Music • Sound • Video • Art

MOTU DP keyboard by Logickeyboard (no less) - Logickeyboard’s custom keyboard for Motu Digital Performer is available though only using the Ultra Thin Aluminum Apple Pro keyboard at the moment. It features all the regular letter, number, and symbol labelling found on a conventional keyboard, so it can be used as your regular keyboard. It’s a bit pricey, but Logickeyboard tells me that they are also developing a set of replacement keycaps for older style Apple keyboards. (This will be much less expensive obviously.)

Bandcamp – I’m probably a little late to announcing this party, but Bandcamp is another free music distribution/viral marketing/sell-your-music-directly-to-the-public site that looks the business. It provides “drop-dead easy tools to share your music with their friends, and most importantly we do it in a way that drives traffic back to you. We also give you complete transparency into how your music is spreading…” The last point refers to their extensive online stats which are pretty impressive. Check out the screencast.   

SoundCloud goes live – I know for sure that I’m late announcing this party, but SoundCloud officially opened to the public recently. SoundCloud is a music distribution/viral marketing/’net 2.0 kind of application with a focus a bit different from Bandcamp. SoundCloud is not really set-up for the general public to find music for downloading. (Though that is possible.) It is keyed more to helping music makers / professionals collaborate and communicate with each other. It’s a well-conceived effort, though there has been some noise around the pricing scheme for their non-free “pro” accounts. 

RadioClouds – One neat feature about SoundCloud is that the API is open to developers. One of the first applications available is called RadioClouds. With RadioClouds you can listen to a lot of new music from SoundCloud without being a member.  RadioClouds displays the name/icon of a SoundCloud member, plays the person’s most popular track, and shows the people the individual is “following” in SoundCloud via a graphical network of icons. Clicking on one of these icons will play the most popular track of the artist and also shows the individual’s network, and so on.

The app is beta so there are a couple of issues: 1) The display of old networks is persistent, so after a few clicks the screen is full of icons and lines and can get pretty confusing; 2) Sometimes when you click an icon, a random artist will play instead. In fairness, perhaps the original choice didn’t have any publicly available tracks so the app picked another for you. (In which case this is not a bug but a feature.)

In any case, you can try it out using my network here. 

Just wanted to mention very quickly that Adam Fielding has released his CD Distant Activity on Magnatune.

Adam Fielding Distant Activity

I don’t know Adam personally, but I am familiar with his work for Jeremy Janzen over at Nucleus SoundLab. Adam contributed a number combinator patches to both Viral Outbreak and ReCombination. His combinators are a marvel of design — beautiful sounding and very functional. (You can see some of them in Jeremy’s video demos of both refills.)

Distant Activity is not my “usual cup of tea” as my personal tastes tend toward instrumental tracks (whatever genre), and this is mostly a quasi – ambient (inadequate term please suggest one), somewhat beat-oriented collection of songs with well-crafted vocals. It’s less ambient than I would have expected based on my limited knowledge of Adam, but this excerpt from his bio on Magnatune highlights how limited that knowledge was:

“Although Adam’s earlier tracks were geared more towards industrial and VGM styles while taking an interest in metal and post-hardcore music, his style would later evolve to encompass a wide variety of sub-genres including dance, ambient, synthpop, downtempo, breaks and neo-classical styles while retaining his unique production style and melodic focus.”

Obviously, a multi-talented guy. You’ll find the player on the next page. I like track 6 in particular. (Then again, it’s the only pure instrumental track so it figures.)