Handmade Music hits Brooklyn again Thursday night with a terrific lineup:

• Robotic gamelan instruments with the Gamelatron, created by Zemi17 and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) – check the video above!
• Rescued PDAs and iPods making music, with the Linux-powered ReWare project (which even allows you to run Pd on an old iPod), by Hans-Christoph Steiner – expect a box full of handhelds making noise
• Gestural Android handheld music, as I demonstrate the possibilities of the Google Android platform and G1 phone for OSC
• The Arduino-based Hard/Soft synth, designed by Gijs Gieskes and built by MAKE’s Collin Cunningham

Full project details at:

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

How to participate:

Online! Wherever you are in the world, you can join our live video stream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cdm-tv

Apologies: while a test of the connection had worked for us last time, network performance was inexplicably poor. We’ll try to work on a better solution for the future. It’s the challenge of relying on a connection other than your own.

Schedule:

7:00p Online chat with the creators

7:30p Public event starts

8:00p Performances + demos

You can also ask questions to our creators by leaving them in comments here, or the day of / during the stream by sending a Twitter message with hashtag #cdmtv. (Follow CDM on Twitter) We’ll have clips of the show available by Friday

In NYC:

FREE, at Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward, 7:30p Thursday. rsvp@3rdward.com or on Facebook

Directions

3rd Ward

Thanks to Pabst Blue Ribbon for the free beer, plus our co-organizers at MAKE, Etsy, and XLR8R.

Last-minute NYC-area projects! If you have a project you want to bring, we will have a PA, amp, and projector. We welcome those last-minute projects that manage to come together. Just bring it by and find me at about 7p.

In Your Neighborhood:

We have folks interested in starting up Handmade Music around the US and internationally. Sign up via Google Docs if you have any interest in helping organize (no commitment) and expect information in the next couple of weeks.

This is entirely experimental, but I’ll be broadcasting live from Handmade Music tonight in Brooklyn. Drop by and have a look at what’s going on. 7:30pm Eastern (that’s GMT -4) is when the event begins. We may be able to switch on earlier than that, but I’ll at least try to have something up by then. Note that we may not be able to have someone live on chat through the evening, so you could get a fishtank experience, but I’ll try to get folks to come say hi through the evening.

And of course, if you’re in the New York area, you can just drop by yourselves and have free beer.

“Frequency Shifter”: that’s for, um, frequency shifting, right?

Not necessarily. As Ableton’s Dennis DeSantis shows us in our final video tutorial of this series, in addition to the usual special effects, frequency shifting can be used for subtler results, like fine-tuning percussion. He shows us how to make the Frequency Shifter into a powerful tool for sound sculpting and sound design.

I’ve always enjoyed Live’s effects and the approaches they encourage to sound, so I really welcome this example.

Got more tutorials you’d like to see? Let us know.

Subscribe to CDM TV: Our video series for music and motion is now available via Blip.tv, so you can subscribe via:

iTunes (and watch on your iPod/iPhone, too)

Miro (the fantastic, all-platform video app)

RSS

Ableton Live 8 is here, and by now, you’re like familiar with some of its banner features. But we wanted to learn more about how features could be used in creative, new ways, or even misused. I sat down with Ableton’s Dennis DeSantis in the Ableton office here in New York to talk about some creative applications of new Live 8 features, starting with groove extraction and quantization.

Dennis is the right guy to consult when it comes to rhythm: he’s a talented composer, a classically-trained percussionist, and a founding former member of the ground-breaking Alarm Will Sound ensemble, which plays music from Varese to Aphex Twin. (Dennis himself was responsible for some of those Aphex Twin remixes.)

In part 1 of our 3-part series, Dennis looks at ways in which groove extraction can be used as a powerful dynamic quantization tool. That was always my hope for Live, going back to very early versions; it was incredibly frustrating that you had only limited, mechanical-sounding “swing” features that couldn’t be controlled. To some, Groove Extraction may simply mean copping specific grooves from samples, but it’s actually capable of dialing in a custom groove with real ease.

In part 2, Dennis shows how a similar technique can bring a simple percussion pattern to life, replicating the sorts of organic variations that happen with real players.

See also part 3 for alternative techniques with the Frequency Shifter – tune percussion with this effect instead of getting the usual metallic special effects.

These are “power features,” capable of a wide variety of results, but they’re also accessible enough that anyone could easily learn to use them. Have a look.

Incidentally, the audio is a bit odd as we recorded this on St. Patrick’s Day, and even twelve stories up, the shouts on the streets in Manhattan made it sound like the French Revolution was happening below us.

Subscribe to CDM TV: Our video series is now available via Blip.tv, so you can subscribe via:

iTunes (and watch on your iPod/iPhone, too)

Miro (the fantastic, all-platform video app)

RSS

We’ll soon have Internet Archive distribution, too. All CDM videos are now released under a Creative Commons license.