I’ve been working on a reaktor ensemble that will interface with the Novation Launchpad, and allow me to use it as a sequencer without buying Max for Live.

I have a working rudimentary drum sequencer that you can download below. It will not yet work properly in Live because I need to make the proper note/button mappings for User1 mode. It will work in reaktor standalone or in something like Kore (to control other plugins).

Here’s a simple demonstration video:

As last year wound down, I started compiling a list of things that made my year nice. These are not new things, necessarily. Rather, they are things either newly discovered (or re-discovered) by me. Things that I wholeheartedly recommend!

I should clarify that this is specifically a list of things. I have not included intangible, soul-feeding moments like seeing my children smiling on Christmas morning, or stepping in dog crap in the middle of the night. Barefoot. Which would, incidentally, not have made the list if I had extended it to include such things. It’s a paradox, and I mention it only to be confusing.

Without further ado, the list!

1. Left 4 Dead games on the xbox.

   I am, historically, a wimp. Despite my deep love for the concept of ZOMBIES, I have actively avoided experiencing them in any media format. Until now! One brave night, I tried the Left 4 Dead demo, despite heart palpitations and dizzying sweats, and I survived! Many many hours of glorious co-op later, I can say that this changed my life. Seriously. Scary is not really that scary.

2. Birdy Nam Nam by Birdy Nam Nam

   For weeks after downloading this, it was the only music played in our car. It is an epic vinyl collage that genre-hops as effortlessly (and nostalgically) as DJ Shadow’s seminal Endtroducing. You don’t have to buy the album, but you absolutely, positively must watch my no-contest hands-down favorite internet video of the year: BIRDY NAM NAM - THE PARACHUTE ENDING.

3. Dexter

   One of the best shows ever. You’ve probably already seen it. It might even convince you to consider cutting someone into pieces. Don’t do it.

4. Terrapin Rye Pale Ale

   Hey, what’s that unique hoppiness? It’s not hops, it’s rye! That is an imaginary conversation I had with myself. While this is not the only rye beer out there, it’s certainly one of the best and it’s probably relatively easy to find in your market. Another excellent rye beer for which to be on the lookout is French Broad Rye Hopper.

5. Pimento Cheese

   I’ve been eating pimento cheese sporadically for many years. (I should have started this blog post with that riveting sentence). Unfortunately for me and the cheese, our love was never spoken aloud, and we just didn’t hang out very much anymore. This year, boy howdy, did we hang out. I will boldly declare that without economic limits on pimento cheese access, it would kill me and I would love it. Best ways to eat it: A) on toasted ciabatta B) on GreenLife’s Southern Belle Panini. 3 cheers for pimento cheese!

6. Skitch

   Read about this great screencapture program on their site. I will just say this: once you get in the Skitch mindset, you will be amazed at how many problems throughout the day can be solved with a little image-grabbing.

   I just made and uploaded this image in seconds while I was sitting here!
   

   So that is my list. It is incomplete. Who cares!

My trusty 1st gen ipod shuffle treated me to an interesting juxtaposition this morning: First, it played a random [unknown] track off the freely available Girl Talk album Feed the Animals, then it played Stark Effect’s “I miss you”, part of his freely available mic in tracks.

Girl Talk uses the most familiar snippets from the world of popular music and creates something wildly different — cultural touchstones (shibboleth?) become part of an alien hip-hop tapestry (alien, at least, to virgin ears — hilarious and catchy to all well-conditioned ears).

To describe the “mic in tracks”, we must take a journey through time to the dawn of file-sharing networks: A common cd-burning software at the time allowed users to record introductions to their mix-cd’s using whatever microphone happened to be plugged into the computer. These files were automatically saved with filenames like “mic in track 3.mp3″ or something (more information at the stark-effect site).

It turns out that a lot of people recording these “mic-in tracks” were also blindly sharing all of their local mp3 files with different file-sharing programs. The end result is that a napster search (or the equivalent) for “mic-in track” would return hundreds of these introductions. Heartfelt moments, random shout-outs — the stupidest most-intimate verbal shenanigans were laid bare for the world to see.

Anyway, the Stark-Effect guy did just that, and created songs out of the gems he unearthed. This particular song, “I miss you” mixes some dude trying to get his girlfriend to come back to him with some floaty girl talking about how much she loves somebody — romantic crap like that.

The individual pieces are not that interesting, but the mix paints a picture that feels warm and enveloping. Despite the lack of context surrounding the bits, the result is something that I think is easy to relate to.

These two songs work together to demonstrate the power — the art — of assembly and the cultural value of remix. I don’t want to dwell on this now, as it is duly dwelled upon elsewhere, but it struck me as worth reporting.

Check out the music!

I just submitted a remix to a contest. Check it out. Mine is the kongbalong remix.

A surprising thing about twitter (compared to other social networking doohickies) is that it actually seems to foster meeting new people.

I’ve been following this guy: Ambienteer. He posts a new ambient electronic piece every day, archiving them on his website.

Check him out.

I just started scrobbling itunes into my last.fm account, if anybody’s interested in seeing what i’m listening to….

I seem to be on a weird ’social networking’ bent here in the last couple of days. I guess that’s OK.

I feel silly, but I just signed up for twitter. Let me know if you’re on here so I can follow you.

I’m weblar