Messages

301

OTHER MUSIC / Guess the sample | a game / quiz / what have you

« on: January 25, 2011, 08:27:33 am »

Allo, I started a webpage (http://samplistic.blogspot.com) as a kind of blend between blog & game. Here's the gist: someone comes up with a creation made with sampling as source material, then everyone and anyone tries to come up and guess the original material that was used.

It doesn't have to be fancy or a complete piece that you would release, anything form a 30 seconds snippet of hip hop beats to a 20 minutes expansive soundscape works out for me.

Everyone is welcomed to join in, either for the guessing or to submit material, even if sampling is not a regular tool you use in your creations per se. The idea is just to have a fun time and scratch our heads during the course of a whatever day, and by the same token, if you submit a creation, you can send me a blurb about who you are / what you do / official website / upcoming projects and so on, it will be featured alongside your guessable sound bite.

To partake in the fun you can click on that link up there or follow from twitter (www.twitter.com/Le_Berger) if that's more convenient for you.

If you want to submit a creation & blurb, send me all the info to le_berger@hotmail.com

Let the games begin!

302

OTHER MUSIC / Re: What are you listening to?

« on: January 24, 2011, 05:32:49 pm »

Ernest Ranglin - Below The Bass Line

whilst preparing supper with a brew
big smile plastered on my face

303

OTHER MUSIC / Re: What are you listening to?

« on: January 22, 2011, 07:15:20 pm »

The common cold turned into bronchitis.
Guess I needed the rest, plus it became the perfect occasion to quit smoking!

304

COMPUTER MUSIC / Re: new monome fetish object: arc

« on: January 22, 2011, 03:26:02 pm »

the looks of it, material and design, remind me of an old (1972 if memory serves) Quad loudspeaker system I used to have

nostalgia... 

305

STUDIO + RECORDING TECHNIQUES / Re: Chance and random composing tools

« on: January 22, 2011, 02:54:14 pm »

about:box
sure thing man!

306

OTHER MUSIC / Re: What are you listening to?

« on: January 22, 2011, 02:28:20 pm »

I'd been sick since just after NYE, finally started feeling better the last few days, today I picked up my snowshoes and went for a stroll, dug out my mp3 player from the drawer (i barely ever use it & usually on strolls i let the elements do the talking) put the thing on random album and headed out.

Xploding Plastix - Amateur Girlfriends go Proskirt Agents
Amon Tobin - Out From Out Where
Plastikman - Consume

All stuff I hadn't listened to in quite a long while, pretty engaging.
And now, I'm sipping cappuccino and lazin' at home.
A good day.

(I was thinking, I like putting music in context / the listening experience or else I'd just link to my last.fm account...)

Addendum: and now it's a very common and refreshing lager with Mozart's Requiem Lacrimosa.

307

STUDIO + RECORDING TECHNIQUES / Re: Chance and random composing tools

« on: January 22, 2011, 02:16:35 pm »

what are you looking to do?

i use chance all the time in my composition and then spend an enormous amount of time editing that chance afterwards.

I see something in common there, human intent. Even if it isn't always for tampering or manipulation of the chance element per se. Purely random music is rather uninteresting to me, as a product anyway. I mean, it's already everywhere in the world, why record it? Though that's personal I guess.

What I find most interesting is the contrast between chance or random elements and other more organized ones. Usually in succession or as juxtaposition. And what I find even more interesting is the framework or process through which the artist (human intent!) makes those elements interact.

Generally I much prefer natural occurrence to algorithms or softwares, etc. as the random element(s) to enter composition. For exemple (solarist marbles come to mind) I'm building a box / tunnel out of wood and sheet metal at the moment with all kinds of strings in it & a few other things, you can drop different sized marbles and balls at certain places in it and depending where and what it hits it creates fun things & colors & stuff. But I'm also tuning the strings (somewhat / as much as is possible) and eventually I wanna mic it and run the gathered sounds through effects and so on. So there is a random portion and a predictable portion.

Also in the process of designing a giant midi controller of sorts where specific events, triggered unsuspectingly by oblivious folks (i say that with all the love in the world) will generate signals to be processed. Is it the same as hitting notes randomly on your keyboard and using a random algorithm to generate the same signals? Perhaps, but I'm so not a mathematician, I like the idea that the process is somewhat grounded in something concrete, even if the end result can be abstract, experimental, whatever you wanna name it.

And when you start thinking of it in terms of interactions, natural occurrence meeting concepts or organized intended structure, man the possibilities are endless, one lifetime simply isn't enough to put all those ideas in place!

Ok, enough jibber jabber and mental wanderings!

To answer the original question, when it comes to the tools I use for randomization. (Sidenote, atm I'm stuck working with very reduced and crude tools, resourcefulness ahoy!) For the project I'm working on now, since it is intended as cyclic and redundant, I will generally do very subtle, almost imperceptible randomization. Such as running a sound through a sequence on a keyboard and leaving the step length as (x) variable to be between (y) ms & (z) ms, if the rest of the tune is perfectly cyclic and on metronome it creates a slight variation in there. Or let's say I'm running an amplitude modulation on one track, I'll do the same thing and let it either do it at different intervals in time, sometimes just plain manually applying it in spots, sometimes through a sequence as mentioned before. You could do the same with any effects or process really, leaving one variable open between y & z parameters and let some external sequence of events dictate to it what to do. I had to bug a few friends to make patches for me though, as I'm no programmer by any standards!

But if you work in MAX / MSP for example, there are tons of options you can easily implement if you know what you'Re doing, or find out there if you look hard enough.

Sometimes I'll also create a plug in chain, without a sound in it or anything, just tweak and play with certain options 'til I have a vague idea of what it 'might' sound like, and then I process a specific sound in it, and whatever happens happens. It's not exactly completely random, but it's unpredictable.

Man I can ramble sometimes.....

308

SELF PROMOTION / Re: In Our Hiding Voice

« on: January 19, 2011, 08:41:59 am »

Definite fave = Cut a Door Where the Walls Meet
good call using it as pre-release promo / video

Upon first pass listening, I like the grounded strongly tonal drones tunes a lot, namely String Trails & Girl, Calling to an Empty House. And then Hiding Song is one great expansive closer.

Maybe you could include the latest vid as bonus material in there?
just a thought (read wish)

309

OTHER MUSIC / Re: What are you listening to?

« on: January 10, 2011, 09:59:01 pm »

I should make a new "Shuffle 15: last albums you have listened too" video for Youtube soon. That's much more fun than posting like this :p

310

OTHER MUSIC / Re: What are you listening to?

« on: January 08, 2011, 09:43:04 am »

These 5 new tracks by Will Long (previously from Celer)

thanks to Lend Me Your Ears for finding them out.

311

SELF PROMOTION / Le Berger - Everything is everything else*

« on: January 07, 2011, 12:42:33 am »

A new excursion in sounds from yours truly.

Expect:
noise | distorted | soundscape
subdued | industrial | drone
grounded | meditative | ringy
more of it

and for those who download it
a little perk in there somewhere

?this is it?

?yes, yes, you can click on the picture, it's magic!?

FYI, throughout the year all files will be 1.11$ and albums 3.33$
trying to be reasonable here

312

THE FUTURE OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS / Re: CDs are dead (almost)

« on: January 07, 2011, 12:14:30 am »

313

SYNTHESIZERS + SOUND-MAKING HARDWARE / Re: Analog synth

« on: December 26, 2010, 04:23:27 pm »

haha, indeed, but kinda like the Nord series, I like the dedicated synth that focus only on reproducing a few things. It seems they do it right because they know mostly nit picky buyers are gonna have interest in the product.

& ditto on Laurie, obviously.

314

OTHER MUSIC / Re: What are you listening to?

« on: December 25, 2010, 01:04:58 pm »

John Williams - The Hologram | Binary Sunset

315

12K + LINE / Re: NEW 12K SITE

« on: December 24, 2010, 11:38:48 pm »

thanks