Some of you might be surprised to learn that people don’t just read this blog, they also make music. Digital music.

In fact, the Create Digital Noise forums have a whole active community of musicmakers, encompassing a broad range of styles, sensibilities, and production techniques. Let’s sift through some recent works by the CDM community, shall we?

Leading the pack in can-do professionalism is UK’s Creature and his new album Distant Horizon:

Creature Audio

Creature is the project of Stephen Haunts, who some of you may recognize from last year’s Circuit-Bending Challenge. Stephen is the proprietor of Haunted House records, and his album is available directly from Haunted House, or via download from iTunes, CDBaby, and a whole slew of others.

A name you may recognize in pairing with the phrase “Buchla Modular Synthesizer” or “Haaken Continuum controller” is that of Richard Lainhart.

lainheart

This track, “The Orchestra Of The Damned” is a track from Richard’s new MusicZeit release “The Beautiful Blue Sky“, a collection of electronic landscapes for the Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum. It was performed and recorded live without post-processing or editing.

Getting good gigs is a challenge for all genres, and it touches even more issues when computers are involved. So, as we’d hoped, Liz’s tips for getting booked has generated a lot of discussion. In addition to comments here on CDM:

The wonderful community at EM411 has some discussion, including a great tip: bring VHS tapes or books to prop your computer atop the booth turntable.

LivePA, a great blog dedicated to these topics, takes issue with the “no dead air” advice. I’ll defend it, though: “dead air” might not mean the same thing if you’re not doing dance music, but it’s still essential to keep some connection with the audience. (And silence, I think, is not the same thing as dead air. I’ve had performances where I created each. Greatly prefer the former to the latter.)

I somehow missed it in the chaos of my RSS reader, but LivePA also has a beginner guide of its own. Whereas Liz focused on the practical, LivePA covers some of the questions to ask yourself about what music you’re making. It’s an ideal complement to Liz’s take:
My personal “Getting Started” for LivePA

There’s far too much for one comment thread or article, so I’ve also set up a new sticky discussion in the Create Digital Noise “Share Your Work” thread:

Getting good music/visual gigs — let’s share advice

Take the poll to let us know how you’re feeling, and let’s start sharing tips on (and challenges with) breaking into the scene, from Canberra to Arkansas City.

Okay, makers of good stuff: we’re looking for you to join in.

I first heard about the fantastic sell-stuff-you-make community, Etsy, from a reader here on CDM, shortly after the service launched. Now, Etsy has become a real phenomenon for people who make stuff, giving them a high-quality venue in which to network with other makers and start real businesses out of what they produce.

Etsy is best known for, well, fuzzy things, from shirts to knitting to plushies — that is, craft-y work more than the harder, electronics-based music and motion technology that’s our bread and butter here. Some of you readers have turned out to be quite crafty, in which case, give us a shout and let us know your Etsy page!

But Etsy may soon become a great venue for other things, as well. Imagine:

1. Limited-run CDs and DVDs, with hand-screened artwork, from indie artists like yourself (music, visuals)


2. Handmade music-related stuff (think t-shirts, posters)
3. DIY electronics, circuit-bent instruments, alternative controllers, homemade synthesizers and guitar pedals, etc.
4. Custom plug-ins and code on limited-run, handmade discs

You can imagine some of the other possibilities. In that spirit, we’ll be collaborating here at CDM with the good folks of Etsy, who happened to be headquartered just over the river from me in Brooklyn, about 15 minutes away. I’ll be talking more about some of the possibilities as they evolve, but first up is an Etsy group:

Digital Music + Motion Makers [Etsy.com Street Team Forum]

Just reply to that message, and I’ll add you to our group. If you’re currently an Etsy member, please stop by the forum on Etsy.com and let us know. If not, and you want to join the group, just sign up for a free Etsy account and post to the forum with your account name. (You can always get approved as a seller later — if you’re like me, that’ll be in about six months when you’ve actually got something to sell.)

Like making things but not necessarily selling them? No worries, as we’ve got some opportunities for you, too. Stay tuned.

Bless K-mart and their $2.50 contact sheets of faux woodgrain. They can turn your average, ordinary plastic M-Audio USB MIDI keyboard into a retro-styled custom job that just screams, erm, class. Melbourne-and-London-based CDM forum reader soloandata did just that. (Talk about bi-coastal — they have K-marts there?) Kudos: it takes a steady hand to line up those contact sheets. The woodgrain looks great on the curved design of the new Axiom keyboards — tres 70s.

Just finished Pimping my axiom-25. check that woodgrain! [Create Digital Noise]
solo andata [Artist Page]
solo andata [@Myspace]

Thanks, Kane. Now the gauntlet has been thrown: who has the pimped keyboard / audio gear that can top this? (And if you don’t have it already, by all means head to the local K-mart. Kane wonders if faux marble might be the logical next step. I’m rooting for something pink and furry.) I know some M-Audio folks read this site, so feel free to play (or introduce faceplates at NAMM).

Velocipede, our friend and inside man in Takarazuka, Japan, has been writing up a storm on the CDM forums, from providing hands-on impressions of Roland’s hand percussion pad to reporting back from Tokyo’s Music Instrument Festival.

The HPD-10 hand percussion controller by Roland could be a terrific controller for synths and clips, from its traditional purpose (drums) to lots of other applications:

My main interest in getting the unit, though, is as a midi control over softsynths. Its 10 pads can be freely assigned to any note numbers on a per kit basis (64 kits can be saved in the unit). So far, I’ve set up different kits for Live’s Impulse, Reason’s Redrum and an Alesis Micron Setup that I have dedicated for drum sounds.

Check out velocipede’s full review:
Handsonic 10 (HPD-10) [Create Digital Noise]

The news from Tokyo’s Music Instrument Festival is mostly what’s going away as what’s new: Alesis selling off the last stock of Ions in Japan, and Roland discontinuing their cult favorite AX-7 strap-on keyboard controller. Fortunately, velocipede dug up two gems. Vestax’s Guber line has some far-out hardware like this crazy-looking turntable:

And from the non-electronic end of the spectrum, the Xaphoon is an original hybrid instrument that packs sax-like sounds in a recorder body; velocipede assures us that it sounds far better than its toy-like looks suggest:

Music Instrument Festival in Tokyo [Create Digital Noise]
Vestax Guber players [Japanese only]
Xaphoon instruments product page

DJ Monday continues … CDM reader Corporation shares a number of tips, resources, and reviews of the new M-Audio DJ solution, involving the Conectiv hardware and Torq software. The basic downsides: bad documentation, and hardware that may not work for everyone. But on the upside, M-Audio has a solution that, at a fraction of the price of some of its competitors, will let you do some serious digital warping of vinyl both in terms of processing timecode off records and adding VST effects.

If you are thinking of early-adopting Torq and Conectiv, you’ve got some good resources and tips from fellow users:
The Unofficial Torq DJ Forum

Informal review/discussion at ScratchLIVE.net forum

Review on Pro DJ Forums

Video

User guide PDF

M-Audio Conectiv Product Page

Perfectionism is the enemy of productivity, in music making, in blog posts, and in forum messages:

Less activity in the forums … because there’s no “off-topic” forum

We know you’re out surfing in this beautiful summer weather, or, erm, trying to prevent death by heat exhaustion here in the newly globally-warmed United States (101 in NYC?), or enjoying the Aussie winter if you’re Jaymis and Nat.

So, here’s a suggestion for getting your chat on via the CDM Forums:

1. Don’t forget there is a General / Chat forum
2. Do feel free to post any “off-topic” messages there you like, such as important threads on sock color
3. Do subscribe to the createdigitalnoise.com RSS feed for the latest posts
4. Don’t be afraid to post “dumb” questions, because we’re happy to lend a helping hand. And if we’re not, remind us to lighten up.
5. Do feel free to promote your latest music or website if you’re an active member of the forum, on the Share your Work forum. (That goes for Create Digital Motion visual work, too!)

And, of course, if you’re out there surfing, please don’t get off your board to get on ours. I mean, that’s just silly. Create Digital Noise is refreshing, but not that refreshing. Salt water, please!

When the magic works, it’s wonderful. And when it doesn’t …

Jim Aikin, whose writing you know from Electronic Musician, Keyboard, his books, and many other places he pops up, has been having a pretty bad time with a brand new HP laptop and his shared his misery on the forums. The computer in question is a Hewlett Packrat Pavilion dv8000 dual-core machine. (Here’s confusing model numbering for you: the dv8000 series includes both Intel Core Duo and AMD Turion models; Jim has the Intel version.) It’s the latest-and-greatest on the inside, but it sounds as though Jim either got a lemon, or there are problems with the way HP configured this machine, bad luck, or a combination of the three. I think there’s some sort of FireWire issue going on from the symptoms Jim is describing. If you haven’t already read this thread, please feel free to offer a better diagnosis if you’ve got one.

Updated: Don’t you love it when companies do the right thing? Jim writes: Hooray!! HP very generously agreed to take the machine back, even though the 21-day grace period had passed.

So, hip, hip, hooray for great support from HP. Now, erm, that said, someone want to suggest a laptop from a maker other than HP that might fit Jim’s (and other’s) needs? More after the break …

If any of you have been having trouble with the forums today (lock icons, inability to post, etc.), you may have missed that we just moved servers. Instead of hosting the forums on createdigitalmusic.com/forums/, they’ll now be at createdigitalnoise.com. The forum RSS feed stays the same, provided you’re subscribed to the correct RSS feed. This should better distribute the load over our servers and help us provide reliable access to Create Digital Music.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but everything should now be redirected. I’ll see you on the forums!

We’ve added the ability to insert YouTube videos directly into forum posts. This will have all sorts of useful applications, but right now we’re having fun:

Posting YouTube Videos

Full instructions at the link above, but you’ll see a tag in the posting interface. As with all YouTube videos, you need Flash Player installed for the magic to work. Aside from lots of applications for Create Digital Motion (which is launching sooner than you think), we’ll be looking forward to what you post on the music side, too. I want to see those Monome-in-action videos real soon.