Randy Sarafan writes: One of the keys to making good music is mindless repetition. That is what the simple sequencer is great at. It does the same thing over and over again in an eight note sequence. You can adjust the frequency of the note, the duration of the note and the pause between notes. If you get really good, you can anticipate the next note and change things up on the fly. This little box is sure to provide endless hours of fun.
Build one yourself with the instructions. [via Make]
Samson's Zoom R16 is a 16-track recorder that writes audio files to SD cards (although only 8 tracks can be recorder at a time). Better, it can be operated on just 6AA batteries for mobile recording. Even better, you can connect it to your computer and just use it as a control surface. There's even a built-in stereo condenser mic that makes it possible to do some basic recording without plugging into the XLR/1/4-inch inputs.
Price! $400 is suggested.
|The EKS "Otus" is billed as the "World's most comfortable DJ controller", with a full complement of remappable knobs, buttons, and touch-sensitive sliders. It's certainly not the ugliest bit of gear I've ever seen, although someone with any experience with live mixing might be more able to tell you if it's of any practical use. The Otus is $900, available soon at North American music retailers or right now at EKS.fi.
|Joel Scilley is a thinking man's carpenter, having grabbed an MA from Carnegie Mellon and a PhD in media studies from Pitt before heading back to the Bay Area to make handcrafted turntables. Like you do.
Scilley makes some out of his "Audiowood" players out of burlwood that has a more organic feel. Others look more modern. Having grown up in the Ozarks, I'm somewhat inured to the charms of burlwood crafts, so I prefer the modern ones, but "Barky", the model below made from a cross-section of a trunk, it downright cute.
The Audiowood designs will be shown off in Oakland starting the 14th. [via Mocoloco]
Charles Shopsin is a New York City-raised and Brooklyn-based software developer. In his spare time, he runs the Modern Mechanix blog, waits tables, and finds new ways to torture his cat. His dream girl is Jordan from the movie Real Genius.
When I was a little kid I saw an episode of Mr. Rogers where he visited a factory that made canned vegetable soup. The soup was made in giant vats and the ingredients — peas, carrots and whatnot — were poured in from giant overhead buckets. Then they went on to the canning, labeling and packing lines. It was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. I've been hooked on factory tours ever since.
I'm also a huge fan of ephemera and when you put the two together you get old factory tours. The best place I know of to find these is the online outpost of the Prelinger Library, hosted by Archive.org. I think I have watched almost every movie listed there and this week I'll be sharing a few of my favorites.
The video I'm linking to today is called "A Visit to Wurlitzer:" made in 1950, this film visits the factory that made Wurlitzer jukeboxes. Maybe not the most exciting video to watch but it is fascinating. Think about all of the buzzwords relating modern production: just-in-time logistics, outsourcing, off-the-shelf components, sub-contractors, and even automation. Now think of the opposite and you'll have some idea of what this factory was like.
Wood, plastic and metal go in one end, and jukeboxes come out the other. They make pretty much everything on site. There are chemists who develop and produce the varnishes, machinists who make the tools, and a sharpening room. They even make their own plywood. Because they produce pretty much everything from the cabinet to the smallest circuit on their assembly line, the schematics for a single jukebox cover 300,000 square feet of blueprint.
It's a stunning example of the change the manufacturing industry has gone through in the last 60 years. Apple is one of the biggest electronics companies in America and I don't think they actually own a single factory.
Skip to about 6 minutes in if you just want to see the tour and not a history of Wurlitzer.
|Because it's much easier to hack music that has a perfectly even tempo, drummers often use a click track to make life easy for producers and remixers. Coder and music technologist Paul Lamere developed a program that plots the deviations of a drumbeat from its own overall tempo, which tells us who brings a metronome to the studio, and who just lets fly.
I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK ( remix is a Python library that allows you to analyze and manipulate music). ... I averaged the beat durations over a short window, and the resulting plot was quite good.That wild blue line is, of course, John Bonham.
In search of the click track [Music Machinery]
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Using Ocarina, Retro Synth, miniSynth, and DigiDrummer Lite, an all-girl UK band covers that one MGMT song about the family of trees. It sounds okay, but it seems like they're slogging through it just so they can provide the background music to a boutique opening or something.
One of our favorite musicians, Judson "Tettix" Cowan, has taken the time to show us how he makes "Fake 'n' Bake Chiptunes" in Propellerheads' Reason. Which is awesome, because if I ever get off my ass and write that chiptune opera we've talked about doing for ages, I'll probably be doing it in Reason, not in retro hardware.
This is great stuff, Judson. Thanks so much for putting it together for us!
In part three Tettix remixes an old favorite, the dungeon theme from Zelda.
Previously • 50 Years of LEGO: Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon Time-Lapse Video
• Tettix's Rites, free electronic album "remodeling" Stravinsky
