One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris samples his coughing and puking on an E-mu Emulator [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged audio, beatles, ferris bueller, grateful dead, jazz, john hughes, keybs, mellotron, midi, Music, reason, Recording, recursion, Sampling, synths, tape, yello
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I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on a stranger’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Key Musicians, Math, Music, Software
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Also tagged computers, drum machines, electronica, Emotion, funk, herbie hancock, interface, jazz, keybs, Music, quincy jones, sequencing, sesame street, synths
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When I was in third grade, my mom and stepfather went on academic sabbatical to London for six months, taking my sister and me with them. I guess I’m grateful for the chance to experience another culture and everything, but it was a rough six months. I missed my dad, school, New York, the Muppet [...]
Filed in Hardware, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged analog, bbc, delia derbyshire, doctor who, electronica, keybs, multitracking, scifi, sixties, synths, tape editing, tv, uk, vocoder
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Herbie Hancock is a musician’s musician. He pushed the boundaries of acoustic piano in the sixties. He found a uniquely personal voice on an array of synthesizers in the seventies. And in the eighties, he helped bring turntablism into the pop mainstream. People have been experimenting with recording playback devices as musical instruments for a [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged breakdancing, digging the crates, drum machines, electronica, funk, herbie hancock, hip-hop, jazz, keybs, Music, pop, remixes, sequencing, synths, turntablism, vocoder
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“Peter Piper” is the leadoff track on Raising Hell, the third album by Run-DMC. It was their big commercial and critical breakthrough. My stepbrother Dan had it on cassette and it pretty much defined the sound of my sixth and seventh grade experience.
Filed in Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged bob james, copyright, digging the crates, hip-hop, jazz, looping, memes, Music, nursery rhymes, paul simon, run-dmc, Sampling, turntablism
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Update: this was written before I ever touched an iPhone or iPad. These devices are major improvements over the desktop metaphor GUIs I complain about below. When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged apple, computers, desktop, interface, metaphor, microsoft, nintendo, recursion, super mario bros, visualization, windows
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