The World's Greatest Invention

As someone who creates audio, video and takes tons of pictures, you might say that backing up and archiving data is a bit of an issue for me. Hard drives are the cheapest archival medium, but enclosures are expensive and a pain. I really like the drive arrangement of the Mac Pro - they're easy enough to get in and out of the machine that I don't mind doing so for the occasional archive. I started thinking it would be cool to get some spare trays and it would be even cooler if there was an external device I could just push one of these trays into if I wanted to make that drive live without shutting down the machine. But even that isn't necessary. I found the Thermaltake BlacX. It is a USB 2.0 SATA drive dock. Drop a raw SATA drive in, and you're all set. It works!

Buy it at newegg $39.95. That price doesn't include the $10 rebate starting today.

Director Resurrection

There is something about my brain that makes it very compatible with some software and violently incompatible with others. Adobe After Effects is an example of something I'm very compatible with. It's like Photoshop on a timeline. I adore this software and it seemed like I knew how to use it right out of the box.

Other software, not so much. Flash, for example. I started using Flash in the very early days right after it was acquired by Macromedia. Flash did things nothing else did which made it sort of a necessary evil, but I never 'got' Flash. The timeline seemed broken to me - all your events are collapsed into a single inscrutable keyframe and if you need to change something you're basically screwed. If you want to fade in some text, you have to turn it into a symbol first so you can add opacity, but that kills the edibility of the text, so if someone wants to change something you have to start all over. These kinds of issues made me very unhappy.

In the early days, when Flash didn't work, I had Director in my pocket. Now, Director and I go along very well. I became reasonably proficient in Lingo, Director's underlying language. Where Flash was inscrutable, Director was accessible and I used it to create interactive content everyone associated in their mind as 'Flash'. Several high points of my career were created in Director - if I could imagine it, I could create it in Director.

But, sadly, Director went the way of the dodo, and after Macromedia was acquired by Adobe, I resigned myself to the reality that I'd never see Director again. This was the beginning of several cruel blows leading to Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia. As Adobe and Macromedia's product lines were mostly tit for tat, once merged, only one of each product would remain. I managed to choose the losing horse in nearly every race. I still feel like I'm using my computer with oven mitts on.

Secretly, I hoped they'd fix Flash's timeline, or make it less... brain damaged.... but I knew the problem was not with Flash, it was with me. There are thousands of people who wield Flash like a Jedi knight, so it must be me. Version after version of Flash appeared, but despite focused attempts to bond with the software, it never melded.

Imagine my joy, when I find an announcement from Adobe this morning. Adobe Director 11. Actually, by 'joy', I mean tea came out of my nose.

Lawrence Lessig and Free Culture

Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and on the Board of Directors of creativecommons.org.

Below is a video of his final talk on Free Culture recorded January 31, 2008 at Stanford. Presumably, by 'final talk', he means he intends to concentrate on the Change Congress movement and possibly run for Congress.

In a nutshell, Change Congress is about removing the influence that money buys in Congress via lobbyists. This is the same thing Obama is talking about, but on the Congressional level. This is a bi-partisian concept.

Anyway, that stuff is in the last ten minutes. The bulk of the video is about Copyright law, remixing, creative commons and intellectual property. It is essential viewing for anyone who creates content.

Where Are You (part 2)

I'll be curious if anyone can guess what is generating the looping phrase. I recorded the output and could have cleaned up the clicks, but I found them endearing.

One of my interests is controlling simple electronic sounds with high bandwidth physical gestures. Analog is really handy for this. Sometimes having infinite resolution is a good thing. There are three controllers being manipulated - the pitch ring, the button and the joystick. There is an endurance factor at play here where fine motor control must be very precise and steady. This is why you'll see me shake my left hand in between phrases.

Simplicity is important as it is exceptionally easy to create huge, massive complicated layered sounds these days. However, even if you could add similar suitable expression vectors, the complicated nature of the sound will obscure the gesture.

The French Connection is controlling a small collection of modules including a Cwejman VCO-RM2, MMF1, Plan B model 11 and Doepfer VCA. The left hand joystick is controlling various parameters including the frequency of the slave osc of the VCO which is also frequency modulating one of the filters.

Modulars for Meth Heads

An entertaining thread erupted on analogue heaven this weekend with the subject "Modern shit is too expensive"

"I looked at one of these modern modular manufacturers the other day, and this nigga had an oscillator for $800. I laughed out loud at my desk. I'm sure some middle-aged Emerson fan will enjoy buying it and not making art with it, hoarding it in his rec room."

"...we got into a long discussion about how the gear is concentrated among the rich and the broke dudes just have to get by with their cheap VA's and so on. I mean, we're talking about a guy that has to support a meth habit AND pay rent each month on minimum wage. He and I talked about the need for anarchist, accessible, socialist-minded equipment. Built cheap but respectable for broke but respectable people. Artisan builds for artists, not collectors."

The full message can be found here.

I started to enumerate the assumptions and fallacies, but I got to about four before the cumulative stupidity of the above statements made blood shoot out of my nose.

1) You don't need a Buchla Music Easel to make great music
I have personally witnessed performances by electronic music composers who, stuck behind the Berlin Wall, created captivating performances from gear even a meth head would throw out. We're talking contact mics, some creative DIY triggers, and a sense of composition and theatre.

2) You don't know how good you have it
'Cheap VAs' are not good enough for your poor, punk self? Cry me a river. I have a hard time mustering sympathy for someone who has a Korg MS2000. I had to make do with a Casio MT-40 and Fostex X-15 when I was starting out.

The fact of the matter is we live in a time where we have access to tools that are embarrassingly amazing. There are options across the entire spectrum of affordability. Some examples:

Mattson Mini Modular

Synth.com installment plan ($120/month)

BC16

Thingamagoops

This is just the beginning. There are tons of do it yourself options if you're interested in branding yourself with a soldering iron a few times. Access to information is WAY easier and more immediate than it was 20 years. We haven't even talked about cheap or free software.

3) Collectors are not the reason you suck
In cases of limited supply and overwhelming demand, prices rise. I'm fairly certain collectors are not the reason why certain Roland TB/TR/SH products fetch the prices we're seeing. This is a case where in order to make a certain kind of music, you had to have certain kinds of tools that aren't made anymore. Interesting, since these things were initially chosen by cash-strapped artists who could only acquire unpopular, cheap gear.

This guy has a narrow view of the utility of a piece of gear. If someone wants to spend $800 on an oscillator and not make music with it, what does it matter? It makes that person happy. They could spend $800 on fine wine, hookers and blow or a trip to someplace sunny and that could also make them happy. At the end, they have nothing to show for it, except the utility of the pursuit of happiness. He isn't depriving someone else of the ability of buying an $800 oscillator.

Prices of certain vintage instruments are out of reach for mere mortals, but I can't think of a single example where their musical utility couldn't be replicated by something cheaper or currently manufactured - especially for the punk aesthetic.

4) Be part of the solution
If you feel gear is too expensive, start building and selling it yourself. The information is out there, all you need is motivation and time.

He continues:

"Let me expand some here...I've put about $2500 into a DotCom modular, and I did so while my wife and I were in grad school and I was working at Starbucks in my spare time."

Woah. So, after all that you have a $2500 modular? With your socialist mindset, I suggest you start some sort of co-op where you provide inexpensive access to your awesome modular to your starving, meth-addicted friends.

Last Stand Against Telecom Immunity

The White House decided it could spy on Americans without getting warrants. If this precedent doesn't chill you to the bone, there isn't anything left I can say. The Government asked telecoms to break numerous federal laws in exchange for profit. It is as simple as that. They were not motivated by 'patriotism' as some would have you believe (as if spying on Americans without a warrant is patriotic), they were motivated by profit. Now the administration is applying significant pressure to provide retroactive immunity to telcoms that co-operated.

Yesterday, the Senate approved telecom immunity. Our last hope is to convince members of congress to stand firm in conference meetings with the Senate. Don't give them this. Doing so sets a dangerous precedent.

How has it come to this?

If you keep asking yourself this, you should ask what you've done to stop it. If the answer is 'nothing' then do something now. Call your representative and tell them how absurd this is. It only takes a few moments to make your voice heard.

monome 64 tilt

Musical instruments allow musicians to directly manipulate sound with their hands. There is no latency, the physical and audible feedback is instantaneous and corresponds to physical laws that human beings understand intuitively. Technology is gradually providing new opportunities for expression and I feel we're still in the infancy of instruments coupled with microprocessors. It has only been 30 years since the Prophet 5. What we're doing today is very primitive, but we're progressing to a future where composers may, for example, shape compositions in real time like molding clay.

I received my 64 yesterday. The monome 64 includes X/Y tilt sensors. I'm using a small application to trigger notes, sent to my modular via a MIDI to CV interface. Another Max patch is gently massaging the output of the tilt sensors to a roughly 0-127 range. After some post interface smoothing via a lag processor, the tilt is directly controlling a VCA and filter cutoff, so I'm articulating the notes with the physical movement of the device.

Later in the video, I'm also routing the tilt sensor to control the rate of an LFO which is triggering an envelope of another VCA which is gating the output.




Here is the source if you're interested.