You’ve seen the “top picks” lists elsewhere online for the NAMM show, that massive Californian convergence of musical instruments and music-making gear. Add together the knobs and faders from such lists, and you could probably build a synthesizer Death Star and destroy Daft Punk’s hidden Rebel base. Of course, you’d only have a marginally larger Death Star than the identical one you could have built from last year’s gear.

We’re doing things a little differently: picking out entirely random stuff that managed to reach for the sublime — including the sublimely absurd. Bad is better than boring. We’ve seen strange things that simply failed, or at least substantially creeped us out.

Now, those moments of victory, of supreme revelation, of –

Yeah, that’s Roger Linn, the LM-1 and former MPC designer without whom drum machines as we know them today wouldn’t exist, holding the “Drum Machines Have No Soul” bumper sticker he acquired. That’s why we were in Anaheim.

We’re still waiting on Barry Wood’s legendary NAMM Oddities, so we’ll focus on our own sense of the exceptional.

Other standout moments and products for reflection:

Don’t believe what you see in the press releases, in the glossy write-ups of shiny, new technology from the NAMM show. Wandering the NAMM show is a truly surreal experience, like falling into a giant music store that acquired its own zipcode crossed with a swap meet crossed with a convention of badly-dressed rocker cosplayers. With apologies to Barry Wood’s superior NAMM Oddities, we couldn’t resist telling you what we really thought of some of the things we found. NAMM find: win or fail?

Part one, the items that registered fail (with one very sweet win that managed to undo one of those failures.)

(Warning: one mind-bogglingly not-safe-for-work close-up photo toward the end. If some things offend you, try not to scroll very far.)

Liz McLean Knight also contributed photos and editorial to this report.

It’s been almost a year since Windows Vista was released to consumers. We know that nearly half of our readers use Windows, so the future of the OS is something we take very seriously — even if many of you, for now, are staying cautious and working (happily, in many cases) on XP. We’ll be examining Vista from various angles over the coming weeks, both measuring the OS and telling you how to make the most of it if for music you are giving it a go.

To start out, we’ve again caught up with Noel Borthwick. Noel CTO of Cakewalk, and one of the most knowledgeable experts on Windows technical details. (He’s also a veteran Linux developer, so his perspective on operating systems goes beyond those from Redmond.)

When we talked to Noel this time last year, a lot of what was new still hadn’t been tested in the real world. Now, Vista has been in the hand of users, and there’s both some good news and bad. A year of Vista has meant a year of improvements, both from Microsoft and third parties. In my own testing, for instance, what began as a disastrous experience running Vista earlier in the year has now become more comparable to XP. (I’m currently on Vista SP1 release candidate on a modest PC desktop.) But there are still areas that could use improvement — and while general Vista improvements were welcome, I think there’s still the real question of whether Vista offers enough that’s unique to compete with its real rival, XP.

We’ll revisit some of those broad issues, but first let’s actually get the technical story, and clear up some misconceptions.

To all of our readers here at Create Digital Music, thank you for 2007. It’s been fantastic to sit at the helm of CDM and get to hear from all of you, from news tips to musical and technological projects, and get to meet you out in the world (at Macworld San Francisco, Maker Faire San Mateo, Handmade Music events here in New York with Etsy and Make, in Chicago at a demo swap, and even in Australia at a coffee shop).

I’m wrapping our own 2007 in review story, but which stories did Webizens choose as the most significant? Here’s 2007 by the numbers, according to our server. First, the most visited stories of the year:

Top Ten Stories By Visit

The top ten start out with Yamaha’s unveiling of the long-awaited TENORI-ON instrument, a tool for mobile recording, a terrific free tool for Windows, and an unusual DJ take on mobile music players. Apple’s Logic Studio manages not to sneak into the top ten, I suspect because it can’t compete with apps that run on two platforms instead of one. But Reason 4 falls just short of matching CDM reader favorite Ableton Live: