If you’re ready to show your skills creating digital music, we want your work.

UPDATED! New contest entry page, new deadline (10/25):
http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/
Plus tips, tracks, and more to give you additional inspiration:
More with Less:”Efficient” Renoise Music Tracks and Tips

Renoise, the "bottom-up" music production tool that makes brings modern comforts to the tracker interface, and Indamixx, the turnkey Linux-powered mobile music rig, are working with CDM on a contest to produce a new song. You’ll need Renoise to make your track, but the software now runs natively on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and you can even finish your production on the free demo version if you’d like to give the software a taste before committing to it. (Really – you can even save your file. The demo won’t let you save a wav file, but we’ll judge the xrns, and the only other restrictions are some nags – Renoise is a rare return to the old “shareware” model of development.)

Here on CDM, we’ll also be featuring some tutorials on music production using Renoise, using Linux, and using free and open source software, as well as the commercial offerings. So, this is a chance not only to compete, but to learn some new tools. Rather than just feed off your work, I’m really eager to make this competition a chance for us to work together and share knowledge, to give to you. So I’m pleased to have some of the experts in the Linux audio community and Renoise community helping us do just that.

The competition will also be fully Creative Commons-licensed, to make sure you’re free to use our tips and tutorials, and that the track you make is free for others to remix – without abusing your work. (This is not officially CC-affiliated; we’re just making use of their license.)

Aside from the prizes, I’ll be thrilled to have the chance to promote your best work here on CDM, and the winner will become a demo song available via Renoise and on the Indamixx Linux-powered USB flash drive and pre-configured netbooks. (The USB stick means that if you already have a netbook, you can get a stable, pre-configured Linux rig on your existing machine.)

Above: The grand prize, the Indamixx Netbook. I’ve just gotten one in the mail from Indamixx to try, and I’m already hooked on the thing. Based on the MSI Wind, the rig is pre-configured with Linux software, set up in advance for you, with energy XT, Renoise, and ArdourXchange for converting sessions from software like Pro Tools – plus lots of free and open source software, of course. Win the contest, and you get one of your own – and your track will ship as the Renoise demo on this laptop and on the Renoise site.

How to enter:

Here’s how the competition will work:

1. You’ll make your track in Renoise, saving as an .xrns file. (Don’t want to start from scratch? Renoise imports MIDI files and many tracker formats, so you could, for instance, bang out some beats on your PSP using LittleGPTracker, then finish up in Renoise.) You can use any samples you like, but make sure they’re your own recordings or samples you’ve cleared for this purpose, and that you properly attribute them.

2. Make sure your track will play on a netbook – so go easy. For reference, here’s a file used for benchmarking systems. Figure that your track should have a similar task on your CPU.

CPUBenchmark21.xrns (nothing special musically – for testing only!)

3. Post your music somewhere (audio + xrns) – put it on your blog, use drop.io, sign up for CDM’s own in-development blog platform noisepages.com, or whatever you like. If you put the sound somewhere like SoundCloud, of course, you get an instantly-embeddable player.

4. Be sure to apply a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. I’ll be doing the same with CDM’s tutorials and such. This leaves others free to share your work and to remix it, while ensuring they can only do so if they attribute you properly and if their work is just as free to share. (It does not preclude you from selling it later on, either.) See the details of the license, then sign up.

About the license

License your work 

Choose “yes” for commercial uses – because any commercial use must still share alike, which discourages commercial abuse. Select “yes, as long as others share alike” for modifications. Choose “unported” for jurisdiction. And make use of the other fields to attach metadata to your work.You should get a CC-BY-SA license as a result, which allows maximum flexibility for your work while protecting you from people exploiting your work without also sharing the results.

5. Tell us about it! Point CDM, Indamixx, Renoise, and the contest judges to your track by signing up here:

Contest entry form [Google Docs]

6. Judging will evaluate whether tracks are relatively CPU efficient xrns files, but – most importantly – are original, terrific music. There will be categories judged by producer/remix artist/DJ Ron Stewart of Indamixx and Peter Kirn of CDM, and a user’s choice judged by you via public voting.

Prizes:

An Indamixx Netbook MK II SE, to the Indamixx choice

A registered version of Renoise, to the CDM choice

4 Indamixx USB stick versions, to the user choices

DEADLINE:

October 15

We’ll have updates through the competition.

Stay tuned for more tips and tutorials on Renoise and Linux audio alike, plus a look at the Indamixx Linux-powered netbook rig (I’ve just gotten one for testing – it’s deliciously compact).

Questions? Thoughts? Shout out in comments below.

“UP” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Miguel Isaza has created a must-read new blog for anyone interested in sound design, and much to our delight has put it on noisepages. He’s being incredibly prolific with posts, covering creative projects to get your ideas flowing, terrific overviews of leading people in the field with links to interviews and resources for learning about their work, and tons of links for learning your craft technologically and artistically.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

Naturally, Pixar figures prominently, with some of the best sound design on the silver screen in recent years. I’m looking forward to finally seeing UP; Michael Coleman offers the video above. See Miguel’s site for more links and interviews and an overview of the all-star team that did sound for Pixar’s latest.

Thanks for this great resource, Miguel; I’ll certainly be reading daily.

Pronunciation of some common music tech terms has been a source of debate. Generally, though, there’s only one right answer. I had hoped to kick off a pronunciation guide yesterday or today, but now I really can’t resist – not with none other than Tegan & Sara getting together to debate the right way to say Moog.

Don’t get me wrong. I love cows, and the sound “moo.” I suggest if you have something you want to name Moo, you should, like your own MooVerb max patch or something. However, here goes, a few of my favorites:

Moog: Rhymes with “brogue” or “rogue,” not the sound a cow makes. Don’t say “Moooooog” unless you want to get funny looks from synth nerds, or if you’re teaching synthesis to livestock in a dairy.

Monome: The community-based, (partly, at least) open-source controller rhymes with “MA gnome,” not the Spanish-sounding “Ma gnome ME.” You should not be able to use it in a couplet with paper mache. Get it? Two syllables. Sure, this pronunciation varies, but the two-syllable version is what the device’s co-creators call it.

OSC: Pronounce the letters of the open communications protocol, as in “O.S.C. / oh ess see”, not “osk” – though that would have been kind of cool. Think, “Rah, rah, rah, Give me an O! Give me an S! Give me a C! What’s that spell? Better than MIDI! Time-based messages, higher resolution, transport-independent high-speed networked communication with auto-discovery, gooooooooooOOOOO O.S.C.!” (People sometimes say this site is geeky. I have no idea what gives them that impression.)

And for now, O.S.C. stands for Open Sound Control, even though in one spot on the JazzMutant website it’s called “Open-Source Control.” Just get ready for this to change – because OSC really isn’t specific to sound, it may need a new name, like Open System Control. (A recent paper suggests dropping the “sound” in the name.)

MIDI: Rhymes with G. Gordon Liddy, or P. Diddy, or Tweetiebird saying “Piddy.” And, actually, it occurs to me I’ve never heard anyone mispronounce this. Fascinating – an acronym that’s actually intuitive. Oh, but “C.C.” stands for “Control Change,” NOT “continuous controllers” — look at the CC specs; most aren’t continuous. There. I got to be anal about something anyway. Updated: consensus is actually that “mee-dee” is a mispronunciation for native-English speakers, but likely makes more since than “mi-dee” in other languages — particularly if you speak French. So, in other words, it’s an acronym, and makes the most sense to pronounce in the natural way you would in your native tongue. (For English speakers, who knows what vowel sound is appropriate given how screwy our language is, but the creators of MIDI all say middy.)

Maschine: Native Instruments’ drum machine software and controller is German-engineered, so say “muh SHEEN uh,” three syllables, as if you grew up in Berlin. Now, granted, Maschine’s own promotional videos — outsourced to the US — anglicize this to “machine” / “muh SHEEN”, but the engineers and product folks who built the thing use the German pronunciation and think you should, too. And, anyway, it sounds cooler, just as I have to admit a currywurst is tastier than a Nathan’s dog.

I’m sure this is only a small selection of potential mispronunciations. Other candidates? We’ll have to release a full pronunciation guide soon.

We talk about tools a lot, but it’s really learning how to make tools expressive in your productions and performances that matters. DubSpot, the music tech production and DJ educational center here in New York, brings its multi-city Ableton Live Sessions tour to its hometown for several days of parties and workshops. If you’re in NYC and on a budget, we have a discount on the paid events and also some free events you can check out. If you’re not in NYC, we’re working on bringing free video coverage to the global CDM community shortly after the event.

This really isn’t a pitch for Live, either – part of why I’m excited to be able to hang out for the weekend is that I expect to learn quite a lot from some of the world’s most skilled Live users and producers.

Headlining the event is none other than global techno star Richie Hawtin – the Minus impresario some of our readers love to love and others love to hate. I hope we get to hear more about his unique Plastikman live rig – see the controller at top, with more details from our friends at visualist corps Derivative, whose TouchDesigner live visual tool powers 3D imagery in those sets. Hawtin will join in a conversation with Ambivalent about what the Minus musical process is about. Hawtin and friends will also play a real gem of New York’s club scene, Love on MacDougal Street – it’s a fantastic space that lives up to its name.

On the dub side, Scientist aka Overton Brown, one of the world’s real stars of dub, a King Tubby protégé out of Jamaica, will return us to the roots of electronic dance music and show off his own take on the use of this technology. Scientist and Dub is a Weapon play Le Poisson Rouge and Scientist will close out the Live Sessions with a dub battle versus Badawi.

KJ Sawka – Hell, Yes, Chops

Before we get into the lineup, here’s just an example of how cool the faculty of this event is – KJ Sawka. Sawka is, of course, what we dream of in live laptop music. His musicianship is fantastic unplugged (see a rooftop set video, apparently sponsored by PBR), so the laptop becomes simply an extension of that.

KJ Sawka will have a full Drums workshop on Saturday as part of the paid program. If you’re new to Live, though, he’s doing a free intro on Thursday evening.

Here’s what to see and how to get the exclusive CDM discount.

By the way, if you’re in Los Angeles, that’s the next stop on this tour; stay tuned for details.

Schedule, Free Events, and Discounts

Thursday

7-9p, FREE KJ Sawka Live 8 clinic, 675 Bar
9p Funk Aid for Africa benefit release party, 675 Bar

Friday: Richie Hawtin @ Love

Saturday

11-6: Ableton Live and Production Sessions: The first day focuses on moving a project through the production process, with KJ Sawka talking live recording of drums, DJ Kiva and Jon Margulies on developing and finishing materials, and veteran engineer Daniel Wyatt on mixing and mastering. The day finishes up with a chat with Richie Hawtin and Ambivalent.

6:30-9p FREE CDM Live Lounge party Saturday evening, we meet up at former sex club / former horse stables (really) turned chilled-out Meatpacking District lounge 675 Bar. We’ll have some surprise unusual Live controller rigs and music.

Sunday

11-6: Performing with Live, Live Onstage: The second day of workshops focuses on live performance, with Jon Margulies, DJ Rupture, and myself talking about working with performance-ready live sets, controllers, and Akai’s APC40. (With Jon covering the APC, I’ll focus instead on alternative and unusual controllers.) Barry Cole of Blue Mountain Publishing will go a different direction entirely – how to understand licensing and distribution and actually make money on your tracks.

7-9p: Scientist will talk about miking and live setup with Dub is a Weapon – and will mix them live.

9p: DubSpot Sessions party, Le Poisson Rouge, with live and DJ performances from Scientist, Dub is a Weapon, Badawi, Kiva, Rupture, etc.

CDM DISCOUNT: Enter promo code ‘CDM’ for $25 off the tour, or follow this link:
http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

The weekend is US$225 for both days ($200 after our discount); $125 for one day.

Here’s a wrap of what happened in San Francisco:

And if you’re there, do come say hi! It’s always nice to meet readers.

Here’s the lineup:

Los Angeles May 9, Musician’s Institute, Hollywood. Bon Harris, Kevin Teasley, Gerry Basserman, Kurt Kurasaki

New York City May 9, Clinton Recording Studios. Ben Weinman, Aaron Albano, Chris Griffin, Chris Petti

Guildford, UK May 9, Academy of Contemporary Music, Guildford, Surrey A Guy Called Gerald, Alex Blanco, Gary Bromham.

Berlin, Germany May 9, Kulturbrauerei Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg Simon Grey, Philippe van Eecke, The Green Man.

Stockholm, Sweden May 9, Propellerhead Software HQ Eric Gadd, Pär Wiksten, Joachim Ekermann, Jonas Löfvenmark

dubSpot, the West Coast + East Coast music technology training center is doing an eight-city tour of the US to talk about Ableton Live 8 and the Akai APC40 controller. They’re enlisting some of my favorite people to do the workshops. I like the curriculum: it’s not just “here’s how to use Live,” but a real focus on music production, finishing actual music, and pushing the envelope with live visuals, onstage performance and controllers. We also have a $25 discount exclusively for CDM readers if you want to attend.

I want to thank dubSpot for helping sponsor CDM this month – their support makes possible our own free tutorial content and artist coverage slated for later in May.

The tour kicks off this week in San Francisco, but will travel to other US cities soon (dates to be announced; stay tuned).

The artists doing the instruction are some folks whose work I particularly enjoy:

• Jon Margulies, author of Ableton Live 7 Power among other things, and the person doing the Live 8 curriculum here in NY. And like me, Jon is a secret Medievalist (he’s played early music at Spoleto).
• Moldover, “Moldy” to his friends, co-founded the Warper series in NYC and the new LoveTech party in SF, and has become notorious for hacking Novation keyboards and espousing controllerism.
• Christopher Willits is an utterly brilliant guitarist capable of morphing the instrument into all kinds of sounds, for those of you who don’t know his work. And he’s been doing a lovely series of tutorials for our friends at XLR8R TV.

… plus a powerful roster of artists: Funkaid for Africa, Dub Mission, Jason Short, Dub Gabriel, and Barry Cole.

The workshop is $125 for one day or $225 for both. If you are lucky enough to hail from sunny San Francisco, dubSpot is also offering a $25 CDM discount if you head to their site via this link:

http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

But we’ll have more for the rest of the world, too – I’m playing with the Warper crew on the sidewalk in front of dubSpot NY in June, and we’re working on a way of doing a live stream to the CDM planet from there. Stay tuned.

Saturday night, there’s a huge convergence of wonderful people in Los Angeles. The lineup looks terrific (music: Speakers, Sahy-Uhns feat. Bucc Rogerz, Eli Walks, Owen Vallis, Counters, D-Funk), and there will be a new iteration of the Brick multi-touch table which we’ll be seeing here on CDM soon. Flyer below; watch MySpace for address details.

Sunday, there’s a free design workshop/demo by the creator of Where’s the Party At, the open source sampler, at Machine Project.

Rest up and enjoy.

There’s no question that GarageBand represents one of the better values in music software, especially since even Apple expect a lot of its users will simply acquire it with their Mac. It still ranks high on software you’d recommend to a beginner on a budget. Apple’s decision this year to add lessons, interactive lessons that introduce you to musical concepts, and to invite famous artists to play familiar songs, is a fantastic idea.

The Artist Lessons themselves, however, have been relatively few in number. I expect more are coming, but so far the only release since GarageBand came out was this week’s three episodes, featuring Sting and Sarah McLachlan.

Yes, that’s right, here’s Apple’s artist lineup: Sting, Sarah McLachlan, Fall Out Boy, Norah Jones, Colbie Caillat, Sara Bareilles, John Fogerty, OneRepublic, Ben Folds

So, at worst it feels a bit like the 1990s, and at best, like the tour schedule at Long Island’s Jones Beach. The issue here is, musical tastes are varied; part of what drives people to music in the first place is personal expression. There are a total of just 13 songs on the platform, all picked by Apple. Some of the lessons are pretty good, and the production values are slick, but there’s not enough quantity to satisfy people hungry to learn music and the choices overall are bland.

With all due respect to Apple, though, you can’t expect Apple to provide everything. Some artists and publishers have already built their own lessons. It’s time for others to step up, too.

The blog Synthtopia is pretty succinct in its headline:

Apple Garageband FAIL

I agree with Synthopia that the solution should be opening this up as a platform for people to make their own lessons:

“turn GarageBand into a video podcast store that lets you watch free and commercial educational music podcasts.”

The lessons in GarageBand are more than just video files; they include music files and some interactive features. Some sort of authoring tool wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Right now, you can build on the existing open standard of Apple’s podcast support in iTunes – which, in turn, works with a variety of players and mobile devices. In fact, a “podcast” is really just an RSS feed. There’s no reason you can’t add media to those files. Apple explicitly supports the use of PDF, which means you can create podcasts that include video and notation. There’s no way to charge for that, but advertising support is possible. It’s also feasible for some artists that such a feature could be used to promote other revenue streams.

At some point, a retail option could make sense, too. Believe it or not, basic tablature and Standard MIDI Files remain highly popular online. All that’s missing is for artists to start packaging this up and selling on its own.

Maybe Apple will figure out how to build a store for this. But there’s no reason to constantly be dependent on Apple to get it right – or anyone else, for that matter.

And in the meantime, I think lessons are a good enough idea that other people will run with this even when Apple doesn’t. Macworld’s review looked at some of the current alternatives.

You may have heard about Pure Data (Pd), the open-source cousin to Max/MSP and a powerful tool for visual programming or “patching” music and multimedia. Pd has even appeared in the iPhone app RjDj and creating generative music for EA’s hit game Spore. But actually learning how to use the thing? Or learning some of the more advanced possible techniques in sound synthesis and processing? That’s another matter.

Johannes Kreidler writes to let us know about his new book for people wanting to learn Pd. It starts at the beginning and teaches you not only the ins and outs of the Pd environment, but all of the advanced music processing techniques, as well. (Given the similarity of Pd and Max/MSP, that should make this just about as useful for Max devotees, too.)

The book is available for reading free online, or in paperback format from Wolke Publishing House. It’s available in both English and German. Johannes writes:

This tutorial is designed for self-study, principally for composers. It begins with explanations of basic programming and acoustic principles then gradually builds up to the most advanced electronic music processing techniques. The book’s teaching approach is focused primarily on hearing, which we consider a faster and more enjoyable way to absorb new concepts than through abstract formulas.

The patches described are available for download.

He notes that because Pd is free and open source rather than commercial software, there isn’t a company behind it that can focus on documentation for new users. That’s been a common complaint about Pd, and this book does a lot to fill it — as well as a lot to fill the need for better documentation of sound techniques, as well, for users of any environment. Some of the juicy topics covered:

• Additive, subtractive synthesis
• Sampling
• Waveshaping, modulation synthesis
• Granular synthesis (something I try to eat a bowl of every day, seriously)
• Fourier analysis
• Sequencers
• Connecting to hardware, network transmission and OSC
• Basics of visuals

It’s a really elegantly-organized set of topics, and absolutely of interest to users of Max/MSP and other environments, as well. With this and a new SuperCollider book coming out this spring, we’re really getting some wonderful resources for learning greater ninja skills. Stay tuned, as I hope to create a forum for folks working on learning this stuff.

Resources

Book site, including downloadable patches and online reading:

http://www.pd-tutorial.com

Direct link to downloading all the patches as one zip (thanks, mic, in comments!):

http://www.kreidler-net.de/pd/patches/patches.zip

More info, including the paperback version:

http://www.wolke-verlag.de/musik_u_t/loadbang.html

http://www.buecher-zur-musik.de/assets/s2dmain.html?http://www.buecher-zur-musik.de/53108697370a2cb3f/5310869bc400a7a02.html

Author’s site:
www.kreidler-net.de

The authorship of the book was aided by a grant by the Music University of Freiburg / Germany.

Previous appearances by the author:

A song made from 70,2000 samples

The stock market declines, as a song

More Pd Books

bang | pure data Free, online

Creator Miller Puckette’s own The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music, free online in various formats and also in print

Chris Breen at Macworld does exceptional, tough reviews of consumer sound software. He’s tackled GarageBand ‘09 in depth in a review published this week at Macworld.com. If you’re a beginning user, this review is for you – and if not, Chris will help you understand what that perspective is like for countless typical Mac users:

Unless you have an active interest in producing podcasts or creating a musical score, it’s likely you’ve opened GarageBand once and then never bothered with it again. Of all the programs that make up the iLife suite, none is more overlooked than this application. And, given its original focus, that’s not too surprising. Making music requires a skill not common in the general population of computer users.

Review: GarageBand ’09 | Macworld

I’ve gotten to spend some time with this review as the tech editor for the story, and testing GarageBand along with it, I definitely agree. The new lessons are really terrific – they won’t teach you to play, necessarily, but they’re polished, and they can whet musicians’ appetite for additional training options and real music lessons. The guitar effects sound terrific. The UI has been improved in subtle but significant ways that make things easier to find.

The one real disadvantage of the new version is that these terrific-sounding guitar effects don’t support MIDI control. They do support automation, but you can’t control them with anything other than the mouse.

To me, that means you may actually struggle to find a reason to get this upgrade on its own – which would be a problem, except that you’re either getting the new release with a new Mac or are also getting major upgrades to iPhoto and iMovie. So, okay — there’s your reason. And for people with an older version wanting to get into something simple, I’d still easily recommend GarageBand.

If it’s video lessons that interest you, though, Chris has done a complete overview of video instructions options on the Mac. If you do get GarageBand 09, I think you’re likely to hunger for more than Apple currently offers, making this a useful resource. And if GarageBand 09 doesn’t interest you, this gives you some other choices for computer-assisted music learning.

Learn to play an instrument | Macworld

Incidentally, it’s too bad Apple doesn’t offer a way for musicians to build their own lessons in GarageBand; I think that’d be a big hit.

All of that said, I do think Apple is doing a whole lot to make music software more accessible to the first-time user. The fact that GarageBand is just there on a new Mac, and that steps in 09 make sure that if you click the icon you get something friendly and musical, really is significant.

Using the new GarageBand? Do let us know what you think of it.