sampling
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On James Blake Live At The Bowery Ballroom
The most interesting part of James Blake’s live show at the Bowery Ballroom last night was his trio’s seamless use of technology to bring to the stage some of the electronic and otherworldly textures of Blake’s debut album, James Blake. Blake was playing a Prophet synthesizer for his gritty analog keyboard textures along with a Continue reading
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On Designing New Musical Controllers
A while back I wrote about MIDI hardware controllers which are used by musicians who want to control their computer software. (You can read the post here.) Why does one need a controller when performing music with say, a laptop? For one thing, it gives you the sense of having physical, tactile control over your Continue reading
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Give The Drummer Some
In the histories of hip hop and electronic dance music, the creative uses of sampling are much discussed, especially musicians’ taking drum and percussion “breaks” from old R&B and soul records and using them as the basis of new tracks. With samplers, MPC workstations, and computer software, musicians and DJs since the late 1980s have Continue reading
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On Secondhand Sureshots
The idea behind the documentary DVD Secondhand Sureshots (Dublab Collective 2010) was to invite four DJ/Producers to each build a new track based solely on their vinyl finds in California thrift shops. (Out Of The Closet Thrift Stores for you collectors out there.) The DJs Daedalus, Nobody, Ras G, and J. Rocc (see pic below) would each have five dollars to buy any Continue reading
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From The Archives: Answering Machine Music
About eight years ago, I composed three electronic music pieces, This Would Be The Time, Have You Any Thoughts?, and All About Affect. The pieces are built around the sampled sounds of voice recordings left on my answering machine. (Do you remember answering machines?) There is nothing new in this: French radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer explored the idea Continue reading
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Favela On Blast
The documentary movie Favela On Blast (produced by the American DJ Wesley Pentz, aka Diplo) explores the culture of electronic music making and dance parties situated in the favelas in the hills surrounding Rio de Janeiro. The name of this energized and hard-hitting music is variously known as funk carioca, favela funk, and baile funk. Musically, Continue reading
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The Hang Drum: Real and Virtual
Do you like the sounds of steel pans and gamelans? Then you might really be intrigued by the sound of the Hang, a percussion instrument created and hand-built by the Swiss company PANart (Felix Rohner and Sabina Scharer) since 2000. The Hang consists of two steel sheets welded together to make a convex shape, a little Continue reading
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Sounds Want To Be Free: Freesound
Freesound (www.freesound.org) is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Sampling Plus-licensed sounds. At freesound, anyone can upload or download sounds. What kinds of sounds are here? You name it: environmental sound field recordings (wind, rain, ice cracking), industrial and mechanical sounds, human voices, sound effects, digitally processed sounds, drones . . . All of the Continue reading
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