Posts Tagged ‘video games’
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except for the fact of all of the sources being giddily combined together without any concern for logic. It’s like a perfect nerd mixtape.
(more…)
Tags: bungie, christianity, halo, mashups, microsoft, remix, ringworld, scifi, star trek, star wars, video games, xbox
Posted in video games | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
My family does not, as a general rule, dance. Maybe individually. Very rarely together. It takes a wedding or bar mitzvah or other major state occasion to get even some of us on the dance floor. When left to our own devices, it doesn’t happen spontaneously. At least not until last Thanksgiving, when we tried out Dance Dance Revolution.
Every Thanksgiving, or every other, the whole mishpokeh gathers at my mom and stepdad’s place in Vermont. We have a good time eating and hanging out, watching football on TV and taking walks on the dirt roads. In the past couple of years we’ve started reintroduced video games into the mix. Katamari Damachy was a hit with some of my younger cousins. But Dance Dance Revolution turned out to be the really big smash. It was my sister’s then-boyfriend, now-fiance who had the idea, and he deserves mad props for thinking of it. The whole clan got involved, from the toddlers up to the seniors.
(more…)
Tags: cold tech hot beats, dance, ddr, family, video games
Posted in autobio, music, video games | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Why are the Beatles still so cool? By which I mean the late Beatles, Revolver onwards. I like Please Please Me as much as the next guy, but it isn’t why the Beatles are cool now. No, I mean the last few records, especially Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road. If any of these albums were released next week, Pitchfork would go ballistic over them. Three quarters of the indie rock of the past ten years descends directly from Abbey Road. Why do we all still care so much?
(more…)
Tags: abbey road, analog, audio, audio editing, beatles, cold tech hot beats, common, divorce, hip-hop, john lennon, kanye west, mellotron, memes, mixtapes, multitracking, paul mccartney, prince, rock, rock band, sampling, tape, tape editing, video games
Posted in music, video games | 2 Comments »
Friday, August 21st, 2009
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 game controller is connected to.
The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.
(more…)
Tags: cold tech hot beats, composing, electronica, hip-hop, improvisation, interface, keybs, mapping, max/msp, midi, programming, reason, sampling, sequencing, synths, video games
Posted in autobio, hardware, music, software, video games | 2 Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2009
When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how you can jump many times your height, as if you’re a bug.
(more…)
Tags: autobio, chiptunes, cold tech hot beats, computers, eighties, electricity, electronica, microchips, nintendo, super mario bros, video games
Posted in autobio, hardware, math, music, science, software, video games | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 14th, 2009
Expanding on “Learning Music Theory With Autotune”
If you’re a science geek and you find yourself in San Francisco, the most fun thing to do there is to go to the Exploratorium.
(more…)
Tags: audio editing, cold tech hot beats, coltrane, exploratorium, giant steps, india, keybs, lego, midi, music theory, pitch, pitch shifting, sequencing, tetris, tuning, video games
Posted in hardware, math, music, science, video games | 2 Comments »
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
Tags: america, beatles, cold tech hot beats, dance, electronica, gender, guitar hero, masculinity, recording, rock, rock band, simulation, south park, video games, visualization
Posted in music, video games | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: a harmonic oscillator, a source of noise, a control surface for modulation, and a resonator.
(more…)
Tags: chiptunes, cold tech hot beats, guitar, music, music theory, overtones, physics, resonance, singing, synths, video games
Posted in hardware, music, science, video games | No Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
Japan doesn’t have a substantial psychedelic drug culture that I’m aware of, but you’d never guess it from Katamari Damacy.
(more…)
Tags: chiptunes, cold tech hot beats, design, japan, katamari, music, video games
Posted in music, software, video games | 2 Comments »
