If you’re looking for something fun to fiddle around with this weekend, this could be your ticket: we’re tipped off that iZotope have released a video game-themed expansion for their iPhone-iPod touch drum machine.
As Timbaland would surely say, were he asked:
T: It’s from a video game, idiot! [laughs]
P: [laughs]
T: Freaking jerk.
(Look that up, if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
Update: VIDEO. Sweet, brilliant video.
Remix contests are all the rage lately, but quality is another thing altogether. I’m happy CDM is involved in a new contest with Dancetracks, however, because the ingredients of a contest that’s worth your time all all there.
First off, Seattle-based [Dave] Pezzner on freefrange is an artist worth noting. He’s a talented producer, has a great sense of sound, as has moved from commercial and television sound and music into being a breakout dance artist – something to which many CDM readers may aspire. He’s assembled just the kind of smart track we like:
Valldemossa was inspired initially by a tape recording I found of a boys choir recorded circa 1982, which was piped through an analog tape delay. The ending result of this tape recording was outstanding and left me with a gold mine of sounds to pick from. I built this song using a handful of my favorite tools, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Native Instruments Battery, Reaktor, D16 Phocyon, some sounds from the Mellotron M400 tape banks, Klanglabs Stompbud collection and Mixed in Key (as well as some keen direction from master and chief, Jimpster). Feel free to let loose and let your inner artist speak loudly. We’re excited to hear what you do!
Apple has released Logic Studio 9 today. Banner features: “Flex Time” audio warping, new goodies for guitarists (plus integration with a new audio interface and pedalboard from Apogee), expanded support for working with video and outputting compression, and most interestingly, tools for making MainStage a feature you might actually take onstage.
I’m meeting with Apple next week, so if you think of any smart questions, do pass them along. I should receive my testing copy then, too, so expect more details. In the meantime, here’s how it looks “on paper,” in a nutshell.
This to me is the interesting one. I loved the idea of MainStage when it came out, but I had a number of complaints in regards to what musicians would actually want to do for live performance. Specifically:
Well, guess what? Apple says they’ve added all of that to MainStage 2. ReWire support should make this particularly interesting, as solutions like a Logic-Live rig now become practical. And this is the first DAW to really try to do backing tracks in a way bands can use, even including Ableton Live.
Grouped controls allow you to drag and drop layouts of controls as macros. It’s a nice implementation, and different from what’s currently out there.
There’s also a live loop recorder, tape style. My first impression of this is that this doesn’t appear to match things like the new looper in Ableton Live 8, which can set an entire project tempo – it’s more like a basic stompbox effect, as we’ve seen previously in Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig. Still, that matches the simplicity of some of the other tools here.
Augh… and yes, that is Apple’s now-ubiquitous album art view as the browser mechanism for templates, proving they really don’t know where to stop. At least it seems they haven’t used that for the entire UI.
Of course, performance is everything in these implementations, so it’ll be fun to torture test MainStage 2 and see how it stands up.
And for anyone who wanted Live clips and Sculpture in one session, this could be interesting.
“It comes from tomorrow …but it’s here today.”
Well, now it is tomorrow. And yesterday’s tomorrow still looks futuristic. Try this test: show someone the video above for the Millioniser 2000, a MIDI harmonica designed by Ronald Schlimmer. Tell them this is a 2009 video designed to go viral, a fakery of 80s cheese. After all, the instrument itself looks impossibly futuristic. Surely this wasn’t really designed in 1979. Surely the close up thigh shots of the backup singer girls in the back are tongue-in-cheek parody.
Your friends will believe you. Of course, you’ll be lying.
For many, mobile technology and developing for the iPhone and the iPod touch is a fad and a Gold Rush. Good designers, though, take a longer view of how interaction can be expressive. And there are few people with a better sense of the big picture of small devices than Dr. Ge Wang. The co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule has a background that goes well beyond the latest Apple platform. Along with Perry Cook at Princeton, Ge Wang is the co-originator of ChucK, a real-time programming language for synthesis so efficient some people use it live onstage. (ChucK, as an open source project, now has a terrific team of people behind it.) ChucK is the sonic engine that powers Smule’s projects. Ge Wang also teaches at Stanford, working with students and fellow researchers to explore new ways of interacting with music technology.
Ge Wang joined me for a lengthy phone conversation recently. He really contextualized why the iPhone is important in the grand scheme of things, but also how the people at Smule and Stanford (and Princeton) can approach technology for musical interaction, focusing on what devices are rather than what they’re not.
(The audio here, believe it or not, is extensively edited – Ge Wang is that easy to talk to. I hope the next time it’s over beers rather than Skype.)
The full interview can be played below, or downloaded directly.
Thanks to KORG and the Nano Series for their support of programming on createdigitalmusic.com.
Lastly: a video of the Smule team headquarters and playing around with Leaf Trombone for a Zelda duet!
More information:
The Mule Chronicles [Smule Blog]
http://smule.com/
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University
Previously, for more on Ge Wang and CCRMA:
Make:TV Meets Stanford Musical Inventors, Feedback Piano
CDM is now launching regular audio content on the artists and inventors we cover as part of our series CDM Sounds. You can subscribe (and review the podcast) via iTunes, where you’ll also find our new video series:
cdm Sounds Podcast [audio]
cdm TV [video]
Or using your software of choice, subscribe directly to RSS. (I like to follow podcasts with Banshee and Winamp this way.)
We’ve fixed some transcoding issues for iPod touch/iPhone on the video podcast. Please do test this and let us know if you have any issues on your software/hardware.
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