If you’re in the New York area, tomorrow night we have another noise-making get-together at the lovely 3rd Ward. The event is free, and we have free Colt 45.

Amanda Ervin is the featured guest this month; see one of her circuits above. Her designs are intended to be something that other folks can make, so they could be an excellent starting point for the project you’re dreaming of. (And once you get sequenced events down, of course, you can assign them to whatever sounds or visuals you like.)

Thursday, September 17
7:30 – 10:30 pm
FREE
3rd Ward in East Williamsburg; Directions
With the support of Etsy.com, Make Magazine, and XLR8R.com

Full details:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com/

And on Facebook:
Handmade Music Night

Nice blurb on myopenbar.com

I’ve given up on live streaming from the event because we can’t get a reliable connection, but we will have documentation for CDM on the projects afterward.

There really is something special about Montreal, Quebec’s metropolis just beyond the New York Adirondacks. Having shared our own conversation with Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke with video from their stunning ATOM, here’s what our friends at XLR8R Magazine were up to in May: they were on a tour of Montreal with local Ghislain Poirier.

Poirer’s Caribbean-infused electronica has made him one of Montreal’s hottest exports, but this Ninja Tune artist isn’t fleeing for Berlin (ahem). Wandering around Montreal, you really get a sense of his love for the city and what you can do to make the scene what you want – a great lesson for those of us living anywhere in the world. Poirer is currently touring the UK and Europe, having done a set at the sprawling Metropolis club during MUTEK, but he’ll get back to Montreal in time to play a Piknic Electronik in the park.

I’d love to see more artists showing us around their cities – including hamlets that don’t get so much coverage, or even big-name cities like my own home New York from a different perspective. We do have a chance to have a different view of things on the Internet. I welcome ideas about how to go about that.

Who are the people in your DIY music neighborhood?

Well, quite a few of the DIYers here on Planet Earth are converging this week in New York. Lover of circuit bending, creative electronics, and DIY music hardware are gathering for the massive Bent Festival in Manhattan, complete with performances, workshops, and a book launch. And we’ve got a special edition planned of Handmade Music featuring several artists from Bent, too, in our monthly free event. For the rest of the planet, I hope to share some of these goodies well beyond the borders of the five boroughs.

To give you a taste of the kind of work we’re doing, check out the videos here of Chiptune Marching Band, getting kids making noisy circuits for the first time and the fantastic electronic workings of Peter Edwards’ brain, plus NPR radio coverage of Ranjit Bhatnagar’s hand-crafted “Instrument a Day.”

Here are the highlights of the events.

Bent Festival, April 16-18, The Tank in Manhattan

bentfestival.org

• Nightly performances by Dr. Bleep, VBLANK, Christopher McDonald, Computer at Sea, Rhythmmemory, Playboy’s Bend, Die Schrauber, Peter Edwards/casperelectronics, E-Squared, Family TV, Devgon Ash, Ken Rei, Dr. Rek, Pixel Form, Boring Machine, Burnkit 2600, Anti Social Musik Order, plus Handmade Music veterans Lesley Flanigan, Loud Objects, Tristan Perich, and Don Miller / No Carrier … plus free beer every night at 7p.
• Nic Collins launching a new edition of his book Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking. (Can’t wait to read that.)
• Workshops on making your own Noise Box or miniRungler (sounds like Dr. Seuss), working with sensors and networks and big installations of lights that switch on and off, microcontroller programming, circuit bending, circuit design, and other Brainy Topics for beginners. There’s even a family-friendly workshop on making your chiptune marching band instruments.

Chiptune Marching Band from jamie allen on Vimeo.

And from your cheery neighbors here at CDM and our friends –

Handmade Music returns with a special Bent Edition – free, Thursday, 4/16, 3rd Ward in Brooklyn:

• “modular synth meets circuit-bent Barbie dolls. noise, drone, dance party with Peter Edwards of casperelectronics.”
• A surprise mystery instrument(s) from Handmade Music superstar Ranjit Bhatnagar, who promises it’ll be “something weird.”
• Me, with the DIY Radio Shack contact mic and some custom software, showing you how to have fun with cheap impulse-buy contact mics and make music with water
• Hopefully surprise cameos from Bent Festival’s Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro talking about the circuitry, the music, and the magic of the Chiptune Marching Band
• Free beer courtesy Pabst Blue Ribbon, while it lasts

Presented by createdigitalmusic.com with our friends at music trend-setters XLR8R.com, DIY bible makezine.com, and self-made marketplace Etsy.com

Hosted by artists’ facility and happening location 3rd Ward

7:30pm, Thursday, April 16 – FREE!
3rd Ward is located at 195 Morgan Ave., at the corner of Stagg St., in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
(near the Grand St L train)
Directions
RSVP: handmade@3rdward.com

Facebook event page

See also lots more at:

casperelectronics

For more on handmade music and Ranjit’s brilliant, self-motivated hand-crafted Instrument a Day project, NPR did a fantastic piece on All Things Considered:

An Instrument A Day, Crafted By Hand [audio, interviews, and sound examples of some wild and wonderful instruments]

Our Handmade Music series continues this month on Thursday evening, 3/19, 7:30p at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn. Projects are open as always. Bring hardware. Bring circuit-bent stuff. Bring code and patches. Bring works you want to perform. Bring works that don’t work yet. Just, if you can, give us a shout to know what to expect. We have a PA, a mixer, a projector, and some space. It’s a party / science fair-style atmosphere, a chance to have a few beers and celebrate sound and noise with fellow geeks and the musicurious.

I’m particularly interested this month to see if anyone has Java or Processing-based works you want to share, as Sun’s CommunityOne East is in town, meaning lots o’ Java programmers. (Generally, they’re doing serious, work stuff like … um … servers and things. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show off your own, more unusual creations.)

More details of the lineup soon.

Call for Works, Direct Link [Google Docs]
Embedded form below:

My favorite track on YouTube has only a slide show in the background, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

For you New Yorker metro area folks:
Presented by createdigitalmusic.com with our friends at music trend-setters XLR8R.com, DIY bible makezine.com, self-made marketplace Etsy.com, and artists’ facility 3rd Ward

7:30pm, Thursday, February 19
3rd Ward is located at 195 Morgan Ave., at the corner of Stagg St., in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
(near the Grand St L train)
Directions

Facebook event page / RSVP
Join the CDM Facebook Page

Non-NYers, I’m open to suggestions as far as trying to set up a video stream. Mogulus just added a verification process, though I can get up to 50 people there without it.

Since the dawn of time, musicians have crafted their own acoustic instruments. Now, “handmade” extends to electrically-powered, digital instruments, including carved-wood gestural controllers, wearable drum pads, and rescued mannequin parts.

We got to enjoy another edition of Handmade Music in Brooklyn last week, getting together with our friends from XLR8R, Make Magazine, DIY marketplace Etsy.com, and venue host 3rd Ward. A huge thanks to our sponsor Pabst Blue Ribbon.

There are two things I especially love about these events. One is, we get to hang out and just make a racket. Performances are a wonderful thing, but getting to mix it up a little with total sonic chaos is great fun. Two, we connect people who haven’t met – non-musicians, people with no background in this stuff discovering what’s going on, but also people doing related work who may not have met before, even in a city like New York. On this particular occasion, we had two artists working with gestural controllers who were able to exchange ideas.

I think all of this can be replicated, of course, even if just hanging out with friends (in music or other fields). So, since Make Magazine and Popular Science were both nice enough to shoot some footage, here’s a look at what was on offer at this month’s edition of the event. And stay tuned for more for next month, now that we really are on a once-a-month schedule.

Handmade Music – 1/15/09 from make magazine on Vimeo.

Video from Handmade Music 1/15/09 [MAKE]

Brooke Borel of Popular Science’s DIY blog did a great piece on the event:

Making Electronic Music By Hand

Last Thursday’s event had the air of an interactive science fair, and while some attendees sat in the corner drinking, chatting, and soaking in the sounds, most crowded around the projects for demonstrations and the chance to take the controllers and make a little music of their own.

That’s a good point, too — while each of the projects could be an instrument you master over time, practicing and really getting good at, it could also be something a non-musician could pick up and play.

More on the December event and some of the technical details behind the projects — including skills you can apply to your own work and music — coming soon.

XLR8RTV has a fantastic video interview with one of my favorite artists, Daedelus. The man is, as always, like pure musical joy. He talks about his musical influences, the early connections he made (including at USC, alma mater of a number of the CDM community), his approach to live performance, the virally-popular open source monome controller, and, yes, that pro-Obama song. (The original lyrics were catchier.)

The monome connection is an interesting case in music technology. Daedelus was the first artist to gig regularly with the device, possibly helping both him and the monome gain some buzz. It’s not just a gimmick, either, because he remains one of the most virtuosic, erm, monomists on the planet.

But technology aside, Daedelus is one of those guys who can charge up your faith in the future of live computer music. Enjoy!

(And Daedelus, if you’re out there, we’ll have to have you sit down with the CDM TV cameras next time I’m in LA. I promise … well, poorer production values. But maybe we can add some special effects in post or something that XLR8R was too tasteful to do. Like have you fly on your monome as though it’s a magic carpet.)

In other news, CDM’s own Liz “Quantazelle” McLean Knight is featured in a podcast look at the Chicago scene.

You can be making incredible music, but if no one knows about it you probably won’t be making it for very long. Having a good project name is the first step to getting publicity and having your music heard by a large amount of people.

Don’t be difficult. It has to be easy to pronounce and say over the phone. Try to avoid using numbers for letters (leet speak) since it will confuse people. Yes, there are exceptions like “!!!,” μ-siq, and whatnot, but the object is to make it easy for the press to write about you and for people to talk about you. While you’re welcome to choose a difficult name, it’s only going to make the rest of your publicity efforts that much harder.

Steer clear of profanity. While James Fucking Friedman has a somewhat high profile, whenever he gets listed in local papers that don’t allow profanity they star out either the entire middle word or just use stars after the F. People will get confused–”Did they star out ‘Faggot,’ ‘Fucking,’ or ‘Fellatio’? Should I Google for James Star Star Star?” Also profanity limits the types of publications that will feature you. While XLR8R and URB are magazines that are pretty laid back about their language, you might one day discover that your music has an interesting crossover audience (be it mountain climbers or acoustic engineers) and you want to make it easy for those types of journalists to approach you and write about you and your music.

It sounds good. Pick three of your favorite names. Say them out loud. Ask some friends what they think and notice how they respond. Do they laugh out loud when you’re aiming for a super serious image (”Abfahrt Hinwil” might cause some giggling)? It may sound obvious, but electronic musicians who tend to work alone and communicate through their computers could use some IRL human feedback once in a while.

No one else has it. While I wouldn’t say you should register for a trademark just yet, you should research as best you can if anyone else is using your name. You don’t want to shell out money for a domain name and spend years growing your project and fan base just to be hit with a cease and desist or worse, a lawsuit (look at Dan Snaith’s Caribou (formerly Manitoba) debacle.) Do some web searches to see if you can determine if anyone’s using your name. The US Patent office has an online search engine called TESS where you can search for trademarks in use. Search for all the words in your desired name, and then search for each one alone and see if they return anything similar. If you’re considering trademarking your name, it’s a very good idea but it will cost you a few hundred bucks. You can file online and read more here: http://www.uspto.gov.

It can be you, as long as you’re not already in use. You can use your own name as long as it’s not in use already and you won’t be confused for someone else. Can you imagine being the second Derrick May in Detroit? You might get a huge turnout for your first gig but the promoter and venue will hate you after the riot of pissed off people who thought they bought tickets to see one of the godfathers of Detroit techno. This second Derrick May in question used his middle name instead to avoid confusion, resulting in Derrick Michael.

Webify it. Get a domain name when you’ve settled on your choice. Although you might just want to use Myspace as your website, Myspace is not press-friendly, and if you adopt that early-90s bad-website look with repeating graphic as the background or garish colors it’s going to be unreadable (and incredibly annoying). Plus, with your own website you have total control over your image and don’t have to worry about deleting comments and photos posted by jerks. Then check to see if your choice is a domain in use already. I got lucky because mine is a completely made up word (Quantazelle) so the domain was available. If it’s not, see if you can add “music” “sounds,” or something else to the end of it and then grab it. If not, you might consider finding a different name, but it’s not a deal killer. While you might want to opt for something clever as your domain name, you want to make it easy for people to find information about you. A web search for your project name should return your site as one of the first results because your name is in the domain itself.

Some ideas for generating project names:

Take a passage from a favorite work of literature or a poem,. For example, “Joy Division” is from The House of Dolls by Karol Cetinsky.

Use an anagram. Aphex Twin relied heavily on this to name many of his songs. “Acrid Avid Jam Shred” on I Care Because You Do is an anagram of “Richard D. James”. Here’s an online anagram generator to experiment with: wordsmith.org/anagram.

Try playing with this emo-band name generator: www.bandnamemaker.com

Check out this tool for generating band names: www.greatnameforaband.com. On my first try I got “Galacticide” which is actually really cool.

Here’s another one: www.bandlookup.com. I put in “bandpass’ and got such gems as “Bandpass Disorder” and “Half-Ass Bandpass.”

Create an alias by generating combinations of male or female names with last names: kleimo.com/random. An example of this in action is “Malcom Kipe” who is actually Nautilis aka Skyler McGlothlin.

Take a hint from the Dada-ist poetry methods of William S. Burrows and do a “cut-up.” Grab a newspaper or any other sliceable piece of literature and cut out a bunch of words from it. Then toss them on a flat surface and see what interesting combinations happen.

Make a portmanteau. “Devo” is a concatenation of “de-evolution.” “Quantazelle” is a combination of “Quantum and Gazelle.”

Create a phrase that congers up imagery of what your music sounds like, such as “Explosions in the Sky.” It’s a little difficult if you’re not a poetic or literary type, but you can ask other people for help. Just say “If you could think of an image that sounds like my music, what would it be?” Gathering a group of people in a room together along with some alcohol or other relaxing substance is a very conducive environment for name generating.

So now that you’re better equipped for the first part of your publicity efforts, why don’t you get started on that brainstorming? Good luck!