Category: Sonic Interactions
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DillaTime
These days I’m having an amazing time reading Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time, enjoying the blending of historic biography and musical breakdowns. If you read my blog you’ll know I’m a fan of visual representations of music and sound and Dilla Time’s central sentiment is best summarized by this image of J Dilla’s main approach to juxtaposing…
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Modding a SD-1 Pedal
I’ve had a Boss Super Overdrive pedal on my pedalboard for decades, it’s gives me a crunchy overdriven tube amp sound at lower volumes and now that I’m comfortable with modifying my guitar pedals I’ll take the soldering iron to this old classic. Today I started with the Brian Wampler’s Cuervo Mod, which I found…
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Building a Stomp Box
For ages I have been curious about what goes into making guitar effects pedals. I’ve had so many stomp boxes over the years, seen articles on people building them but stayed away from trying it myself until this past year when I picked up a few books on the topic:Craig Anderton’s Electronic Projects for MusiciansBrian…
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Updating Bluez on RPi
Update (Jul 9, 2019):Now, Raspbian Buster, released on 6/20/2019, has bluez 5.50 by default! This post shows how to update BlueZ on Raspberry Pi from 5.43 (the default version comes with Raspbian Stretch) to 5.50 (released notes [1]). In this post, I assume that you already have a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ or Raspberry Pi Zero W running Raspbian Stretch. Steps [2]1. Check Current BlueZ Version1-1. Before…
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Song Sketching
Today I also listened to an interesting podcast by TapeOp with an interview with Michael Beinhorn, the producer of Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock album (featuring Rockit) and Soundgarden’s seminal album Superunknown. The interview centred around the importance of preproduction, detailing the lack of proper preparation that most artists experience before going into a studio to…
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Arranging music
I’ve always been fascinated with the art of music arrangement, from the early days of playing in a band and figuring out the length of sections, introductions, middle sections and bridges to endings. In university I learned about how to write for larger ensembles and various instruments, learning about harmonic support of melodies in Jazz…
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Algorithmic Composition
Teaching a workshop on Algorithmic Composition at an amazing school in Yerevan, Armenia called Tumo – Centre for Creative Technologies. As a person with equal parts enthusiasm for music, design and code, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of using technology to enhance and propel our experiences with music, both creating and enjoying. I…
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Start Music Hacking Now
I keep hearing myself say: There has never been a better time to get into music technology than now – Haig Armen These days there is so many choices of software and hardware platforms and resources designed specifically for any level in what was once an extremely specialized field. Not that kind of Hacking… ‘Hacker…
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Introducing PureData
I’ve been posting my experiments exploring sound/musical instrument design and prototyping, and it occurred to me that although my writing had focussed on the creative process and user experience of playing instruments, it would you the reader to have more context and explanations of the technical side to go beyond just embedding links throughout my…
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SI004 – NonInstrument
Most of my research these days is about getting to the heart of how we interact with musical instruments, exploring the essence of a nuanced touch that a piano player has or that subtle vibrato that makes one guitar player different than another. As a departure or brief interlude I’ve been thinking also about how…