Posts tagged Music
The UsCast 001 – Sick Start
Feb 20th
The UsCast 001 - A Sick Start
(Lee & Charity’s New Podcast)
Charity and I have been wanting to just record our random conversations about various topics and put them online for a while. Now I guess is a decent time to start doing so, and matter of fact, we dont care how much they suck because we will just keep on doing it to archive the crazy thoughts going through our heads. For a great example, we decided to start the first one while we both sound horrible and sick from either head or sinus colds so enjoy it and please tell us what you think. We will be adding a website and twitter and area for it to be very easy to send in your input and even ask us questions. We promise we will make it easy to understand why we are doing this and why you are going to want to listen. Right now, just let us iron it out. We are in beta ok? Thanks for listening beta testers!
Email comments/questions/requests uscast@337studios.com
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...Zelda ReOrchestrated
Dec 29th
Russ Frushtick at MTV Multiplayer was following the progress of a musical group that wanted to remake the music in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with a real orchestra. Today, he reports, they’ve finally finished their work.
The Zelda Reorchestrated project (a.k.a. ZREO) first got started six years ago when a 14-year-old had the brilliant idea to redo all the music in the game with an orchestra. Now, 82 tracks later, the idea is real and you can listen to it yourself.
As of a month ago, we were only short a handful of songs to complete the album, however, many of the songs from Ocarina of Time were not nearly up to par with others, so we decided to go through the album, song by song, and figure out which songs needed to be remade. It started out as five, then ten, twelve. The list grew and grew till we reached a whopping 22 tracks. Today, we release those additional 22 remakes.
Frushtick rightly points out that this work is in no way protected from a take-down notice from Nintendo (though I’m sure the more clever legal minds out there could make a case for fair use). So get it while it’s hot in download form or pop over to Zelda Reorchestrated just to sample their work. Really, it’s pretty neat.
Zelda Reorchestrated [Zreomusic.com via MTV Multiplayer]
(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5) Loading ...Weekend Projects; Dont Procrastinate
Sep 17th
In one day, Beck Hansen and friends recorded an album-length cover of a beloved pop music album. They did it by setting aside time, lowering their guard, and letting creative work happen. Anyone with a side-project could learn a lot from them.
Hansen, better known as the singular Beck, is known in popular culture for a cut-and-paste, information-overloaded sound that takes a lot of time to produce, and far more time to release, promote, and tour on. For the Record Club project, he took a step back from the standard conception of “Let’s make an ‘album.’”
He rang up like-minded friends and cohorts, got them to agree on an album—the Velvet Underground’s debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico—and limited the project to 24 hours. There were no practice sessions or pre-arranged song structures, and no intention to, as Beck put it, “‘Add to’ the original work or … recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens.” The result? Some pretty striking, and strikingly pretty, music. A total of eleven tracks and one alternate take, and, at the end of one really long day, there’s this new thing that anyone can listen to, watch videos of, and obsess over.
Any musician with a few musically gifted friends could try the same project, but there’s a wider lesson for programmers, writers, and hobbyists of any stripe. When you’re contemplating a new project, or stuck on a big one, consider how Record Club demonstrates the payoffs of creative constraints, definite time frames, and a ban against external expectations to your Big Serious Project.
The joys of creative constraints
Why does Flickr’s video service allow for only 90 seconds of footage? Cynically, you could assume it’s to save on bandwidth and storage costs, but Flickr says otherwise: It’s actually about emphasizing original, condensed, in-the-moment content rather than super-awesome World of Warcraft screengrabs. Spending time randomly clicking around Flickr’s video pools is scads more tolerable than randomly browsing YouTube’s user clips, which, aside from the occasional bit of brilliance, mostly serve as primers on the pitfalls of poor lighting and sound and having a huge amount of time to talk about popular music feuds.
(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...Dopplerpad, music remixing on the iPhone
Jul 25th
We knew you could make great music on the iPhone. With instrument apps such as Smule’s Ocarina and Leaf Trombone. Still, while they’re cool and surprisingly rich mobile instruments, they’re not all that practical for creating, sampling, and recording musical compositions on the fly.
DopplerPad [iTunes Link] is a turntable-like instrument iPhone app built by one of the two creators of FourTrack [iTunes Link]. Unlike some other apps, this one doesn’t feature just one instrument – it has 37. It doesn’t just play notes; it lets you sample them, no matter where you are. And most of all, you can record and combine the beats to create your own electronic remix.
Want to make a techno beat?
DopplerPad takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of its interface, there’s actually a lot you can do. It uses touch-based responses in order to create an instrumental piece. The 37 instruments we mentioned earlier are almost all techno or electronic-based beats: FM Bass, Cymbals, and even “Space Oddity†are available. You can fine tune the tone of the instruments as well.
Once you’re ready, the key to it is picking a beat count, a tempo, and recording your music. You’re only allowed up to 16 beats, which is a little disappointing but more than enough to get the job done (and considering you can record more pieces, you can just combine them all later).
Each time you touch the screen while recording, DopplerPad remembers it and plays it back the next time around. This allows you to add instrument after instrument. The DopplarPad video above gives you a good idea, although we want to note that it will take a lot of work before you can make music like they do on the video.
At $9.99 though, this app may be a bit too expensive for most people’s tastes. And because it focuses specifically on electronica beats, the music it can create may not be for everyone. If you’re just a guy who likes to make funky sounds, DopplerPad works, but you really get the full benefit if you use it to create actual music and remixes. The app is strong enough to make a good dance club beat, but it’ll take a bit of practice before you knock the socks of your friends at your next party.
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...Skettalee – What They Want – Music Video
Jul 21st
This is an old video I made with a friend back when I first started my 3rd solo album in 2003. Yeah, 2003, its 2009 and that album still isn’t done. Well, life gets in the way. Crazy, but atleast I found this copy and decided to put it online!
(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5) Loading ...Audacity 1.3.8 – Running Way Fast!
Jul 20th
I really wish the folks behind open source, cross-platform audio editing utility Audacity would take the beta label off the Audacity 1.3 branch. It’s so much better than the last stable release, Audacity 1.2.6 it’s not even funny. But it’s still considered beta software because it’s still under construction and doesn’t come with complete documentation or translation into languages besides English.
This week the team released Audacity 1.3.8 beta. Some of the new features include faster equalization and noise removal tools. There’s also a new “mixer board” view with per-track volume meters. And mute, solo, gain, and track height information is now saved when you save a project. You can find more changes in the release notes.
(1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5) Loading ...The Calm Ringtone Collection
Jan 20th
Ever since I seen the iPhone, OMG! You guys havn’t seen it yet? It will change phones for sure. Alot of people just say its the same thing we always had. Your just blinded by Windows and crap devices that dont work the way they are supposed to. There has never been anything that looks to run so smooth as this iPhone device ever! This is what I call the Star Trek Communicator for sure. Or atleast a step closer. I do want to project images on objects and other stuff like webcams and stuff but its sweet. Also I got the chance to help format someones PC and help them install Windows Vista which was beautiful. I honestly do love the OS but still not over OS X. Sorry Microsoft!
I loved the calm sound changes that were done with Vista and decided to port that over to my XP machine. Im a much happier designer now with smooth calm sounding notes playing while I work on the computer. I also liked the iPhone ringtone. That all got me inspired to create some of my own calm sounding ringtones and before I go hang out with friends, I thought I would write this and give you all a copy of that. I also threw in the new iPhone ringtone as well as a Windows Mobile 2005 theme to make it look like an iPhones main menu. Enjoy!
Download Ringtones
iPhone
Off It
Ring A Ding
Smaussie
Soft It Up
GET THE REST ON MY FORUM
SideNote: I was just featured on the mjelly blog and new mjelly mobile music social ringtone website. They seem to have a great site popping up which will allow registration and ringtone uploads from producers later in the future. Looking to be pretty cool though. You guys should go check them out!
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