Miraculously, Nat has escaped alive, and the results are fantastic. Good luck paying a designer to give you gig posters like this. These two warm my heart because of their digital music create-i-ness:

Day 27, Tsuki

28×28 Day 17 – Moulinex + Xinobi

For the complete set, see the lineup on onetonnemusic:

Gig Posters Archives

Have a gig coming up? Need a rocking poster to publicise said gig to the wider community? You should check out Nat’s 28 Posters in 28 Days Poster Challenge! You know you’re going to get a great result, because Nat designed this here website, and CDMo, and the forums. You should get in quick, however, because he doesn’t seem to be starting out in the most positive frame of mind:

They said I couldn’t do it! My girlfriend said I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I can do it… Let me preface this by saying that I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t one of my brightest ideas. Good? Clear? Okay.

For the month of February, I am going to attempt to do 1 FREE gig poster per day.

That means I need details for 28 gigs and bands who want posters done. Starting tomorrow, the 1st of February. 

I stepped up first, nominating my collaborators Segue and our show at the Empire, Brisbane on the 23rd of Feb, and I love the results!

I’m sure there are plenty of artists out there with gigs coming up (they don’t even have to be in Feb) who could do with some tasty design to publicise your awesomeness, so go sign up.

Cycling ‘74 Hipno “Subversive” Plug-in Collection

US$199 for a whole mess of plug-ins; works with everything. (Mac RTAS/VST/AU, Windows RTAS/VST.) More after the jump.

The challenge of developing Hipno was, with so many far-out sonic possibilities, how could you navigate different sounds to find the one you want? The main answer is the Hipnoscope, a color-palette circular orb through which you can explore different sounds and even morph through presets. (Yep, it’s MIDI-assignable.) It’s very Kai Krause-esque interface design. (Anyone here remember Kai’s Power Tools, the Photoshop plug-ins?)

Of course, here at CDM we’re always into alternative interfaces, and it’s great to see them making their way into a commercial product. Several of the plug-ins can be modulated or controlled with a webcam input, using motion tracking or motion detection. There’s even a modulator that uses a USB game pad.

The best feature by far, though, isn’t avant-garde at all. Hipno has XML import/export of presets, so you can switch hosts without losing your presets, and you can share your brilliant sound design work. The demo I saw at AES had Hipno loaded in Ableton Live 5’s new preset browser, and everything appeared perfectly sorted.

I can’t wait to get my hands on it, if nothing else because I think it’ll inspire some custom effects and instruments of my own. Speaking of which, if you’d like to try creating some of your own subversive instruments/effects, the whole set was developed in Cycling ‘74 Max/MSP with the aid of Electrotap’s Tap.Tools. I usually avoid the use of a lot of externals in my Max work, but this set is great fun, and includes some terrific stuff for working with motion and webcams, along with more utilitarian objects. See also the GTK granular library.

Could that Maxlite at your side be a musical instrument in disguise? With up to 9 audience participants, viewers of the RGB project can control sound and visuals using colored flashlights, in a performance installation by Tomas Dvorak (CZ), Alessandro Capozzo (IT) and Matous Godik (CZ). The team used the free PC-only software EyesWeb, passing data to Macs running Max/MSP for sound and Processing for visuals. If you wanted to do something like this, EyesWeb would be a good place to start; it can track the movement of specified color(s) through a live video signal. There are other options, too; watch for an upcoming how-to on camera input in a print story by me (can’t say where yet, but I’ll let you know when I can).

RGB project site with description, visuals, and video; via our friend Chris “Pixelsumo”

Spencer Kiser, another whiz kid from NYU’s ITP program, gives CDM our first look at his SpinCycle. It’s a new take on the turntable: instead of tracking grooves on a disc, the device reads colors and produces sounds (and hypnotic colors). Check out Spencer’s flickr gallery for pics for now, but he promises more documentation and video soon.

Another reason I’m jealous of Spencer: he made the Vancouver conference on new musical instrument interfaces. Check out what looks like an interactive washboard-computer interface! More on all this soon . . .