I’ve now had a couple of opportunities to play around with an iPad, and to surreptitiously watch other people use it. I have strong and mixed feelings. The touchscreen interface is pretty wonderful and I have no doubt that it’s going to send the mouse the way of the floppy disk. But the walled garden [...]
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Here’s a live rendition of Imogen Heap’s song “Hide And Seek.” It’s introduced by Zach Braff, but don’t let that dissuade you from watching.
Filed in music
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Also tagged authenticity, autotune, book, brian eno, electronica, harmony, imogen heap, improvisation, keybs, midi, music, pop, remixes, sampling, synths
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on [...]
Filed in music, software, web
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Also tagged book, daft punk, delicious, design, drum machines, electronica, fun, internet, inudge, minimalism, multitracking, reason, remixes, sequencing, social media, tenori-on, toys, visualization, web browser
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Saturday, September 5, 2009
It was only a matter of time before the Autotune The News people got T-Pain on board. The newest version of this software lets you sing with Auto-tune over anything in your iTunes library. Pretty amazing hip-hop and electronica scratchpad, except that it crashes two minutes into each recording. Still. Auto-tune the Pro Tools plug-in [...]
Filed in hardware, music, software, web
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Also tagged advertising, autotune, book, fan art, hip-hop, iphone, karaoke, social media, t-pain
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Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Björk knows how to balance the coldness of electronic production with hotly unpredictable vocals and instrument textures. Her approach is eccentric and her sound gets on some people’s nerves. It took me a couple years to be convinced by her. I’m glad I hung in there, because she’s been one of my best teachers in [...]
Filed in music
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Also tagged audio editing, bjork, book, depression, electronica, hipster, iceland, lord of the rings, missy elliot, pro tools, recording, remixes, sampling, sequencing, timbaland, tolkien
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This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller. Here’s a screenshot of the program that the [...]
Filed in autobio, hardware, music, software, video games
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Also tagged book, composing, electronica, hip-hop, improvisation, keybs, mapping, max/msp, midi, programming, reason, sampling, sequencing, synths, video games
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I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on some dude’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, math, music, science, software
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Also tagged book, computers, drum machines, eighties, electronica, emotion, funk, herbie hancock, jazz, keybs, music, quincy jones, sequencing, sesame street, synths
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People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly it had been used as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated [...]
Filed in hardware, math, music, web
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Also tagged analog, book, electricity, electromagnetism, electronica, feedback, guitar, harmonics, harmony, jimi hendrix, music, music theory, recursion, remixes, resonance, tuning, wah pedal
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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 back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness. User interfaces are the first line [...]
Friday, February 13, 2009
So the other night my friend Jesse played at the Shorty Awards with his Tin Pan Blues Band. Because it was an awards ceremony dedicated to the best of Twitter, they were projecting people’s tweets about the event itself onto a screen in real time. Some of those tweets were comments about the band. The [...]
Filed in music, web
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Also tagged book, hip-hop, improvisation, internet, iphone, jazz, music, social media, stone age, twitter
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