Archive for the ‘Music Technology’ Category

I subscribe to a few tech blog feeds and a lot of my friends I’m linked to via Google Reader have similar interests. There’s an endless supply new devices, apps, and games announced almost daily. Such an exciting time for tech lovers. And specifically for musician tech lovers.

Here is new take on the Tetris model called Chime. This one uses not only a point reward system, but also a musical reward…

It’s exciting to see how people are shaping how consumers access and interact with music today. Gives me a lot of inspiration.

Lot o’ guitar noise happening on my speakers as of late. This fit right in.

Early Bird Special: Old and Busted: Songbirds. New Hotness: Avant-noise birds.

Thanks Graham.

In a classic case of irony sent on by Greenleaf commenter Mike Grimaldi, “Scorpio” talks about the golden days of smash hit bootlegs and how the Internet has ruined his business.

From NY Mag:
The music industry took another tumble in 2009, with CD sales down 12.7 percent from 2008. But the shadier, shadowy side of the business has been equally decimated. At one time, as many as 75 unofficial bootleg “companies” existed, illegally cranking out LPs and then CDs of hard-to-find studio and soundboard-jacked live recordings by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Phish, Pearl Jam, and other rock icons. Some, like the multidisc Dylan Ten of Swords box, are considered classics. Although it’s impossible to gauge exactly how profitable this quasi-industry was, the four-decade-old bootlegging biz generated millions of dollars globally. But now, this old-school method of illegal music distribution — one of rock’s most illustrious if illicit traditions — is being destroyed right along with the legit CD, all by the new-school method: the Internet.

I remember back in the day paying $40 for a “rare” Pink Floyd bootleg set. Hard to imagine doing that for burned CD-Rs now.

This will make Jim happy: Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales from the Times.

The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from hip-hop icons like 50 Cent and Diddy and new pop stars like Norah Jones and Lady Gaga.

And with the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with reel-to-reel and eight-track tape players, has been reborn.

We’re still investigating the idea of Greenleaf vinyl. Some have proposed a print on demand system, others a vinyl sampler system. Do you have an LP player? Is the sound of vinyl important to you? What would you most like to hear that way? Let us know here or on Facebook.

The Times gives front page coverage:

Ge Wang, the assistant professor of music who leads the two-year-old Stanford group, says the iPhone may be the first instrument — electronic or acoustic — that millions of people will carry in their pockets. “I can’t bring my guitar or my piano or my cello wherever I go, but I do have my iPhone at all times,” he said.

Professor Wang said he would like to democratize the process of making music, so that anyone with a cellphone could become a musician. “Part of my philosophy is people are inherently creative,” he said. “It’s not just people who think of themselves as artists.”

…

Professor Wang, who still plays the guitar he learned in middle school, acknowledges that “nothing is better than a cello at playing the cello.”

Still, he hopes that his ensemble — which builds the instruments, writes the music and performs it — will invent the instruments of the future.

Plus, cool pictures from CCRMA at Stanford University. This is the room where Keystone will be creating Spark Of Being in January.

I just got wind of Wolfgangs Vault opening the flood gates of archived material dating back to the second Newport Festival via Ben Ratliff’s article at the Times.

“…posting free streams of a handful of performances from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, at wolfgangsvault.com: the first offerings include Count Basie, Dakota Staton and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. By next Tuesday, when more are added, there will be 27 sets from that year’s jazz festival, including some by Ahmad Jamal, Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. The plan is to have hundreds more online in the coming months, from other years of Newport Jazz and from the Newport Folk Festival as well.”

A couple clicks later, I’m listening. And noticing that I can embed some of this tunage into this post. What nice guys over there, understanding word of mouth and all.

Looking forward to hearing more.

Happy weekend.

Berna 1.0 (MAC OSX)
Vintage Electronic Studio

Between the 1950s and the mid 1960s, long before Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos injected electronics into pop-music (with a few exceptions like the Barrons and Raymond Scott), electroacoustic music was pioneered by european radio laboratories and US universities. Composing with tapes and electronics was a serious painstaking and expensive affair, prerogative of a restricted elite of contemporary music composers and adventurous sound engineers. At that time there wasn’t any electronic musical instruments market, as a matter of fact, most of the equipment was adapted from scientific tools belonging to radio engineering departments. Sometimes the equipment was built from scratch cannibalizing anything that had wires, tubes and pots, more rarely, the studios used the few commercial instruments available in those days, such as the Melchord, the Trautonium and the Theremin. Contrarily to what happens today, electronic music then was everything but fast and easy to create. A few minutes of electronic composition could take more than one year of work. Everything was handmade, from complex timbres with multiple sine oscillators bounces to tape editing with scissors and scotch-tape. Even sound envelopes were manually built by cutting tapes’ edgdes at different degrees of inclination. Ussachevsky’s ADSR was yet to be invented!

Berna is a software simulation of a late 1950s electroacoustic music studio. Oscillators, filters, modulators, tape recorders, mixers, are all packed in a easy-to-use interface with historical accuracy.

Explore serial, concrete and tape music or create strange new sonic worlds with instruments inspired by the greatest studios of the early days of electronic music.

Thanks to Josh for passing that on.

Never ceases to amaze me what creative people can do with bare essentials and contact microphones…

While watching that, all I wanted to do was run the sound into a Kaos Pad and maybe some delay and get freaky.

–

From Google Reader feed from Make Magazine.

After a short tour out East and back, I’m back in the office working away. It was a great trip, but good to be home and away from rest stops and fast food.

A few things that were sent to me over the weekend that I wasn’t able to find time to post…

First, long-time Greenleaf friend Helen Money has a cool new video on the ‘Tube directed by Nelson Chan. The music is a cover of the classic Minutemen tune “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing.” Helen’s new album is due out November 3rd and comes highly recommended.

“I am a very big Fan of Michael Jackson, and am quite angry on the fact that We only started to pay attention to him only after his passing. so here is my tribute to him in a Halloween spirit. “let the fouls choke on their own gold!” R.I.P. MJ –Nelson Chan

Monster Cable releases Miles Davis Tribute headphones. Quite a perplexing product. But like most things with Miles’ name on it, I’d want one — if I didn’t already have a sweet set of ‘phones.

Miles Davis Tribute Jazz Headphones are designed and precision tuned with Miles and the unique acoustic tones of jazz in mind.

What would have been cooler than just getting the cans is if the headphones were somehow preloaded with all those complete boxsets. Some Miles iPod or whatever. Still, would love to at least test out Pharoah’s Dance or The Ghetto Walk to see how they sound.

We want you to know about FLAC files because it’s a relatively new way of downloading excellent sounding music. Sounds better than MP3, sounds as good as a CD, uses no packaging or shipping products, has all the artwork embedded. Greenleaf Music’s owner, Dave Douglas, went through this process reluctantly and came out the other side a convinced FLAC user. Now you can, too!

–

First, download the FLAC track A Single Sky. (right-click > Save As)

Downloading a Greenleaf FLAC is the same as downloading an MP3, they’re just larger files because they are uncompressed and therefore sound better. After downloading the FLAC track, here are a couple options of how to get going:

If you use iTunes, the only way to play FLACs is by using Fluke. It’s a free software available here. Right-clicking on the FLAC file and choosing Open With > Fluke will import the FLAC into your iTunes where you can then play it with no problem.

You can also convert the FLAC file using a program called Max. WAVs and AIFs are the formats used to press CDs and are supported in iTunes without any software add-on. Simply select what format you’d like to convert to in the Max > Preferences > Formats window. Then drag the file(s) into the Max window and click Convert. Those files can be added directly to your iTunes or burned to a CD that will match the sound quality of a CD you’d receive from us. (Update: Using a PC? Check out dBpoweramp for converting)

For folks not tied to iTunes, you can use a number of FLAC players out there. We recommend the recently discovered Songbird (thanks to Gary, one of our new subscribers). Songbird looks and feels like iTunes, so it’s easy to get set up.

–

Internet speeds are getting faster, and hard drive space is getting larger and cheaper with every second. Lossless files like FLACs are here to stay and great for folks like me who are not audiophiles but enjoy listening to quality music in the best way they can. These suggestions and directions are a good place to start. And I’ll be around to answer any questions you have as best I can.

Everyone has their own method for organizing their digital files — feel free to pass on yours in the Comments Section.