HACK A DAY Has a cool tutorial on how to make a really simple digital synthesizer.
Looperman has some free acapella and vocal samples.
If you like crazy musical gadgets you should check out Found Electronics.
IG Blog has a post about a soon to be launch vintage guitar hedge found. Thats right a vintage Guitar Hedge fund. Well, it can’t do any worse the than my 401k has lately. Maybe it will make rich people even richer it the nature of investment but it is a same if more cool vintage guitars will be locked up out of site and out of the hands of guitarist.
Ambience has a great library of free field recording capturing you guessed the ambient sounds of different environments.
Yellow Tools has 2 gigs of free samples for the download. If your German is, like mine, is consits of a few words used on Hogans Hero’s use google transalte or babble fish.
Captain Beefheart is awesome. So are his 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing. Not your normally tips but what else would you expect. Moses would approve.
Ableton has released The Orchestral Instrument Collection. Ableton is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Orchestral music. But of course these instrument can be used for other types of music. I think the strength of this collection is how well it integrated into the host. Most other collection like this are not going to fit right in as well as this unsurprisingly. If you follow the link the video on the site show it off pretty well. It is $600 for 24Gb of $160 for each instrument group.
If you like for web pages plain, information limited and samples in great numbers I have the site for you.
The Noise Theorem Sound Library has quite a collection of samples form from classic drum machines and synths just waiting for a nice sampler to adopt them. Roland, Simmons, Casio, Korg, Yamaha etc, all represented.
LastFM is great way to listen and find new music. It is also a cool way to track what you are listening and it can be sometimes surprising to see your listening habits. When I was finding out what my favs really are I saw a promo about a hundred times because the down side of LastFM is I seem to have to navigate a lot on the site. I did finally click on the promo. So, web advertising works…eventually.
The promo was for a remix competition. The idea is you remix a song by Foals and upload it and if you are the awesomest then you get a release and win a signed album and Foals get cheap publicity. You may have never heard of the Foals I hadn’t but I being a normal guy I don’t exactly get handed master tapes everyday. I jump at the chance to play with any music broken down to individual tracks, loops, samples, stems or whatever you want to call them. So not really being into contests I just wanted get to play with all the pieces of the song. Even if I don’t make anything good out of a song I always feel like a learn something about strong structure or how other people think when I get to play with the individual components.
I gave myself 2 hours to finish it all. I had no plans to be the awesomest. It was my attempt to make me actually finish a project in a timely manner. And I succeed(OK, rendering and converting to mp3 put me a little over.) You can most likely tell I succeed in sticking to the 2 hour limit by listening to the less than perfect track. It was fun though. Just nice to bang something out in a sitting. The vocals were pissing me off but it still more rewarding and less frustrating had say playing football manager for 2 hours.
When I was first experimenting with the song I started with a bassline playing then some drums came into the mix building slowly. As strange as I am this reminded me of the intro to Black Flag’s Six Pack (its not nearly as aggressive but whatever) which maybe the second greatest punk intro after Fear’s I love Livin’ in the City (both have links to the right.) That is kind of a weird connection which ever genre you wish to place Foals in to 80’s West Coast Punk is not a leap normal people would make but I am probably not normal.
If you enjoy remixing check it out. The link to the contest and tracks can be found here:
