To celebrate the wonderful summer we are having and to commiserate for the England World Cup team / Andy Murray not going further I have decided to release some of my work Free of Charge under the Creative Commons licensing agreement. That’s nothing, nowt, nada, not a sausage, in short FREE FREE FREE!
The Creative Commons license means you cannot profit from the music but can share with your friends and family ’til your heart’s content – which I would be most grateful if you would.
Have a little listen to these three beauties and let me know what you think:
I have started looking longer and harder at my Acer Aspire One Netbook as a music making device and have been playing with the awesome tracker Renoise.
The user interface is a little bewildering to start with – especially if like me you are used to a traditional sequencer, however with a little patience and a few tutorials things start slotting into place.
I have Renoise running smoothly on my Windows 7 Netbook with the CPU meter rarely going over 10%. This seems like a match made in heaven! Oh and did I mention that it can run happily using the onboard sound card?
and download either or both of these wonderful free soft synths. The real beauty of these synths is that they are lightweight by todays standards and can be run standalone.
With the software downloaded and extracted all you need to do is set up your ASIO device (ASIO4ALL seems to work pretty well in this instance) and MIDI settings. I personally have tested this with my Novation X-Station and can report latency free playing with the CPU meter maxing at around 20% and averages at around 9-13%.
Out of the two instruments the MiniMogueVA works slightly better with the limitations of the Netbook screen resolution. To get the most out of it you should turn off the on screen keyboard so that you can see all of the parameters.
Above is a screen grab from my Netbook running Windows 7 and MiniMogueVA.
With my Muvi digital camcorder I decided to capture some footage on the London Underground with the intention of maybe taking some of the interesting elements and using them within a video to accompany an existing piece of music. However when I started importing the clips into Ableton Live I quickly realised that it is possible to edit the video like audio clips. This then got me thinking that I could create a piece of music inspired by the video clips and using the sound as a musique concrète source. Here is the video of said experiment:
What I learned from this experiment was:
The music and video components need to be edited independently of one another so that they stand up on their own
Composing visual elements helped me to build a basic structure to the music a lot quicker than starting with a blank arrange window
Ableton Live can stretch video easily to get things in time
Using the source audio from the video with added FX adds another layer of detail to the music
