Bliss – SevenUpLive 1.4 Preview from bar|none on Vimeo.

monome lovers have come from all over the planet to exchange tips and creative ideas and check out music here in Princeton, New Jersey at the Monomeet. I’m here shooting some video, so expect a feature and links to some of the projects in a few days. In the meantime, JP has set up a live stream, so you can listen in while you clean your studio or whatever you happen to be doing on this Saturday afternoon / evening. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more! (Incidentally, there’s quite a lot of discussion here that’s relevant whether or not you own the monome hardware, really getting to the heart of open source and DIY musical tools. I’ll certainly be sharing some of that soon.)

Updated: what a Saturday! The monomeet was incredibly packed with goodness, from crazy DIY projects to terrific music. And it’s also worth saying, the event wound up being about far more than just the monome; the object becomes a catalyst for all sorts of other discussions of open source and audiovisual technique. I have some video that looks good, lots of cameras were rolling, photographers snapping – expect good documentation over the coming days.

You can also follow the post-event discussion on the monome board.

If you have videos to post, there’s a special monomeet Vimeo group. To get things kicked off, check out the SevenUpLive preview, contributed virtually by bar|none who couldn’t make the event. (See the monome boards for a discussion and download of the software in the video.)
http://www.vimeo.com/groups/monomeetfall2009

If you have photos, of course I always watch the CDM Flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cdmu/pool/

For blog posts and so on – or if you couldn’t make it and have specific questions for the monome folks – you can holler on Twitter or via our contact form:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/contact/

In the Pocket (Rhodes and Moog Light Paint) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

Fantastic, hip, soulful keys couple with brilliant stop-motion editing, as a Moog and Rhodes keyboard are splashed with light painting, in this new music video from Ethan Goldhammer. (See his blog for more.) It’s the perfect example of how a much-seen technique can retain its novelty when used creatively, especially as the sound itself seems to dance in light-up oscilloscope patterns.

Background:

Original music by Ethan Goldhammer and S. Burke.
Time Lapse footage shot in August 2008 on Block Island, RI.
Stop motion and light paint September 2008 in Cambridge, MA.

The lesson here: gear pr0n and special effects work perfectly when they visualize the way we feel about our musical objects and sounds.

Okay, so how did he do it? Ethan responds:

Ableton all the way. Recorded as loops with an [Akai] apc, then arranged later. The secret is also, making the animations, rendering them in [Final Cut Pro] but then WARPING them in ableton to the proper timing and bouncing them back to FCP.

Nicely done. Of course, this is why some audiovisualists have turned to Sony Vegas for Windows – formerly developed by Sonic Foundry, Vegas is actually half audio, half visual software. On the other hand, Live is a comfortable and flexible tool that does many things Vegas can’t.

Ethan also has a beautiful rendering of “Air on a G String,” the second cut from the legendary Switched on Bach. Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, please don’t stop Ethan; I’d love to see more collaboration instead.

Air on a G String (Oscilliscoped) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

BIRDY NAM NAM – THE PARACHUTE ENDING from Steve Scott on Vimeo.

This is the music video you’ve always dreamed of getting when your track gets a music video. It’s been round the Web a few months ago, but I only discovered it today via the lovely 8-bit punk Anamanaguchi (see our interview), on their Twitter feed. It’s like what you worked out when bored in grade school Chemistry class with your best friend who planned to become a comic book artist for a career, scrawled in the margins of your notebook. There’s an evil Egyptian alien sarcophagus shooting what appears to be evil sugar cubes from orbit. There’s a crazy space alien superhero who’s all Shriner and Freemason and gets special powers when he replaces his hand with a vegetable squid … thing. And good triumphs over evil, which is what we all root for. It’s the sort of trippy album art we don’t get any more, but animated.

The animation, creative direction, and concept are by Will Sweeney, who under the name Alakazam Label makes fantastic, far-out illustrations, toys, and animations with edible acid-neon colors, and hamburgers for heads, and organic tendrils like pasta or vines or tentacles wrapped through the dreamscapes. You can see more of Sweeney’s work:

http://alakazamlabel.com/

Steve Scott directed the video, did concept design, and did his own compositing, which shows you he knows his stuff. Scott, based in Australia, has his own brilliantly wonderful stuff.

Birdy Nam Nam are a French DJ crew, cool enough to name drop Peter Sellers references in their actual name. They’re proper turntablists in a world in which that has become a rarity, with the prizes to match. Remix did a good write-up of their work in 2006; the best way to keep up with them now is to follow MySpace and, unfortunately for the world’s other continents, to live in Europe.

Justice did the production, in case that wasn’t evident; the marriage works.

And, seriously, special squid vegetable hands?

Record is now shipping, and the beta closed – and now is a perfect time to talk about learning.

Okay, let me explain something. Propellerhead doesn’t want Record to be called a “DAW,” for Digital Audio Workstation. I personally overcame my own distaste for the strange acronym today because, well, there’s not another good name for a related set of tools.

But I do think Record is different. Workstations are usually defined by being all-in-one environments, for hosting other third-party instruments and effects, and adding in additional features like notation and video scoring. Record is none of those things. You can even treat it like a virtual mixer or rack of processing tools and load it into your existing “DAW” of choice, or take something like Ableton Live and load it into Record for mastering.

But then, Record is the exception that proves the rule, isn’t it? Aggressively geared to be the anti-DAW, to avoid trying to be all things to all people, Record illustrates the variety of ways you can get your music making done.

We’ve had a good, healthy debate on this topic, so no reason to resurrect that. Instead, I have two pieces of news: one, Record is now actually shipping. Two, if you’re interested to learn how to use it, or just to see what they’ve done, the Props have assembled a terrific set of learning resources. For beginners, “Record U” promises to cover the basics of recording tasks as well as the software. (So far, the first episode, “Recording Guitar,” is available.) You can add that to lovely ReWire tutorials from the folks who developed the technology, and mini-tips on how to use the tools. Whatever you think of the software, it’s an exemplary learning site, just the kind of thing you’d hope developers would do.

Basics video
Record U
Tutorials Page
Micro Tutorials and iTunes podcast link

I’ve chosen my favorite so far. Love it or hate it, I think this illustrates some of the vision of Record. It makes moving tracks and devices as easy as racking up instruments and effects in Reason, and makes mixing and matching audio uncommonly easy. That could make Record a nice tool to have around for trying to take your pile of recordings and productions and turn them into finished tracks and albums. (A lot of this “love it or hate it” phenomenon seems to depend on your feelings about Reason, so Reason fans will also want to take a look at the Reason – Record integration video.)

Michael Jackson’s This Is It in HD

I’ve never been big on idol worship or celebrity; it’s my feeling you can draw inspiration from any musician as a fellow artist – it’s really the point of music. But that works both ways; for all that can be said of him, and for all that people may be suffering from Michael Jackson fatigue, the man’s talent can still be stunning.

My editor at Keyboard, Steve Fortner (via Twitter), sends along this trailer for an upcoming Michael Jackson documentary. It features some of the rehearsal footage prior to the artist’s death. You can also spot keyboardist Michael Bearden, Friend of Keyboard Magazine – who has, in turn, been featured on Keyboard TV. Check out his incredible bio. And on the same note, it’s often these lesser-known artists, the people playing next to all the famous artists everyone has heard of, who can be equally inspiring. Their sounds and musical imagination is woven into a lot of the popular music of the last half century, even if their names may not be as imprinted on people’s brains. They also typically have to have the ability to quickly sit in with artists of radically varying styles and “make it work.”

I think it’s possible to be a champion of the lesser-known or obscure without being allergic to the well-known. To do anything else would deprive you of the experience of some great musicians. And the documentary looks like it could be terrific.