First things first: a disclaimer… I’m not a music producer, nor do I ever intend to be one. I’m only posting these loops to entertain myself and hopefully also encourage me to lift my game a little bit and spend more time creating sound.
Yep, I’m posting music. Sort of. This is the first in what will hopefully be a series of loops created in Ableton Live. I’ve waxed lyrical on this blog about how great Ableton is for creativity compared to other, more mature/clunky sound software packages, like Logic or Pro Tools. The flipside of the ease with which you can create sound in Ableton – for me at least – is that I never invest a whole lot of time fine tuning anything I do. My short attention span gets the better of me and I decide to go back to Earthworm Jim on my SNES emulator.
However, I’m hoping that by forcing myself to shoot some of these loops into the interweb sludge, I will be motivated to put some more time and effort into learning the ins and outs of Ableton properly. Like I stated above – I’m not interested in music production, but I am going to be spending a lot of time doing sound design over the next year or so at university, so with any luck, a little bit more effort will go a long way.
This first loop is a pretty standard affair: I threw a bunch of processing at it, and in the end it started sounding pretty muddy and dark. But in keeping with my resolution to upload these pieces for scrutiny, here it is – warts and all…
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AntiVJ are a frighteningly talented group from Europe/the UK, who seem to have made a name for themselves by marrying thoughtful projection mapping and sound work to site specific locations. I first came across their work when I found this piece, which was performed with Crea Composite at Mont des Arts in Brussels, Belgium…
When I read through Peter Kirn’s article on CDM, I thought it was interesting to note that they are continuing with this very distinct style. It’s obviously quite effective, but I am really impressed to see that they are continuing to explore this concept, rather than simply recycle old ideas. This clip is from a work titled Grote Kerk and was performed in a cathedral in Breda, Netherlands…
It’s undeniably amazing stuff and probably doesn’t need a lot more said about it: the work speaks for itself.
I had a bunch of fun playing at Flunked on Thursday night, so I thought I’d throw my set online. It’s been a really long time since I’ve put up a mix, and whilst this is a bit of a mash in places, there are some great tunes here that I’m feeling right now, and think they should be shot out into the soup of sound on the interweb.
This is the first time I have done a mix without headphones for cueing. It’s all beatmatched in Ableton and controlled with my padKontrol (hacked with the awesome farmpad), and it’s got a bit of a techno mixing style going on: the padKontrol has just a couple of knobs, so all the EQing is a kill-fest. I enjoyed digging out the controller though and I think with a bit more tweaking, I’ll get it set up nicely with Ableton.
Edit: My ladyfriend has politely informed me that the above paragraph makes no sense to those who are neither DJs, or nerdarsarus’ (nerdasaurii?). Despite my objections, she’s generally right, so I should probably explain myself to those that don’t understand, but for whatever reason, give a damn. If you don’t (and you shouldn’t), skip ahead to the mix…
Once upon a time I was a DJ of sorts, and prided myself on playing music that no one liked/understood. These days, it’s apparently cool to be playing dubstep, so obviously I couldn’t continue the charade, and gave it away. A couple of good-hearted people still believe that I can do it though, so in an effort to prove them wrong, I agreed and played silly records. But now that I’m a poverty stricken student, I can’t afford shelling out for a large wax platter which only holds two tunes (one of which is crap, the other will go out of date before I get it home), so I spend my smaller dollars on MP3s (yes, I pay for them. If you think you can play your 128K iPod files on a club system, I’ll leave you alone in there with them and your bleeding ears).
There are all manner of ways to DJ with MP3s these days, but seeing as I’ll likely be spending a lot of time with Ableton in the future, I decided I might as well just move in permanently. Ableton started its life as a piece of software for DJs, before it became a fully (over)blown production suite. What makes it stand apart is it’s ability to take any two tracks thrown at it and keep them playing in time. It’s really not much harder than that – whatever that “DJ friend” of yours says. So, instead of having to listen to the next record in my headphones to make sure it’s in time (or doesn’t sound crap/is the right song/I’d rather be listening to than the rubbish you guys are dancing to), I know that when I hit play in Ableton, it’ll be in time.
The padKontrol is simply a controller, in the style of the ubiquitous MPC, which… uh… controls the software. I pretty much tell it which button/knob/pad/whatever makes which song/volume/fully sick effect/whatever do its thing in Ableton. I can already hear your stunned responses of “what a deft understanding of amazing technological advances he must possess!”, but truthfully it’s really, really simple. You should do it. Then I would stop getting asked to pretend to be a DJ.
I stopped in at CarriageWorks this morning to de-brief the last Finders Keepers markets and have a talk about the next one coming up in December. Chatting about the other spaces within the venue, we went for a bit of a wander to check them out and came across a couple of excellent exhibitions that you need to see…
The first is opening tomorrow and showcases some of KesselsKramer’s (yes, that is their website) excellent ad work. They’re one of those uber-talented European marketing crews that blur the line between art, design and advertising, often to stunning effect. It’s the first retrospective of it’s size in Australia and well worth a look.
What really caught my attention though, was a brilliant exhibition of local and international artists, called There Goes The Neighbourhood. Based around Sydney’s notorious The Block area and the aboriginal culture surrounding that, it’s a fascinating insight into a place that most of middle-class white Australia knows precious little about.
In fact, the premise of the exhibition is far broader than the just The Block, and takes a look at how we categorise people based on where they live – particularly in the urban environment. Fittingly, the exhibition is cross-disciplinary, with video, photography, interactivity, painting, sculpture and a labyrinthine installation that you absolutely must take a walk through. There are no plans to tour the exhibition as yet, but if anyone else from around the country can help out, I really recommend getting in touch with the organisers. The work is much more far-reaching than just the inner-west of Sydney.
The exhibition is open until June 27th, from Tuesday to Sunday each week and is free. Check it out.
This marks the very final part of Semester 1, 2009 for me. We were given the option of completing our documentation for Multimedia Authoring 1 with either a video or website, which were due today. I chose the latter because of the non-action required for my project. It wouldn’t make for a particularly exciting video experience: “Wow, look at that guy, not doing anything!” Exciting stuff.
So as my projects have a tendency to do, this one got a bit out of hand. So I turned it into a minisite. This is the first of a couple that I have in the works for the mid-year break (the second is a far more exciting return of Concrète. More on that soon) and doing this prevents me from making any more bloody WordPress databases – it’s like they’ve begun breeding on the angryPixel server.
For anyone who’s read past posts about my Multimedia Authoring 1 process, there’s not a lot new here, but I’m hoping that it’s helpful to someone out there at some point, maybe coming across Processing for the very first time.
It’s an apt name for a gig I’ll be playing at the Loft this Thursday night: I totally forgot I was on the bill. Nevermind. Regardless of me being completely unprepared, you should come along and check out some great free music, particularly one of my favourites, Sofie.
I’m unsure if I’ll try and wrangle Ableton into something set-like between now and then, or I’ll just pull out my old dubstep records (thanks to Alistair for billing me as a dubstep veteran. I’m not sure if that’s says I’m getting old, or just jaded). Either way, it’ll be a cheap night for all those students that should be very close to celebrating a few weeks of freedom.
Pretty sure the lovely flyer design is once again done by the unstoppable Bec Paton.
Set Times
1700 Dan Copping
1800 Shunji
1900 Kodama
2000 Sofie
2100 Dan Copping
2200 Portrait
2300 Blablake
Over the past couple of months, I’ve upgraded both Pro Tools and Ableton Live (both now in their 8th release), thanks to my K. Rudd bonus cheque. It’s only now that I’ve finished uni for a few weeks that I’ve had a chance to really take a look at the updates and I have to say that they’re both looking pretty nifty. I found some great Ableton sound design tutorials on CDM, which started me on a hunt through many video tutorials to get me up to speed on all the new features. It’s not long before I realised that not all videos are created equal.
If you take even a quick look at the videos created by Digidesign for their terrible dTV, you really get a feel for what a dinosaur this company has become. They’re so over produced that you can’t help but cringe every time this ball-bag drops another product placement one-liner…
Whilst we’re thankfully spared from watching baldy by Ableton, I’m still a little disappointed by the cheese I have to endure for their promo videos (not to mention pulling some weird Matrix-style location shoot)…
…the near monotone voice over creeps me out. Crazy Germans.
What really blows my mind with nearly all of these promo videos is the consistently bad muzak. Who is responsible for these soundtracks? Why do they think that this won’t make me want to distance myself completely from their software? When will we see a video with Pan Sonic behind the controls?
That childish rant aside though, these manufacturer produced videos give you a glimpse into Digidesign’s attempt to play catch-up to far more flexible software packages like Ableton Live. One video I couldn’t find on YouTube was a dTV rant by Pro Tools HD owners about how great the Digidesign community and support is. I have no idea what these people got for saying this, but anyone that has had any experience at all with Pro Tools (not the studio-centric HD version) will testify to just how far from the truth this is.
In fact, if Pro Tools wasn’t ubiquitous in teaching environments and the film industry, I can’t see a reason anyone would want to use it these days. Logic has it’s number for professional output and Live is undoubtedly in first place for anyone wanting flexibility and ease of use. I hope someone at Digidesign is trying to turn this hulking ship around. Quickly.
For some time now, I’ve been planning a bit of a revamp of the angryPixel main site. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake to use such a personal logo to represent a site which will umbrella several different projects and the people behind them.
Now that the first semester of uni has wrapped up and I’ve got some time to myself, I’m playing with a few new ideas. Firstly, the logo will get a facelift. I have moved my personal logo (yes, those are my eyebrows) to this blog and thrown up a mark that I had in mind for a while…
…it does concern me that this first attempt may be a little too corporate, but I do like the metaphor of ‘aP’ being represented by a sprouting plant. angryPixel is not only a reasonably new concept, but I would love to see it grow into a larger organism, branching off into many different projects. It’s also a mark which could be carried across into different media – it will function much more effectively than the eyebrow character now on this blog. No doubt this mark will go through some changes before I settle on its final state, but for now I’m comfortable enough with it as a placeholder.
The next step is to replace the main angryPixel page with an updating feed from each of the angryPixel sites, changing it into much more of a dynamic gateway than the current static page.
Update: I’ve also rolled this out to the angryPixel design site. It seems the ease that this can be modified for other projects is a good indicator that I’m on the right track…
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