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CDM Asks: Digital Music + Beautiful Weather? (Go Play On a Lake!)

CDM traffic has taken a sudden plunge. Now, it could be all those digital DJ stories (um, sorry about that), but based on past experience, we tend to see a dip in readership whenever the weather turns lovely (which also happens to coincide with the end of the semester, a big deal for the many readers in school). I, for one, love the outdoors (despite what you might suspect reading this site), and absolutely encourage the trend! (And if you’re just studying for exams, I’ll send you positive Brain Energy.)

But that got me thinking. I think for creative health it’s important to spend some time out waterskiing or birdwatching that isn’t musical time. But what about those time when you have music making to do and you have to reconcile it with pretty outdoors time? Have you found a mobile setup that you take with you to the park? Let us know. Maybe I do need one of those HP Mini-Notes like our friend Brad just picked up. Some micro PC, solar power … sounds rather nice, right?

And if you’ve got an image of you, a keytar, and a surfboard, or perhaps a solar array powering a mountain-top Reaktor programming session, send them our way!

Updated:

That didn’t take long! Here’s Soundfreaks playing, complete with keytar and Speedo, on a lake outside Munich. Nice one, guys. Now, I just need a waterproof computer…

Related: askcdm, composition, environment, mobile, nature, tips, trends, weather & more.

8. By Peter.

2008-May-04@13:15.

Oct 03 2007

Logic Environments: Connect Logic to Nintendo NES via MIDINES

By Peter Kirn

MIDINES Nintendo NES game system with MIDI

Logic’s Environment, a modular layer in the program for creating custom configurations, isn’t well known to many Logic users. But if you can get used to its slightly unusual interface, it’s capable of some really powerful stuff. You know, important music stuff. Like connecting Logic to your Nintendo NES game system. Jonathan Flugel writes:

The MIDINES evironment was created based on this chart:
http://www.wayfar.net/0xf00000_midi_chart.php

The environment allows for control of the 5 channels of synth/audio that the NES [supports]

Here are the 5 parts:
1-2 - Pulse Synthesizer waves
3-4 - Triangle/Square waves
5- sample channel

Since this is also my primary template for a Logic session there are other goodies I left in there:

1. NYC compression bus channel
2. 3 bus channels that I got from Hybrid (electronic group) for simple drum processing
3. MPC groove templates taken from an MPC 60
4. Ableton Live and Reason ReWire objects

There you have it: Logic + NES + MPC + Live + Reason. If that’s not a digital dream studio, I don’t know what is.

MIDI NES environment in Logic 8

In case you want to give this file a look:
MIDINES.zip
That’s the MIDINES, Logic 8 file (if anyone has a MIDINES but Logic 7, let us know and we can share the Logic 7 file.)

Call for Help: Logic Environment Round-Up

With the release of Logic Studio 8, several soundware houses released custom Logic Environments / sound packs. Taking advantage of Logic’s unique modular engine, beneath its shiny new skin, has some real potential. I’m trying to organize a round-up of everything out there, so if you represent a company doing commercial Logic development — or have some Environments you built yourself for personal use you’d like to make available to others — let us know! Community development has worked well elsewhere (sound packs for Ableton Live, ensembles for Reaktor, patches and externals for Max, ReFills for Reason, to name a few), so it’d be great to see a re-invigorated Logic user base.