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:

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’ve created a Starfinger facebook page. Become a fan today, and earn virtual starfinger points which are redeemable for diddly squat at your favorite ethnic restaurants.

Hi there.. it’s been a while.

I thought I’d make mention of a few of my recent musical purchases, and confirm to you that I am alive and kicking.

For my birthday, I got a a kaossilator, which is a terribly fun touchpad-based preset synth. The sound quality is great, and you can build up some neat loops with it. It’s great for jamming, if not for sound design. It’s easy enough to play with your eyes closed, and it’s been in my bag or on my person constantly since acquiring it. I have a couple stupid demo tracks around here somewhere, which I can make available if anyone is interested.

The kaossilator got me into a very hands-on mood lately, so I’ve been hooking it up to things like my old SP-202 and my ER-1. I realized what I really wanted was a cheap small-format mixer to hook these things up more flexibly.

Over the weekend, I got this Xenyx 502 by Behringer. Normally I wouldn’t touch Behringer with a 10 foot pole, but thanks to a surprising promo gift card from Guitar Center I got this one (and a few much-needed cables) for $35.

It was definitely a spur-of-the-moment purchase, but this thing is surprisingly awesome. It’s meeting my routing needs perfectly, and the xenyx preamp + “british EQ” makes a pretty sweet bass preamp. Who knew!

Anyway, expect to hear these things in a recording one of these days.

I grabbed the new Beck CD yesterday. It’s good. Danger Mouse [the producer] is OK in my book… though he has not always been: In the beginning, I was both underwhelmed by “the Grey Album” and annoyed by his usurpation of a favorite cartoon character’s name. Thus-configured, I chose to ignore his musical contributions and silently resent his existence. Well, it turns out that Gnarls Barkley is pretty damn good. In fact, “the Odd Couple” is my favorite album of the year, thus far [critical note: I think I have heard 2 new albums this year, total].

Anyway, I would love to add this CD to my cd database, but I seem to have deleted the database and all of my maintenance tools, during a linux-related debacle [for the nerds: debian unstable to openSUSE 11]. A half-hearted attempt at recreating the database from that most recently generated report [linked mere sentences ago] is currently underway.

I have to leave now. The kids need drinks.

The End.