Elvis Costello once said the album title “Spike The Entertainer” was not an eponym, but a call to action.

That thing to the right that looks like it should be a cable joint tester is actually called Spike. My guess is that it’s supposed to be driven through the heart of Mbox, the low-end ProTools box.

Spike is part of a reach-for-the-moon grab by Mackie, the mixer guys, but it requires software. You know, like a sequencer. So they bought Tracktion. Um, OK, they didn’t exactly buy it. They will “assume worldwide distribution and marketing efforts for Tracktion™ software.” Which is French for “we assume worldwide collection of revenues and as for reporting bugs, well, keep reporting that shit to the poor overwhelmed sod sitting in his bathrobe (or less) at the laptop on a TV tray in the middle of his one-room over-hoarded flat in Liverpool.”

Sorry if this entry looks like a lowly excuse to post that ridiculous picture. It is.

It’s a harmonica, it’s a beatbox, it’s both. (This is a big slow download of a Flash file. Almost worth the dowload.)

USA Today has a write up called
Apple’s iTunes might not be only answer to ending piracy but in fact the entire column is about my favorite label who signed me: Magnatune.

XFM Radio recently broadcast Strictly Kev’s “History of Cutup.” This is 40 minute mix/mash of basically every important piece of music in the second half of the 20th century interspersed with Howard Zinn, William Burroughs and even John Lennon describing the grandaddy of cutups: Revolution #9.

I don’t have enough hyperbole to describe how huge a work this is. I’m guessing the actual recording will be a moving target on the web. As of this writing you can get it here. Track listing here.

(..thanks to our neighborhood bloodhound dj snubbz for digging this one out of the yard and dropping it on our doorstep)

Some days I really miss Seattle. Here’s one of those bitchin’ ideas that will probably end in beautiful mayhem and tons of fun: Laptop Battle at Chop Suey this Friday in Seattle.

If anybody is game in the Bay Area just give me buzz.

There are only so many ways to go in the world of remixing today, but it all comes down to: did you get permission from the “owner” of the music to use their material or are you using the material outside the bounds of authorization. I don’t know of a “grey area” between the two points I mentioned above. (I am not a lawyer, nothing you read on this site is to be taken as valid legal interpretation of the laws that may or may not apply where you live and post to the Internet.)

Now I’d like to tell you where to get music for remxing that you may or may not have the rights to.

(Make sure to giggle at the picture of Mickey as a pirate. That way the use of that image is considered “satire.”)

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A big props and thanks to natural studio for uploading (and maintaining!) a great drum set as an SF2 format soundfont . (WinRAR required for the individual set pieces, a lot of patience required if you download the whole thing in one shot.)
[via chellman]

This is a continuation of our rip and remix series that focuses on how to isolate vocals from a backing track that started here in Part 1. This part continues the list of specific tips and techniques for manipulating the wave file and fitting it into your remix started in here in Part 3. This entry has a lot of subjective opinions (even more than the other parts of the series) so keep that in mind. Hopefully you have a sound, or at least an emotion in your head and heart that you are trying to express. You need to fiddle with the knobs until you get that sound and emotion. I’m still fiddling with mine, thank you very much, and I expect you to do the same with yours as opposed to, you know, mine, which I’m already fiddling with.

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This is the third in a series on answering the question of how to isolate vocals from the rest of a track. The series started in Part 1 with some background and plugins, then explained what kind of tracks are more suitable than others in Part 2 and now delves into the specifics on tools and techniques.

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