Feeling your way around grids : Articles : Mark Boulton

Boing Boing called her PJ Harvey + Freddy Mercury. I told Kathy that and she said “you mean like Kate Bush?” And we listened and Kathy said: “interesting. I guess PJ Harvey + Freddy Mercury = Kate Bush.”

But does Kate Bush - Freddy Mercury = Sophe Lux?

VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac.

Happy Place is the most beautiful processing project I have ever seen.

Until I saw Substrate.

via Gallery of Computation

Masami Teraoka’s Art Theatre is totally gorgeous, terrifying and hilarious. The work references well known paintings (Botticelli’s Venus) or styles (Medieval Tryptichs) and incorporates modern body horror/splatter/S&M characters.

If you can decipher Gieskes.nl, does it mean you can understand it? He has the craziest blog software in the world, either that or he spends a lot of time assembling posts made up of gifs of individual letters.

Judging from the
music instruments he invents, maybe he does just sit around making posts of individual pictures of letters.

Yikes!

It’s harder than it sounds, or not!

Windows Media Stream Recorders

Wah-ha.

Processing 1.0 (BETA) is a. errr….

Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.

Yeah.

It looks purty, too.

From Delia Derbyshire Recordings:

“He came to my little one room flat above a flower shop … He was thrilled to bits with it! He said, and I felt quite insulted at the time… ‘I’ll soon get you out of this little place.’”

Delia on Anthony Newley (MP3)
An unreleased perv-pop classic in the 1966 novelty vein, recorded with Anthony Newley. The future Mr Joan Collins was after an electronic backing track and called in Delia (he wasn’t alone - Paul McCartney considered using Delia’s electronic backing for Yesterday before using a string quartet). Delia said of this track: “I’d written this beautiful little innocent tune, all sensitive love and innocence, and he made it into a dirty old raincoat song. But he was really chuffed!” Sadly Newley decamped to Hollywood before he could progress beyond this demo recording. Delia was initially disappointed with the recording, but as the years passed she became exceptionally fond of it, and insisted it was featured on this site.

Moogies Bloogies: MP3

A very strange song, but I really really like it. Anthony Newley indeed.

Insane paper doll comics creator.

OMG.

I made this with m-city’s city creation tool konstructor

What fun.

Arboretum Systems has released a new version of HyperEngine-AV as freeware which is a pretty awesome thing.

I just downloaded it, and am checking it out. I’m more interested in audio tracks than the video side, but if I like it I’ll post more.

From bastwood.com, a little bit about the sound in a song that was a demon face. Well, Richard’s anyway.

No really, Sound on Sound has an article called BEAT THE SYSTEM which supposedly tells you how to build your own electronic drum kit.

The catch? They only tell you what items you need, but not really how to actually put them together.

iCompositions, a site by GarageBand enthusiasts for enthusiast, has released a new page iCompositions Tools, which tracks all of the various things people and companies have made to go with Garageband. I would recommend specifically the Software and iCompositions Tools - Audio Units pages as very useful resources.

I’ve been using protools LE and the two digis a bit more, so I’ve been snooping around for an online ProTools Community.

I found one. Does anyone know of another one? Let me know, thanks.

No need to wait for death, and your own eternal damnation if you want to talk to the Morningstar… just use the catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell to find the most convenient entrance and step inside…if. you. dare Muuu-wahhh-ha-ha!

I wish the pictures on this site were bigger. Some of the photos are very enjoyable.

I am enjoying listening to music (for robots)

Me am so happy, am I not man?

G from Yow* Digital Media Software is some sort of DJ application that I’ll download and try someday.

Microsoft has a disagreeably facetious type glossary on their typography website, which is actually pretty funny.

Actually, Microsoft’s Typography website in general is pretty good, so if you’re interested in typeface design, you should check it out.

I have lots of friends into [ xerox art ].

DAM1ER, John, this one’s for you.

errrrr….

What?

If you’re stupid cool like some people I know, you can go to Beowulf on Steorarume and have a nice read through of the Beowulf Semi-Diplomatic Edition (strictly habibi–little of this so-called moderne englisc allowed, except some notes).

If you’re a grade-a lame-o (negative) like myself who can barely comprehend something simple like Middle English, you’ll have to read the Bilingual Edition.

Extra treat: check out the mp3s of Ben Slade reading Beowulf Old English. It’s really cool. You can almost understand it when it’s read, sort of. If you also speak german & finnish, maybe.

So. What are you’re thoughts on Niw Englisc as a possible common tongue for the New World Order?

I wrote this to apple, using their feedback page:

But you knew that. I have a few suggestions, from a prosumer user (Ed market, light (as in short educational projects) ProTools, FinalCut and ACID use ):

1) There needs to be a way to import ACID loops. I know they’re not as good as Apple loops, but there’s a million of em, and a lot of us own them already. I spent a good bit of time trying to get acid loops into GB today, and when it works at all it’s a pain… I own over 5 GB of Acid Libraries, and they are very useful. If I can’t use them in GB, I’ll cry. No, not really. But I’ll probably be really disappointed. =)

To sum up: Either add support for a drag/convert for Acid Loops in GB, or add a batch convert function to the Soundtrack Loop Utility where you can take a selection/folder/disk of Acid wavs and convert them to Apple Loops in the Garage band folder.

2) What about making a loop in GarageBand? I just made a stupid four measure piano arpeggio in a track, and then tried to drag it down to the loop browser, assuming that it would prompt me to name and catalogue the loop, so I could use it later. I was totally surprised when it didn’t, and figured there must be another way. There doesn’t seem to be. I even tried saving it as a GB file and opening it with the SLU, but that didn’t work either. I should be able to select a region in a track and choose “convert to loop” and have it be saved in my loop library, preferably in a special folder where “myLoops” are saved.

3) The Soundtrack Loop Utility (shouldn’t you rename that to Apple Loop utility?) needs an update. First, it needs to be able to open user made loops created in GarageBand (see #2 above). Secondly, it needs a batch convert function for Acid loops (see #1 above). Third, the browser for when you open sound files needs to tell you a few more things: bit-depth, length, # of beats if available, and have a preview function so you can ear the sound you’re thinking of opening. Fourth, it should always be able to save a sound as an Apple Loop (for example, if you open an Acid file)

4) Speaking of Soundtrack, I noticed that Gb and ST store their loops in separate locations–this is fine. But unless I missed something, they can’t tap into each others loops which is sort of lame. I suggest adding the ability to both to look in multiple places for their loop library, so that users can maximize their loop library while saving disk space (it looked like there might be a bit of overlap between the two libs).

5) By the way, what about Audio Units? There are a number of decent AU instuments available (some are free!), and some are installed on my machine. It seems like you have your own special virual instrument for making the Software Instrument tracks, and it’s very nice, but I’d like to use Zebra and Airysynth too. Audio Units are maybe your most exciting technology (to me, anyway), and I don’t understand why you wouldn’t take advantage of them… especially when you do take advantage of the AU effects (which is nice). I won’t bother to ask you for VST support, since I don’t care about it, but other people might as well. Again, this is about maximizing both your users software assets and GarageBand’s usefulness.

It turns out that you can use AU instruments in GarageBand, it’s just a little bit hidden. Thanks to balconycollapsee
, here’s the steps to use AU instruments:

6) Integration, file this suggestion under “and I’d also like a pony:” I think this may already be possible (albeit kludgy), but it would be nice to be able to use GB with other applications, specifically Reason, in my case. It woul be awesome if GB was Rewire-able, and I guess there’s other standards too. Bt Rewire is the one I care about.

Via die puny humans (what else?), I came across the The ROZZ-TOX Manifesto, written by Gary Panter circa 1980

Law: If you want better media, go make it.

Yes sir.

Note to self: update the mp3 page =\

The (or is that “da”) hip hop crib has a Reason Support Group that looks intriguing.

I haven’t posted in a month?

Berklee School of Music has decided to join the fun of giving things away with Berklee Shares: free music lessons.

Hey wait, don’t go to the next entry yet! They have DJ lessons, like this one on crabs for turntable djs, which is hilarious if you’ve ever taken a music lesson before–mainly the way the teacher exhorts you to “work each individual finger, one finger at a time, slowly and then build up speed.”

It’s good advice, of course, but it’s funny because the teacher is so straight-sounding–he doesn’t once say hype, dope or live, or talk about beats at all.

Hey DAM13R! Are you checking this out?

Did I ever tell you about my Photogallery at the LightRoom Photo Community?

Have a look see!

It’s a given that no matter how many strange things you’ve seen, you haven’t seen them all. Innocent web surfing led me to a page about Yu-Mex, or Mexican music in 1950s Yugoslavia. Yeah, that’s right. Apparently it was all the rage.

Of course, it all gets back to Stalin and Tito. Apparently after the famous breakup, Yugoslavia needed a new source of popular culture, and they chose Mexico:

it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?

Emilio Fernández’s Un Día de vida (1950) became so immensely popular that the old people in the former republics of Yugoslavia even today regard it as surely one of the most well known films in the world ever made although in truth it is probably unknown in every other country, even Mexican web pages don’t mention it much. The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays.

Of course, it’s easy to laugh at things like this.

Mainly because they’re really funny.

Did I mention that there’s a bunch of mp3s on the site?

Take a look art this Digital Conductor MIDI Conducting Device. It’s pretty neat.