100 posts tagged “blah-di-blah”
I’ve crafted a new promo for my podcast. Feel free to send it around, to other podcasters etc. Thanks for your promotional efforts!
Hens
Download Sounds Good - promo 2
Facebook is lovely. I just joined Gary Dring’s “Campaign for the end of Wordart usage in documents” group: Which one is this? The multi-coloured one. Who uses it? People who like to think they’re being creative/wacky, but are actually just tossers. What should I do if I see this on display? Vomit on the creator and shout ‘HOW’S THAT FOR A COLOURFUL CREATION!?’ If you enjoy this kind of stuff, I also highly recommend subscribing to Gary’s podcast Clever Little Pod.
Technorati Tags: word, facebook
A propos of nothing, here is a bit of my tech history. I lived in Tanzania (Afrika) from the age of three to six, where my parents had an Aristona 1/4″ open reel recorder. This was probably my first fascination into audio recording. It was slightly similar to the Philips N4407 recorder, and probably manufactured in the same year. I never did any tape splicing on it, but used the pause button for a few weird experiments during the 1970’s when we had returned to Groningen, The Netherlands. My hooray! moment in audio was 1978, when my cousin introduced me to portable cassette recorders. I used several portable cassette players, all mono, to record everything going on in my surroundings. This included interviewing everyone and recording special events such as new year’s eve 1979/1980. “My” first cassette recorder was my dad’s Realistic recorder (from Tandy, now Radio Shack I guess). I saved money to buy a Philips N2235, which had interesting features such as variable pitch. I then gradually started to invest in better equipment. A Teac V40 was my (extremely modded) stereo cassette recorder that I used to do a lot of editing. Some of this editing even made it onto Ferry Maat’s Soulshow. After saving 4000 guilders from my first job in the Academic Hospital of Groningen in 1986, I bought a brand new Revox B77 open reel recorder which ran at 7.5 and 15 i.p.s. This was the first recorder I used to do tape editing, always at 15 i.p.s. As much as I enjoyed doing 1/4″ editing, I think digital editing is much easier and as such better suited for creative editing. It’s also much cheaper! Back in 2003 when I studied at the School of Audio Engineering (SAE) we had to do a bit of open reel editing too, and it was fun to notice I still had the same routine, even though I hadn’t done any tape editing for some 10 years. As for computers, we had an Acorn Atom at school which I used for some stupid BASIC experiments around 1980/1981. A lot of calls to random functions, yes, hmmm…. My dad got a 8086 IBM XT computer running MS-DOS in 1987, but I didn’t do much with it at first. A bit of WordPerfect 4.something. Later on in life it was the “spare computer” in my parents’ house, and I experimented a lot with it using Borland’s TASM assembler and Modula-2. It was 1989 when I got my first own computer, which was an Atari ST 520 STFM I got from my parents as a birthday gift. I used it to run some MIDI programs to talk to my Yamaha DX 21 synthesizer and Kawai drummachine, but soon I drifted off in the direction of computer programming. I used TDI Modula-2 a lot. I taught myself C and C++ during my stay at filmschool (1988 - 1994), but never excelled in those languages. I also did a lot of programming in Toolbook II. These days I do a liiiiittle bit of php/mysql. In 1994 I re-discovered editing on my PC, a 486SX machine. It was the first time I noticed that my PC was fast enough to do audio editing in okay quality. Do mind, this was way before the internet was ubiquitous. I wrote two books on computer topics on non internet machines! My first own modem connection to the internet was in 1996, where I was hz37@xs4all.nl. I’ve owned several different PC’s running various versions of Windows and used programs such as SoundForge to do most editing. When I started taking piano lessons in 2000, I got more serious about music production and got a license for Emagic Logic Platinum. When it was discontinued on the Windows platform, I bought my first iMac in 2005. I now also have a Macbook Pro, which runs Logic Pro 7.2 and Protools LE with an MBox. And several other apps of course. At work we use Windows PC’s, running Protools HD. My girlfriend and I also own a custom built PC running Windows XP, but we’ll probably upgrade it to a more quiet core 2 duo machine some time soon.
Technorati Tags: apple, cassettedeck, core2duo, editing, logic, macbook, php, revox, soulshow, toolbook, windows
Musicovery is a fun way to discover music by genre and mood. If you are into these kinds of things, there’s of course also Pandora and Last.fm.
Technorati Tags: pandora, musicovery, last.fm
Matt Cuttle from the brand new Games Weasel podcast (executively produced by James Bedford, Moody Glasgow, Adam Curry and Ron Bloom) used a whole bunch of my music. Thanks and happy to be of service! I’m currently producing a new IDM-ish song in my attick studio in Zeist. Yesterday I also - finally! - finished and uploaded the 16th episode of my podcast Sounds Good. It’s once again a video episode, which explains the delay. As much fun as it is, it’s still a lot of work to time and editan entire video episode. Add to that my busy work schedule at Park Post and the fact that we’ve just moved to the beautiful city of Zeist, and you’ll probably understand why it took me longer than ever to produce this episode. Which, by the way, has already been downloaded a staggering 314 times as I type this, not even being online for 24 hours yet.
Technorati Tags: adamcurry, podcast, podshow, podsafe, music, zeist
From time to time you find a book that’s really something different. Well, “How Music REALLY Works” by Wayne Chase is phenomenal. It covers just about every facet of music. From chord progressions to lyrics, from the origins of music to building your repertoire, this book’s got it covered. The nicest thing about it is Wayne’s writing style, which makes every page fun to read. You can read a few chapters online to see for yourself.
Technorati Tags: music, songwriting, chords, waynechase
Click to Play This is the video by an artist called 45Hz, using a song by an artist called 37Hz. The song is called “Less Than Seven”. The video demonstrates “Perplexing Poultry Philtre v1.0″ programmed on Quartz on the Mac by 45Hz. The PPP concept is invented by science-fiction writer Rudy Rucker (http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2007/04/07/amsterdam-van-gogh/) and is a popular public-domain filter in the future, that enhances reality to make it appear like Escher tilings (http://www.mcescher.com/). PPP v1.0 also puts in practise concepts developed by Finnish Computer Music Pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (http://www.frif.com/new2004/fut.html). One of his ideas was “Personal Communicator” represented in 1985, special eye-ware that includes a powerful computer, local-area network, microphones and earplugs, and high-resolution cameras and eye-projectors, that allows real-time modification of reality. The concept of reality modification appears also in a recent sci-fi published by Charles Stross “Accelerando” (http://www.accelerando.org/reviews/), where the future superhero Mandfred Macs extends his intelligence with computer-spectacles. The starting scene curiously takes place in Amsterdam - the same place, where Rudy Rucker gave his speech on “Psipunk” - the next step of telephatic communication right in the quantum level. Original realtime capture of the speech was made by Luc Sala/Mindlift and can be viewed on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_bYYpiQNg4). PPP v1.0 generalizes a bit of the PPP concept to allow input from camera and files, and not focusing just on tiling patterns, since there are many other enhancements that yield aesthetic values, too. There are also many limitations one needs to take in account to realize PPP technology that will run on the nowadays computer platforms, and at the moment PPP Technology is more suitable for video postproduction usage than for personal reality enhancement.
To the right of my site, just below my Twitter box, you can see a new sidebar entry where you can buy a new cd from Spin the World, LLC. This cd features my two Bush related hits, “Death of Democracy” and “Bunker Buster”, and many other cool Bush mixes. You can click on the image below to go the MySpace page for G.W.Bush’ greatest hits… PS: I’m also on Jaiku these days.
Technorati Tags: bush, jaiku, iraq, myspace
