Adrian Belew is one of the most accomplished and ubiquitous players in the history of the electric guitar. With a career spanning decades and hundreds of album credits ranging from Frank Zappa and David Bowie to Talking Heads, King Crimson and Nine Inch Nails, Adrian has kept constant pace with both pop music and music technology. His newest release has come in the form of an app, called FLUX, wherein hundreds of snippets of sound are recombined into new and varied ways so that the music is never the same twice. Accompanying that release is another app, FLUX:FX, a professional, playable multi-effect audio processor for the iPad. We caught up with Adrian to talk to about his career, his influences and his two new apps. Read more »
Meet Steve Harmon, the founder and brains behind Synthrotek, co-founder of Harben Audio, and Captain of the World’s Largest Online Pirate Store, among other clever entrepreneurial adventures. We caught up with Steve to talk about how he got his start making pedals and eurorack modules, his music, and what’s been inspiring him lately. Read more »
The Algorithm is the stage name of French musician and producer Rémi Gallego. We caught up with him in Cologne to talk about what he’s been up to lately. Read more »
When I first heard about Bitwig Studio years ago, there was one feature that really caught my eye. In promotions for the software they always mentioned that they would have an ‘Open Controller Scripting API’. Coming from an environment like Ableton Live, which has an undocumented and ‘closed’ API, this was hugely exciting. In this series of articles we will walk through the creation of a basic controller script for Bitwig Studio. Read more »
Back in the 1960s, it didn’t take synth maker pioneers like Moog and Buchla very long to realize the fun and usefulness of modules that could step through patterns of programmed voltage values. They are called sequencers and they are simple devices with powerful implications. Read more »
Have you heard the song “Smoke on the Water” by English rock and roll band Deep Purple? Of course you have. It’s played daily on most classic rock radio stations and has likely surpassed Stairway to Heaven as the #1 most played song in music stores nationwide (denied!). I would bet that you have the riff stuck in your head at this very moment and may even be humming it aloud. But do you know all the words? Not just the chorus, of course you know the chorus: “Smoke on the water / Fire in the sky.” But if you manage to make it past the riff and the anthemic sing-along, you find yourself faced with a very literal and very true story about an event that happened at a concert in Switzerland in the winter of 1971. And at the core of this story is a band as unlikely an inspiration for the song as could be, the inimitable Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Read more »
On its surface, the Batumi by XAOC Devices is a quad voltage controlled LFO module, but under the hood there’s a lot more going on.
The best way to unlock the hidden potential of any semi-modular synthesizer is by sequencing. This post will describe the necessary steps to use the QuNexus as a MIDI-to-CV converter along with Ableton Live to control the legendary Oberheim Synthesizer Expander Module. Read more »
Working in music technology I get to interface with many brilliant and hard working minds behind the veil of music performance. Music directors and producers, techs and engineers. Some of them have been interviewed in past posts on this blog. Recently I caught up with Daniel Rowland, the engineer/producer/tech wizard behind Adrian Belew’s seriously futuristic guitar rig and studio. We talked about his tenure with Belew, outfitting a closet with electronic toys and the process and ideas that sparked the new Flux apps. Read more »
One of the most powerful aspects of modular synthesis is the fact that almost everything can be modulated, making possible highly advanced sounds that change over time and can seem almost alive. Meet the LFO. Read more »
Live is a great tool for making music on the computer and, as we saw in a previous article, you can leverage its MIDI capabilities to talk to external MIDI gear. There are a lot of great sound making tools that don’t live inside of our DAWs and Live makes it easy to incorporate these into your sessions. In this article we will examine the External Audio Effect and External Instrument devices to process with and record from analog sources. Read more »
Tracy Silverman is an musician, composer, producer and champion of the electric violin. His unique instrument and innovative technique have led to collaborations with composers the likes of John Adams and Terry Riley, and performances ranging from the gala opening of the Walt Disney Music Hall to premieres at Carnegie Hall. We caught up with Tracy to talk about reinventing the violin, creating a new musical language, and cutting new paths through the jungles of modern music. Read more »
There are many ways to operate a modular synthesizer but one of the important methods of sound synthesis is called subtractive synthesis. To accomplish that you’re going need a filter. Read more »
Juan Alderete de la Peña is an electric bassist with three decades of experience playing in the bands Racer X, Mars Volta, Deltron 3030, B’z, Big Sir and Vato Negro. We caught up with Juan to talk about touring essentials, saying yes to the right gig and the story behind his signature stickers. Read more »
With the advent of small, portable, MIDI enabled analog synthesizers, computer musicians now have the option of controlling a lot more than VSTs. If you have a USB MIDI interface (or other means of getting MIDI from your computer to 5 Pin MIDI connections), you can leverage the sequencing power of Live to control all of the MIDI enabled parameters on your synth. In this article, we’ll look at how to create a MIDI device using M4L that allows us to access all of the parameters on the Meeblip Anode, as well as how to add modulation sources to allow for more sonic options. Read more »