I think the first time I really understood handheld music making was when I first tried Nanoloop on Game Boy. While the more-popular LSDJ tracker is powerful, Nanoloop’s interface was unlike anything I’d seen before: aggressively minimal, it embodies in its interface design the feeling of a blank sheet of paper. Adding an idea feels like composition, like genuinely exploring open-ended possibilities and discovering what melodies may result. Now, Nanoloop – already on iOS – is available for Android, too.

It remains simple stuff, the sense of what a music maker looks like when designed for your hand rather than translated to mobile from desktop, studio-style workstations. There are six fixed channels, each assignable to a synth (FM, noise, or filtered wave) or a sampler. Then, each channel takes eight patterns. There’s a step sequencer, the ability to resample, and song editor with loops. The sampling capabilities are especially nice on Android, as you can now sample from the mic or load samples right onto the SD card. (The mic you can use on iOS, but not the SD card, of course.) You can export OGG files to your library, turning your Android device into a DJ-set-ready pocket music library, or send and receive projects via email. Via iTunes, you can even exchange files with the iPhone version, in case you have an Android phone and an iPod touch or some similar arrangement.

This isn’t a port of the Game Boy nanoloop, developer Oliver Wittchow is quick to note. It’s not for chip music, or emulating game consoles. It’s for … well, Android music. But make no mistake: while the tool feels fresh and native to the new platform, it also carries the spirit of the Game Boy version. And that spirit is handheld music making, not just the aesthetics of the chip, but the feeling of using a minimal device scaled to your hands, something you can use on the go.

Oliver tells CDM that he has used a lot of native code (via the NDK), as he did non-object-oriented C (not Objective-C) in the iOS version. He says it’s about 1:1 C and Java: “I could use the iOS code almost unmodified and get the sound engine and touch input to work immediately. I had an almost fully working nanoloop within few days – without any graphics though.
Now I ‘just’ had to write Java code for GUI, file access, recording functions and the different menu structure.”

The results, he says, are a little strange if you’re looking at the code (lots of getters and setters, C mixed with Java), but it works well.

Android owners, I’d love to hear how this works on your device. Let us know – just be sure to fill out a bug report. As the Market page notes:

Nanoloop works on a variety of devices, including HTC Desire, Motorola Droid and also midrange phones such as HTC Legend and XPERIA X10 mini. However, this is the first release and of course it has not been tested on all Android devices yet. If you experience crashes or other problems, please report them via e-mail or the anonymous bug report form at www.nanoloop.com. Thank you.

Now if we can just have some luck with Bluetooth MIDI at our hacklab tomorrow, this could be another candidate.

Oh, and most of all, I’d love to hear the music you make.

nanoloop on the Android Market (a stunning EUR1 … that’s a no-brainer. Better than an espresso shot!)

nanoloop.de [iOS, Android]

See our previous Android music round-up

For the historical record, here’s nanoloop for Game Boy on CDM – from 2004. It’s actually come quite a ways since that release, but the spirit is the same.
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2004/11/updated-nanoloop-20-game-boy-instrument/

If you’re in the NYC area, we hope you’ll mark your calendar; if not, we have some free listening for you to explore below.

Hacking and inventing, creative musicians are making and modifying the tools of their performance to express the music they imagine, with stunning variety of results. And so it is that once a month (erm, more or less), we get together in Manhattan to celebrate music makers at a little thing we call Handmade Music.

This month, experimental sound systems and Afrotronic future funk with new electronic instruments inspired by west African tradition join the lineup.

1-6 PM, FREE: OPEN LAB (all ages)
Bring your project to work on, or just hang out and see what others are producing.

• Bluetooth wireless MIDI music-making on hardware and Android phones
• Open show-and-tell, including a couple of presentations of free Pd patching tools for making new instruments
• At 5 PM, Todd Michael Bailey will show off his Where’s the Party At 2 open, DIY sampler, which takes inspiration from grungy digital samplers past.

7PM, FREE – LIVE MUSIC (21+)

Futuristic performances meet reimagined renditions of everything from Game Boys to m’biras this month. The full night is free, and you can remain quenched and fed with Culturefix’s superb beers, wines, and delicious food menu. (Where else in New York can you hear chip music and Afrotronic future funk while munching on The Grilled Cheese of Awesomeness?) The program:

DIGITAL DIASPORA
Afrotronic future funk band! Electronic, handmade remixes of traditional African instruments like the “the Gongo~Tron,” based on the traditional “Gongoma,” a Guinean m’bira (thumb-piano), and “Nano-Shakerator,” based on the traditional “Shekere,” a percussion instrument found throughout western Africa. All in grooving, futuristic new combinations!
http://soundcloud.com/digitaldiaspora

RUCYL MILLS (Saturn Never Sleeps) sci-fi singer

CONCRETE SOUND SYSTEM live sound set (David Primus Luta Dodson). I could try to put into words what David does, but it’s best to see in the video above, from Manhattan’s Harvestworks sound and music research center.

SAPHRYN PHOLLICLE (STEF EYE, Saturn Never Sleeps), multi-instrumentalist, singer, and sound experimentalist plays a left-field live set.

ACTIVE aka CHRIS GILROY live digital monome music played on grids (In/Out Festival)

KRIS KEYSER chip music +
BATSLY ADAMS NES + Genesis-powered vintage game visuals
Kris Keyser is already a favorite of spectacular 8-bit LSDJ music, here accompanied by live-generated visuals on vintage game consoles by this talented digital artist and inventor.

ALEX KIEFER (exilefaker) Forward-thinking chip music from a man also working toward a PhD in philosophy. The chip philosopher? Believe it.

Listen Now, Learn More

Stef Eye/Zaphryn Follicle, pictured above working away (via SNS), has a great profile by Saturn Never Sleeps’ Rucyl Mills on her production setup, here with Ableton Live, a Kaosillator, a kalimba, and an ancient guitar thing:
Living on the Rings | Stef Eye Artist Process Interview

And she has an experimental Zaturn Blend podcast.

Rucyl Mills, pictured above, has her music up on her endlessly-inspiring blog.
http://rucyl.com/tagged/audio/

I can’t embed it, but I absolutely adore the sound of the Yesterday’s Machine preview; I promise to make sure Rucyl keeps us posted on its release. See also Rucyl’s rig, at bottom.

http://saturnneversleeps.com/yesterdays-machine/

Lovely chip music by Kris Kesyer:

From our last edition, Chris Gilroy (on the docket this time, too) joins Philippe “Flippy Lesaux,” as documented in video by Thomas Piper.

And finally, in addition to one more video below, some SoundCloud-hosted tracks from Digital Diaspora, including Mikel Banks on vocals and “freakaphone” (“Looking Back”) and Janice Lowe on vocals (“Sing With Me”).

Looking Back by digital diaspora

Sing With Me by digital diaspora

Where to Go

If you’re not in NY, I hope you’ll get to spend some time with the listening and videos above. But if you are in the area, here are details on our venue for Saturday:

Presented by Culturefix NY
9 Clinton Street
New York, New York 10002

View Larger Map

http://culturefixny.com/

RSVP on Facebook:

Open lab, 1p Saturday 4/2

Live music party, 7p

“Handmade music” has now been taken up by groups in cities around the world, without any central organization. It’s an open celebration of experimentation in music making and sound. Here, we get a look at the event series we’ve been running here in New York that helped spawn those others.

Part of what I like about playing live is that it is unpredictable. We get to get together and try things, play wildly divergent styles of music, and explore ideas for what to play, all with a friendly group of people. So, here – thanks to the lovely videography of our friend Thomas Piper, himself a terrific musician – we have footage of an all-MeeBlip performance, Michelle Temple & Aiwen Wang-Huddleston’s startling Diptych with paper and contact mics and speakers, and, below, Philippe LeSaux and Chris Gilroy with live electronics. (There were other, dancier, Game Boy-ier acts, too, though we don’t have video of those.)

It’s a variety show, so each night can be completely different. If you’re in NYC, mark your calendars for Saturday, April 2 at Culturefix. But wherever you are, we can find some ideas about how to imagine live electronic playing today.

And for a completely different take, at the bottom we have the latest video from Porto, Portugal’s own Handmade Music.

Photo Slideshows: Handmade Music NYC, Plus Open Lab

This installment, we also led an “open lab” at which people could bring in and hack any project they like. We got a MeeBlip assembled and tested, we had monome artists modifying patches (including none other than proto-monomist Daedelus), we had strange NES and Arduino creations … check that out, as well.

Handmade Music Porto, Portugal

Digitópia, at Porto, Portugal’s hulk of an arts space, Casa da Música, runs their own show-and-tell. What’s special about this performance venue is that, situated in the lobby of a set of theaters, it’s completely open to the public. (By contrast, walking into, say, the Disney Hall or Lincoln Center typically requires tickets.) And they’re doing terrific research and creation, too, as part of their series. I hope we get to check in with them soon.

Handmade Music is back on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with an epic lineup spanning digital synths to monomes to interactive installations to chip music. It’s a bit like stepping into the music tech world described on the Web. (For the vast majority of you outside NYC, hoping to have good documentation of recent events edited and available shortly.)

We’re moving to Saturday night and doing a proper party. Hack, ask, meet, geek, eat, drink, listen, watch, dance…

Full event details for New York, and plenty to watch and hear online for those of you in NYC and everywhere in the world:

OPEN LAB
3p – 6p, FREE

Come early to get a close look at what people are making, and expect some surprises.

• MeeBlip user gathering for new MeeBlip owners (or those curious) in the NYC area. Check out our open source, affordable, hackable synth, or get help and ask questions.
• mlrv2: Meet the latest-and-greatest from the monome world, the free software that turns grids from MPCs to Launchpads to monomes into live performance sampling instruments. Get a look up close and ask questions before the performance later in the evening. (See our coverage of the news.)
• Bring your project! Building a synth? Got a Max for Live / Pd / Csound creation of which you’re proud? Circuit-bent project? Handmade CD case, band t-shirt, percussion made out of shells and wood? Bring them by, show them off, and share ideas with fellow DIY music inventors!

PARTY + LIVE MUSIC
7p – 2a; NO COVER!
Free entry for cash bar and brilliant food menu. Or a $20 ticket buys you two hours of open bar (7-9p) including beers brewed here in New York State and wine selections… and a full night of music either way.

Enjoy a wine and New York-brewed beer list celebrated by Frank Bruni with The New York Times, order from Culturefix’s excellent small plate menu, and stick around for a packed evening of music.

Culturefix Food + Drink menu

• Diptych: Ben Black and Aiwen Wang-Huddleston’s elegant, sail-like sculptural live digital performance instrument.
• Dissonics: Michael Cohen’s array of pylons form an alien, proximity-based performance.
• monome music: Christopher Gilroy + Philippe ‘Flippy’ LeSaux, Galapagoose, and % tap out live grooves on the monome grid.
• Chip music: Note! and Kris Keyser make infectious 8-bit music on Game Boys, some of the best virtuosos of the form.
• Electronic music: Pulsing soundscapes by Ganucheau on laptop and myself on MeeBlip.

Hear and see the artists…

I’ve never been a fan of chip music for the sake of it; I really like to hear stuff that’s well-produced, compositionally interesting, and can stand alongside stuff that isn’t chip music. And I really like Note! (Christophe Richard) and Kris Keyser; there’s some great stuff, and it’s easy to point people who think they don’t like chip music or music made with Game Boys to this. Have a listen to Christophe’s most recent album, the free 12345:

http://note.monoanimal.com/

And Kris’ music:

We also have videos to give you an idea of the installation/interactive performance creations and monome music. First, premiering at NYU’s NIME (new instruments in musical expression) course:

Galapagoose plays live:

Some terrific audio and (with dementoid) visuals) from “owner/operator” (%) — “album” art for these electronic releases below, as I’m really digging it:

mezos by owneroperator

cognitives by owneroperator

Music from actv / Christopher Gilroy (CC-licensed, too):

03 Watching Records Spin by actv

Check his free EP, too:

A collection of four songs of various types, most were performed in the fall/winter of 2010. Made using Ableton, Arduinome 64, NI Maschine, and various synths. Mixed in Harrison Mixbus. Ella made it look pretty.

http://cargocollective.com/active#927812/Failed-Houdini-ep

And here’s the last time Ganucheau and I played together, with the Grant Sisters for Diana Eng’s fashion show.

Open Lab 3-6p
Party 7p-late with 7-9p open bar
Saturday, February 5, 2011

Presented by Culturefix NY
9 Clinton Street
New York, New York 10002

View Larger Map

http://culturefixny.com/

Handmade Music found a new home on New York’s Lower East Side, at Culturefix, an electronics boutique cum gallery, bar, and tapas. The philosophy of this event has long been to simply open the doors, letting a community of people come together, make some noise, and have fun and learn. So we’re indebted to the people who made it happen – and I think there were some lessons to hopefully reproduce.

And yes, part of why I share this is I hope we can work over time to provide more resources, so that it’s easier to organize events and workshops to involve people in discovering the music technologies about which we’re passionate.

Highlights:

Great food and drink and art. First, I owe huge thanks to Ari and Cole and the whole staff of Culturefix for serving up delicious food and drinks in the kitchen/bar. There’s no reason tech has to be served on an empty stomach. I gather some purchases went down up in their drool-worthy audio boutique. (I, uh, bought a mixer…) But perhaps best of all, it was nice being in a gallery with an active show and being surrounded with texture and visual inspiration.

Lots of people soldering and making electronics, even for the first time. We had a wide group of people try out the 1976 phototheremin, an original design by Forrest M. Mims III adapted and executed by Eric Archer. Simplicity makes a difference: Forrest’s original design uses a tiny number of parts, which makes it ideal for a workshop – fewer solder points. Folks who had never soldered before nailed it in no time at all; Brian Biggs’ young children even got in on the action. We benefited from having a mix of people who had soldered before and some who hadn’t. Result: everyone one had a great time. (Thanks, great participants!) And apart from one case of swapped transistors, remedied with a desoldering gun, we had a 100% success rate. I think this is an ideal way to learn; I hope we can do more of these and perhaps create a new library of these projects for the online age.

Video and more photos by Joe Saavedra, who helped out with the workshop:

Chip music, invented guitars, dodecahedron side by side. Guitarist Nick Demopoulos captivated the crowd with his homemade Smomid guitar controller, which aligned MIDI pitches with touch-sensitive strips arranged as frets, for a controller more comfortable for guitar. Ted Hayes talked about the fine details of construction and three-dimensional layouts for sequencers on his Neurohedron – a particular enough task that I think we should probably cover it in more detail with Ted. Pulsewave, the NYC-based chip music series, offered chip music. What was interesting about that was that, by taking it out its usual venue, the music reached a largely unfamiliar crowd. (A number of people were hearing chip music for the first time.) This put the notion of making music with Nintendo handhelds alongside other hacks and DIY solutions for music. Thanks to Peter Swimm for making this happen.

Live videos

Thanks to Robots Dreams for the additional photos and videos. If you haven’t seen this superb hacker-friendly site, it’s a definite don’t miss:
http://www.robots-dreams.com/

And to everyone, yes, we’ll do this again, as well as work on ways of sharing these events across geographic distance, whether that’s publishing additional kit and workshop ideas, promoting events in different places, or … well, really, anything else you’d suggest.

REFORMAT THE PLANET trailer from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

The journey to complete and release a documentary is a long one, but Reformat the Planet, a feature-length documentary on the chip music scene, has reached the other side. Focused on the hub of artists in New York and the Blip Festival, Reformat the Planet has had some significant success out on the festival circuit, and it’s the product of a talented team of producers called 2 Player Productions, who do some really lovely work. (Staking out a corner of the indie game world, they also have worked on the Penny Arcade video series.)

The DVD represents a more finished vision of the film, with a new cut, a new short (RTP “1.5″, excerpted below, with additional interviews from the past couple of years), a new audio mix, and bonus content.

The DVD set is US$15 and available from Fangamer. Sadly, no VHS or LaserDisc (and I’ve just heard from my sister that the family LaserDisc is working perfectly). Fangamer will also happily relieve you of the burden of additional cash and replace it with posters, pins, and other goodies.

http://fangamer.net/products/rtp-dvd

Reformat the Planet 1.5 clip from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

Ed.: It’s more than nostalgia that drives the dedicated chip musician with their modified Nintendo instruments. As guest writer Vijith Assar learned while interviewing Anamanaguchi, some more elemental love of digital synthesis leads these artists to deal with esoteric hardware and crashing homebrewed software. Vijith covered Anamanaguchi for New York’s Village Voice, but this trio had far more geeking than could fit in the free weekly’s pages. The band’s front man and songwriter, flanked by talented NES hacker bandmates, muses on the technology and artistic process – and on why, yes, the act did have to start with blowing on the cartridges. (Surprised?) -PK

I recently had a chance to chat with Anamanaguchi, who would probably be the boy-band teen idols of the chiptune world if the scene were to tolerate such things. Lead songwriter Pete Berkman opened up about his creative process and the digital speed bumps he hits along the way, and guitarist Ary Warnaar is on another planet when it comes to working with Game Boy synths like LSDJ and Nanoloop, but the most freakish technical bits came from bassist James DeVito. He wrote later to describe in detail the customized hardware he’s cobbling together for use on tour, which so far has involved modding the Nintendo for multiple outputs, each with a bolted-on 1/4″ jack and volume knob, and integrating a tiny high-res screen lifted from a PlayStation. He’s even considering a built-in controller for the next version.

The stock NES has five channels of sound — two square waves (lead), triangle (usually for bass), noise, and DPCM sample channel. Normally, these are all mixed down to one mono output, but by tapping directly into pins 1 and 2 of the CPU, we are able to separate them into two outputs. Pin 1 on the NES CPU (2A03) contains the two square channels, and pin 2 contains the triangle, sample and noise channel. A third output is gained from a proprietary audio expansion, containing two extra square channels and a sawtooth channel. This particular one, VRC6, was designed by Konami and featured only on Japanese Famicom games. However, with development carts we are able to get the expansion audio on our NES. The extra audio chip is in the cartridge itself, and outputted directly through a pin on the cartridge. This pin is tied directly to pin 9 on the expansion port, which is where we tap in to get our third output. Directly off those pins I connected 1µf capacitors @ 50V (negative leg goes to CPU pin, positive goes to output) to protect the chips from any short circuits or power surges when plugging a cable in. From there it’s relatively simple, putting them in line with 50K pots and outputting directly to the 1/4 inch jacks out the back. The screen is all wired internally. 5V power is taken from the regulator within the screen and fed into the NES. In order to avoid problems, I cut out the 7805 regulator in the NES and applied the 5V where it needed to be. Audio and video were soldered directly to where the RCA jacks are attached to provide signal to the screen.

And what then? Well, let’s ask Pete.

Vijith: How do you do write these sequences?

Pete: It’s a [DOS] program called Nerdtracker 2 that apparently writes music in the language that the NES can understand. It’s a really home-brewed program. It was made in 1998 by a bunch of Swedish dudes, and it never got out of beta, and it’s prone to crashing, and it has all these terrible bugs in it, half the features don’t work.

And the decision to mix it with guitars?

Pete: I started messing around with it and sending songs back and forth with a friend of mine, and in the beginning, the music I wrote kind of sounded “videogamey,” but as I continued writing, my actual musical influence kind of started to get in there. And at that point, it made a lot of sense to put it as an instrument in a full live band setting, with guitars and drums and that sort of thing. Right before going to NYU, literally NYU move-in day, I released the Power Supply EP through 8bitpeoples, which I had recorded totally by myself at my house except for one track which we recorded with James. All I had was a shitty mic and a shitty guitar and a shitty amp and just recorded what I knew, without any kind of formal training.

It was made in 1998 by a bunch of Swedish dudes, and it never got out of beta, and it’s prone to crashing, and it has all these terrible bugs in it, half the features don’t work.

Do you write using a guitar or a Nintendo?

Pete: It’s a mixture of both. Certain songs, I’ll get the idea as a melody in my head. The music is pretty melodic, so it’s pretty transferable from instrument to instrument. Anything I write on guitar I can put on the Nintendo, and anything I write on the Nintendo I can usually play on guitar – unless it’s way too fast, which it usually is.

Recently, I’ve been getting more into making sounds on the Nintendo that can’t be reproduced by instruments, doing stuff that only the sound chip can do. But more or less I like to create a skeleton of the song on the NES. Ary, on the Game Boy, makes some absolutely ridiculous stuff that’s really fucking weird, like, really just straight-up the weirdest music I’ve ever heard. And the way he does it is not so much thinking musically, but technically. When I came into the 8-bit world, I was definitely the opposite. Any time there’s electronic music, you have people who are thinking technically, and usually that’s music that I’m not very interested in, because it’s kind of cold, usually. I came into the 8 bit world with a very musical background, being in bands growing up and stuff, as opposed to a programming background. But recently I’ve been getting really into making strange sounds on the Nintendo that, like, “Whoa, I didn’t know you could do that with that sound chip.” At the same time, I’m mixing that with that simple pop sensibility.

What I usually like to do is to harmonize everything. Why not? You have two square channels. What else are they going to do but harmonize each other?

James: You don’t have the option of chords, so you might as well harmonize.

Pete: I tend to get bored very easily, which kind of finds its way into the music too. Like, “Oh, here’s an idea. Oh, wait, no, it’s gone now. Now it’s totally different.” In high school, I guess I was diagnosed with ADD — whether that’s bullshit or not, which I think it is, but I’m very capricious, and I tend to jump from thing to thing, in life and in music. But yeah, basically, hyperactivity is something I do.

Basically, hyperactivity is something I do.

How does it actually work? All this time I thought it was a MidiNES, but I recently read a YouTube comment where you said that wasn’t the case.

Pete: Two years ago, I was really upset by the claim that it was MIDI, because it was such a ridiculous process that we don’t do anymore. Back then, you would make the song in Nerdtracker 2, and if you typed in a wrong filename and hit Enter, the program would just crash, and you’d lose everything you had worked on. From there, you’d have to hit Enter to create, like, four different files — temp.ihd, temp.dat, temp.dmc, and temp-dot-some-other-shit. And you’d take all those files and compile them in an NES compiler. That would give you a Nintendo Sound File. And you’d have to do this specifically in Windows 98, because the assembler for XP was fucked up, and it would give you the wrong shit, the wrong hex to burn onto a chip. What you would do from that point is turn it into a binary file, .nsf. The only command is “Play this song at this location in the EPROM’s memory.” And so what you would do from there is you would take that binary file and burn it to a special 28-pin EPROM chip that you would have to order in bulk from some electronics company in New Jersey. And then if you’re lucky, the burning worked. And then if you’re even luckier, all 28 pins are in place in the socket that you soldered into an NES cartridge. And then if you’re even luckier, the NES is willing to play the song in the cartridge — instead of having to blow on it — and then it plays. And that’s the process that we did live, with one chip for each different song, having to flip it out with a guitar pick and replace it with my shaky hands.

James: And the chips aren’t even labeled. So it was this long, complicated process.

Wait, isn’t that last problem your fault?

Pete: Yeah.

James: We’ve come a long way since then.

Pete: Yeah, we have come a long way. That’s why I was… not upset, but adamant about saying what it was. But we’ve got this new system that’s the happiest…

James [unzips case]

Pete: Yeah, we have it here. Instead of burning stuff to a chip, you just take the NSF and put it on a CompactFlash card, and put that in a cartridge that will straight-up just play the song, and has a menu. It’s a 2-gig Flash card, so you can put every song on there, and there’s an on-cartridge browser. And we have a screen hooked up to it, too.

James: The card is usually meant for development, but it also plays the Nintendo sound files that Pete exports, so we can actually just go through it and the file browser has all of our songs listed. (And every game we downloaded from a torrent.)

Ary: He’s currently working on a new Nintendo. They’re going to replace literally every electrical component.

James: Well, not everything. But just make it sound better, like improve the output.

You mean just gutting it and rebuilding it with better parts?

James: It’s more like rebuilding the audio output aspect of it, and certain things like the power supply that adds noise to the signal. It’ll have newer parts, so it’s less likely to explode on stage. With our old setup, if major vibrations were happening to it, it would actually just restart the song.

Pete: Tons of aberrations live.

Ary: And major vibrations happen a lot on stage…

Check out the band for yourself; they’re on tour now.

Vijith Assar is a musician, writer, and computer geek based in New York City. His musical projects have tended toward scores for film, television, and
advertising, and his writing has appeared in the Village Voice, the New York Post, Tape Op, Electronic Musician, and PopMatters, among others. He plays the Chapman Stick and might be going bald because of Reaktor.

Game Boy superstar Pixelh8 is releasing his fantastic 8-bit music software into the wild. And it’s even being picked up in music education. From True Chip Till Death:

Pixelh8 sez:

After lengthy consideration, I decided I would rather have my Game Boy / Game Boy Advance music software be used by everyone it can be used by, instead of just the few.

All of my software Music Tech V2.0, Pro Performer and more are all free for download at http://pixelh8.co.uk/software/ Enjoy! Please read the FAQ before emailing me questions about it, it’s pretty straight forward. I am doing a lot of work in music and music education, the software is now even being used in some UK schools for students to do their GCSE music composition on.

There are also new videos in his archives for your viewing pleasure. (Check out the BBC Radio 1 appearance on the Pixel8 site. And yes, that’s Radio One.)

What happens when you put all the digital and electronic tools you love together into one groove session? I expect it probably looks something like this video. Welcome to the new digital music age: DIY electronics, vintage digital tech (Game Boys), and modern computer tech (Monome as Arduinome clone, Max/MSP, and shiny MacBook) all coexist. And a fair bit of what you see if a modern hybrid of old and new paradigms, like the thoroughly modernized Tracker Renoise. Thomas Margolf says “Greetings from Rotterdam” and writes,

We made a first Jam using the new GorF step-sequencer, Arduinome, max msp patch ‘Soyuz’, a Gameboy running LittleSoundDJ, LSDJMC2 Gameboy Midi-Interface, Renoise, Ableton Live and a Nord Micro-Modular. It’s the first session with a fresh soldered GorF.

Lovely stuff. Keep on soldering and jammin’, folks. Okay, tagging this story is going to take … a lot of tags.

PSP lgpt port [fundable]

You’ll need to hack your PSP, of course, until Sony sees the light and allows arcane music downloads via its official store. But hacking isn’t so bad. We’ll keep you posted!