That said, as far as big-ass production numbers go, the opening ceremonies the Chinese put on last night were made of pure WIN. Since I know a thing or two about production (doing lighting and production design for medium to largish events was my paycheck during the Lean Years) I can say with a relatively qualified background that the complexity and technical difficulty of that thing was simply unsurpassed; it was like about a thousand Superbowl halftime shows rolled in to one, with the distinction that it was actually interesting to watch. Too bad NBC ruined it with commercials and the utterly banal commentary of the Matt And Bob Show.

Anyhow, we have a house guest for the next couple days, and that coupled with the American men's basketball team will conspire to keep my attention on things other than musical endeavors for the next while. Therefore, this is an open thread. I'll leave the topic up to you for the now.

As far as I can tell, it's really as simple as saying "I'm writing a book about Blah, and furthermore some pleasant bits about Blah Blah," and people will send you money so you can go get your Barton Fink on. I'm totally down for that. I just have no idea whatsoever about what to write it on. ("Full Of Techno: The Unauthorized Biography Of Diamond Dave" is one thing that came to mind.)

So this is for the publishers out there. Send me a check and I'll write you a book. I don't even need 300 large. I'll do it for waaaaay less than that. You can even tell me what to write it about.

I'm working on the ad for CM/FM today, and I need a tag line which will be used on the image above. I had originally gone with "Open The Pod Bay Doors..." but my wife pointed out that the less... uh... imaginative of our potential customer base would get stuck on the word "pod," coupled with the image, and think this was something for the iPhone or some shit like that.

So, the first person to come up with a single sentence or phrase which will happily grab one's attention gets a free copy of Automaton (a US$49.00 value!!!) when it is released. Don't spend too much time thinking, as I have to finish this today.

EDIT: Okay, the ad is sent off and we're done. I came up with my own, but someone here posted it simultaneously, so he can be the winner. I'll be contacting him shortly.

(As an aside, isn't it funny how, in the music industry, we always assume someone is male until proven otherwise? Not funny "ha ha," but funny "queer.")

While I'm on the subject, the Kombinat review in the current issue of Computer Music got all three possible gongs: "Performance," "Value," and "Editor's Choice." You can read what is for all intents and purposes the same review here. The first paragraph is different, but otherwise it is the same text. Thanks to the CM editorial staff for that.

In other news, if somebody wants to start an ad agency primarily made up of musicians, and who's client list is only boutique music equipment and software manufacturers, we would happily be your first client. I hate (hate, hate, hate) making ads. But trying to explain to a non-musician what a particular product is, and what it does (especially something like Replicant or Automaton), well, the mere thought just makes hives break out right on my face.

And finally, it looks like we're going to have to bag plans for Modulate:08. We just can't get a proper venue in the alloted time frame, and not compete with something similar. I'll aim for something early next summer. The worst thing about it is that we lose the Modulate:08 pun, and Moduline:09 doesn't have the same ring to it.

1 - Something that sounds like The Stray Cats - Rock This Town.
2 - Something that sounds like Black Eyed Peas - Pump It

If you're in The System, you get a lot of stuff like this. "Hey, do you have any tracks that sound like Song X?" I never do, of course, because I make niche music. The closest I ever got was when someone wrote asking for a clone of Chemical Bros. "Bass Test," and there happened to be a Micronaut song that was fairly similar. A case of convergent evolution, as I don't think I had heard the Chemical Bros. song before.

The thing to remember, if you ever get a request like this and haven't ever before, is that what they really mean is that the director put "Rock This Town" in the temp cut, has fallen in love with it, and doesn't trust his music supervisor. So what they're actually asking is "do you feel like spending the afternoon making 'Rock This Town' except maybe inverting one pair of chords and changing it to 'Rock That Town'?"

The music industry is such a strange and wonderful place.

The purpose of this particular video is more to test screencasting workflow than anything else. I have to say that every time I get in to video stuff, I have to be prepared to spend the whole day frustrated. It is simply amazing to me that more television producers don't go apeshit, running around their studios shooting production assistants in the head.

Anyhow, after my brief experience with Camstudio today, I think that I will use that for quick demonstrations of alpha software, and put those in my personal Vimeo account. However, I will create an Audio Damage account on Vimeo for proper demonstrations of finished (or near-finished) software, and do that on a Mac with Screenflow, as that seems to be a far more sophisticated program than Camstudio, and generally easier to deal with. (I like what Oliver is doing with his Wire To The Ear screencasts using Screenflow, to name one example.) Dealing with the audio portion is especially annoying on PC, due to the way I have my music computer rigged, and the Screenflow method makes that much simpler, what with CoreAudio and all. That in and of itself makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Ranting aside, here we have a quick overview of some of the things Automaton can do. I'll do in-depth videos with narrative of each section in the plugin once we have an OSX build. In the video, I start out with a little glider object, and then add one single trigger for the Stutter engine and fool with that a bit. After that, it's back to the sequencer and you can see how the RAND FILL and RAND RESET controls work with the Life ruleset. The random stuff is kind of ruleset-specific. When I do a full overview of the sequencer, I'll go in to detail on the different rulesets and how the randomization affects them.

Wanna see what Automaton actually looks like? Whack that image for a full-sized screenshot. Now, some points to make:

1. We are in feature freeze, so don't bother saying "hey, you should make it do XXX." You can say "hey, does it do XXX?" and Adam and I will answer best we can," but nothing new will be added.

2. The stuff in the display panel will get moved around quite a bit, alpha values are off, some tags are missing, etc. We're working on that today, and I may replace this screenshot at some point in the next few hours.

With those two things in mind, enjoy.

As with all my reviews, I start with a caveat: if you want to know about all the bells and whistles of a particular box, you'd be better served by reading the magazine reviews, because they get in to minutia that I simply don't care about.

With that out of the way, here we have the Akai MDP32. Right off the bat, I have some complaints. First is build quality. While I expect a $99 doo-hickie from Behringer or M-Audio to be a piece of shit (that is, after all, why it is $99) when we're talking about companies like Akai that make what are generally construed to be better quality products, at a somewhat higher price, I expect certain things to be done a certain way. In this category, I hold the Korg KP3 as the benchmark of what can be done in the $299-$499 price point for gee-gaws like this. It is in a cast metal case, with metal knobs and beefy switches and pots. Anything else is going to be compared to this particular box in my mind.

In that comparison, the MPD32 suffers. It is plastic, as in "Big Hunk O'." The rotary pots feel pretty firm, and the switches are okay, but the sliders are just like any whack-ass sliders you find on cheaper (or shittier) gear, like the Novation Remote series. The face of the unit is a high-density thick plastic, but it's plastic none the less. Not the best substance for something that will get pounded upon. I would expect that the more expensive of the available controllers from Akai would be better constructed. Which not to say that it's bad. It's just not as good as it should or could be. I would submit that if someone is going to get this unit instead of the MPD16 in the first place, that someone will pay another $50 or $100 to get cast metal or sheet metal construction and proper potentiometers. I know I would.

The USB cable that came with the unit is 36" long. This is only useful if you have the device right next to your computer, so I had to hunt up a proper cable before I could plug it in at all. This was annoying in the extreme, and put me in a bad mood viz. this unit right away. I would have had to either try it out on my laptop or taken a trip to the computer store if I hadn't had one handy, because I, like most musicians with an ounce of common sense, hide the CPU of my computer away so I don't have to hear the fucking thing.

As far as using it goes, I don't think these pads are MPC pads, at least not from the top-line units. They are, however, nicer than any pads from any other company, with the obvious and glaring exception of the Studio 440. This is one area in which Akai knows their business, and these little guys are fine. It came from the factory with the sensitivity set to 10, which means a mean velocity of about 50. After taking some time to poke and prod, I determined that a setting of 13 fit my style nicely.

There's no layout sheet or hint book or anything for the preset layouts, so you kind of have to puzzle those out. After fucking around for a bit, I decided to just leave it on generic and use the learn features of whatever I feel like using it with, rather than having to change layouts and remember which goes with what song or track or whatever. I don't care for these sorts of "intelligent" layout shits anyhow, but that's personal taste. If you feel like switching from Live to Guru and back, well, you can do that. Knock yourself out.

Speaking of which, it comes with Live Lite 6 and Guru Lite. Whoopie. Value added content. I wish they had have added value in the construction. Sub-question: I wonder how many times I've paid for Live Lite? I must have 20 Live disks that came with various gear I've bought and then sold. I should make a Live Lite server farm.

Now, all that bitching and moaning aside, programming drums with a pad surface is SO MUCH BETTER than programming them with a grid or a keyboard, I can't even put it in words. In that regard, this is well worth the money and then some. I just wish they didn't cut so many corners on the design. Despite what you may read in their product literature, this is most emphatically not an MPC without a sampler.

Here's what I don't understand: how does someone with such a fundamental lack of knowledge about how and why copyright exists and works make so much money writing about it? (Although I'm perfectly aware that "so much money" is a relative term, and by using that particular phrase, what I really mean is "any money at all.") It seems that every article of his I read on this subject, and I'll admit that the old "car wreck on the highway" adage applies here, contains a general litany of complaints about some very specific aspect of how a particular industry chooses to protect their IP, coupled with some silly "wouldn't it be cool if" anecdote.

Summation of the linked article: "O NOES! RECORD INDUSTRY MAKES YOUR CABLE MODEM IN TO NORMAL MODEM BECAUSE YOU WANT FREE SHIT! Oh, and by the way, I write and teach. (Euphemistically speaking in both cases, of course.) Wouldn't it be nice if the music industry charged you like the electric company charges you? Otherwise, people won't steal out in the open like they do now! SHIT!"

In the article, he bemoans an inter-industry deal cooking in the UK where some ISPs have hatched a plan to throttle the bandwidth of massive P2P abusers. (Which leads me to wonder what will happen when Warcraft patches come out; will the whole country go back to the level of a mid-90s ISDN? The horror! The horror!) While that's all well and good, it leads me to wonder the following: I've seen many articles where Mr. Doctorow has bemoaned the music industry for doing the very things that he's suggesting they do in this particular case instead of what they did. Essentially, he won't be happy until he and everyone he knows get all their music for free (as in "the grocery store advert that shows up in your mailbox" free, and I don't mean any other kind of free, although I'm constantly amazed as to how many degrees of "free" can be thought up.)

So, Mr. Doctorow: please just come out and say it. I'll think you're a better person for it. You would like music to be ENTIRELY free. You would like artists to bankroll the creation of their music, and release it in to the wild, and hope that some enterprising soul can figure out a way to make a little coin, and hopefully that enterprising soul will perhaps, in the kindness of their heart, cut the musician in on the action. I know that's what you mean. You definitely know that's what you mean, because that's EXACTLY what you do with your writing, with the obvious exceptions of the for-pay work you do for the Guardian, et al. (Which brings up an interesting sub-question, but I'll leave that for another day.) So stop beating around the bush. Just man up and admit that shit, and we can all move along.

That picture right there is enough to give any studio rat a little chubby. Also, the MDP32 I ordered months ago showed up, but the USB cable that AKAI supplies is so fucking short it's useless. So I need to ruffle through my cable trough until I find one that is of a usable length. After that, I'll post my thoughts. Initially, it's not looking favorable. This thing is about as plastic as plastic gets.

Also, because I obviously don't have enough presence on the interwebs, what with this site, my various band websites, Flickr and YouTube channels, etc., I thought it was time to go ahead and add Twitter to the mix. So if you find what I do throughout the day incredibly thought-provoking (keeping in mind that the vast majority of it involves staring at a computer) and you want to inflict the same sort of nonsense on me, go ahead and hit that shit. I only made the account about a half hour ago, and nothing interesting has happened in that amount of time.

(Or maybe it has? Should I tweet about the fact that I had a hot dog and some potato chips for lunch?)

So, in the last month I've digested two pieces, Beethoven's 14th Sonata in C#m (better known as the "Moonlight Sonata," although I think it should be called the "Summer Thunderstorm Sonata," if the imagery it brings to my mind is any indication of what it should be named) and Eric Sätie's Gnossienne #1. It's funny, because it took me the better part of three weeks to get the Beethoven piece socketed in my skull, but I got the Sätie piece memorized in about an hour. I assume that this is because the gnossiene is almost laughably simple compared to the sonata, and not because I suddenly developed the ability to instantly memorize music.

Personally, while I can puzzle any given piece out from the sheet music, I prefer to load up a MIDI file (if I can find one) and look at it on the piano roll editor of Cubase. For some reason, this visual really works for me. Probably because I've been editing keyboard parts via piano roll editors on a daily basis since the late 80s. But then I just learn the piece by rote memory through repetition and that's that.

I was just curious as to whether others out there have different ways for learning more complex pieces than my blunt force trauma method. While it works fine for me, I don't imagine it's the best way to learn a keyboard part.

I'll admit that all prior videos of the DS-10 cart have kind of left me with a "huh" kind of vibe. As in "that's kinda cool, but as a Serious Musician I must look down on it as something of a toy." But MatrixSynth came across this video in his never-ending crawl for synth-related material across the interwebs, and I have to say that, aside from the fact that is the first demo I've seen of this software that was musically interesting, it gives a far better overview of what is obviously a quite-powerful application.

This leaves me wondering about handheld music generation in general, though. For something like the DS-10, it is simple enough where non-musicians can sort of poop out semi-interesting things, but it is obviously deep enough to where a Serious Musician (such as myself and, I assume, you, dear reader) can actually use it as he/she would any other tool. But the vast majority of programs out there fall squarely in the "meh" category of trying to get something that was not designed for music generation to do so.

However, with the inherent power of touch-screen devices like the iPhone and the DS Lite, there is a new world opening up, provided one can work around (or perhaps take advantage of) the inherent difficulties with the user interfaces. I mean, a DS Lite is far more powerful than many computers I've used to make music over the years, and an iPhone completely dusts a DS when it comes to raw horsepower, display technologies, and user interface abilities.

So how 'bout it? Does the DS-10 herald the beginning of making serious music applications for handhelds? Or is it just another toy? (Obviously with the caveat that the audio output of the DS is an afterthought, and barely worth the name. The iPhone fares much better in this department.)

The majority of professional users of Giga products do so on a dedicated machine. In my experience (which is limited, I'll grant) every single person I'm aware of that uses Giga on a dedicated machine is otherwise a Mac user and runs either Logic or DP for the most part, with the occasional PT guy thrown in the mix. I have no numbers to back up anything I'm saying, but my gut tells me that that the Giga products (the recent plans for the cross-platform plugin notwithstanding) were always largely meant to turn a PC in to a powerful dedicated sampler. They didn't stop working last week, and they won't stop working on Dec. 31st.

Now that every DAW has a top-line sample playback instrument available to it as a built-in (although one could argue that Cubase does not, seeing how the HalionOne player is a tragic fucking mess, and Halion itself is essentially not worth the box it comes in) and machines have progressed enough in power to the point where they can run large sample sets simultaneously within a DAW, I have to wonder if this is all much ado about nothing. Giga had its day and its purpose. So did the S1000 (which was relatively much more expensive). Quite frankly, I'm glad the days where I needed to hunch over that little LCD screen truncating samples are over. It wasn't cool then, it isn't retro now, and my back still hurts.

In short, time and tools march ever onwards. In all honesty, I give kudos to Tascam for seeing the forest instead of trying to keep the trees alive. I imagine the people that will be seriously inconvenienced by this number less than a couple dozen, and if someone has a dedicated high-end machine for Giga and massive libraries for same (all of which still will work fine), they are either de facto successful at their trade, and thus able to afford a replacement of some sort, or pirates and can fuck right off.

Here's a screengrab of Automaton chugging away in Live (which is, I think, apropos) along with its lil' buddy Dubstation. And here is an MP3 of what I was listening to when I took that screengrab.

Note a couple things: all four effects are being used, and I've got the unit running in one of its several "utterly random" modes, so there's no rhyme nor reason to how they're firing. I'll put more sophisticated demos up, with full explanations of what is happening, when everything is working properly. Note that the delay effect is Dubstation, not Automaton, in case that wasn't obvious. First four measures are uneffected.

If you'd like to add a link to your comment, just put the link in. The back end will figure out it's a link and turn it in to a hyperlink. Otherwise, you'll have to use your skill with the English language to get your point across here.

On the one hand, I appreciate the desire of people to "break free" of the "brutal dictatorship" of equal temperament and try something new.

On the other hand, good enough for Bach, good enough for me. That video is a good reason why I can make the above statement with a certain amount of smugness.

But that said, you should take note of an interesting side-effect. On the first listen, that organ sounds horribly, horribly out of tune. Or, like, broken or something. On the second, it's not so bad. If you watch the video four times, you'll notice that it actually kind of sounds in tune, with itself at least. I wonder if this is what the world sounds like to someone with perfect pitch.

In any case, anyone that writes music for a living (as opposed to cooking udon, which is what this keyboard is demonstrably for) will mention that you don't get four listens to grab someone, and anything that sounds that badly out of tune is never gonna make it in any sort of popular music, so this thing is automatically relegated to udon, on a more-or-less permanent basis. It's worth mentioning that one can pull this sort of effect off with the controller they already have, simply by playing the wrong notes.

(Via MatrixSynth, without the color commentary.)

As this role requires you to be at Jordan's private residence, absolute discretion and confidentiality must be maintained by the successful applicant to maintain Jordan's privacy and the privacy of his family.

A good way to ensure privacy would be to ask your fans if any of them would like the job. And we all know how forward-thinking Dream Theater's fans are. I'm sure he'll get many excellent replies.

Please no time wasters or overzealous fans, this is a serious opportunity to gain some great experience and work with one of the best musicians performing today in his own private studio.

No offense, Mr. Rudess, but if you're so shit-hot... well... I'll just let that thought dwindle off, because that's a road fraught with peril. But just for a moment, let's talk about grammar. The way that sentence is written, it sounds like he's one of the best home studio musicians performing today. That got a chuckle out of me. Jordan Rudess: King Of YouTube. But the one thing I haven't seen is him using his Haken Continuum to trigger a V-Synth while playing the Super Mario Bros. theme. That would be the event horizon of wankery, and no mistake.

I've looked all over for a tutorial on how to do this, but when you couple the broadness of the search terms ("Live," "Sampler," "Pack") with the fact that this is a semi-esoteric thing I'm trying to do, it just turns up a bunch of bullshit. Obviously, it's easy to make a Live Pack, but I just can't figure out how to make one that auto-installs to the correct home.