Wacom tablets

Here's a video of two australian academics in their research/rehearsal space discussing and demonstrating their use of wacom graphics tablets to control digital audio.

Getting one of these tablets working within maxmsp is pretty straightforward and you can use it in a variety of different ways...



link

EQ tips

audiotuts has little tutorial giving some tips to help you with the EQ-ing of tracks and mixes.
There's nothing new here, but EQ-ing can be a hard thing to get right and it takes a lot of practice to be able to quickly achieve the desired result.

The most important tip they give is:

"Don't fix it in the mix"

wii-theremin

speaking of taking yourself too seriously...

Here's a video where the maker of a wii-mote based theremin explains how it works. He's using the infra-red sensor of the wii-mote to determine the position of two markers (one on each hand). He then maps the position of one marker to pitch, the other to volume to create a theremin type instrument.
It doesn't have to stop there - the mapping could be done so that the two markers control any parameter of the sound - giving you expressive control over any sound.

Grainface laptop performance

Here's a video of a german laptop ensemble giving a performance.
The music is quite 'ambient' with long sustained tones and then short percussive elements introduced throughtout - there's also some vocoding going on.
Musically, it's not everyone's cup of tea and the performers do look like they're taking themselves a little too seriously at times. But they use wii-motes as gestural input devices to control the sound and the link between their actions and the sounds being generated is pretty obvious - so worth a look...

another free DAW

mu.lab is a free cross platform DAW. It's not exactly packed full of features, but it looks pretty easy to use and allows you to host VST's so could be used as a basic audio editing package.

" MU.LAB is an alternative, state of the art software application for OSX and Windows, transforming your computer into a real music studio!

It does not overwhelm you with a complex feature set, in which you can get lost.

On the contrary, MU.LAB is a user-friendly yet rock-solid musical tool designed to create, finetune and play Your Music!

MU.LAB's core feature set:

* Audio Recording & Playback
* MIDI Recording & Playback
* Flexible Composition & Sequence Editing
* Supports Audio and MIDI VST Plugins
* Powerful Audio and MIDI Plugin Routing (up to 100% modular if you want)
* Integrated high quality synths, samplers and effects
* High quality Audio Engine
* Sample Accurate Sequencing
* Available for OSX (Universal Binary) and Windows"

free chat application

Chat rooms can be pretty handy when your doing group work as they allow you to discuss ideas online as you work.
stinto is a free web-based web application that allows you to create your own disposable chat rooms. You can set up and control a number of different parameters to do with your chat rooms.

Free Drum Samples

orange tree samples has released a free set of jazz drum samples for use within Kontakt.

"In celebration of this month, I’ve decided to release a free jazz drumset sample library. This sample library features unique and rare drums and cymbals and has an excellent tone suitable for jazz and funk."

direct link to the .rar file

via synthtopia