I decided to take a shot and see if I could find a S/PDIF to USB converter to run my crusty DG Stomp box directly into my audio interface. I really didn’t hold out much hope until I tripped over this link. Damn. I’m kind of out of excuses. (Lame registration required if you want to see the results — I entered all phony stuff and it worked.)

Scott Andrew and Brad Sucks have been having a conversation about text cut-ups ala William Burroughs.

Coincidentally I’ve been playing with the free VST plugin SupaTrigga which constantly comes up as a favorite cut-up/repeater in forums ranging from Traktion to FL Studio to Live. I’m not sure I know how to use it exactly but it’s pretty wild in that it works by setting several values to a degree of randomness such as repeat, slow down and reverse. It follows the tempo of your project and then, depending on the degree (0-100%) of randomness you select it will apply each of those effects.

Again, I’m not sure how to use it but “out of the box” it does great effects. It seems like a wonder for automating drums fills — a process which always drives me bonkers with dread since I’m not a drummer. The weirdest part is is that you never know what it’s going to do, so when you render your project it’s anyone’s guess what it did to the track you applied it to. I found myself re-rendering a lot until I finally figured I need to render just that track and do a proper mixdown. Click on Vincent to hear a quick example of using supatrigger in combination with Fruity’s ZeroX beatslicer. For a full blown cut download “Decent Poetry” which I threw together tonight applying SupaTrigga to the electric piano and drums.

[UPDATE] Here’s a link to the “dry” piano and drums used for “Decent Poetry” featuring my very own now legendary ‘two-fingered’ piano style.

In a bit of over-the-top-shameless-self-promotion I submitted a story to Slashdot this morning on CC Mixter and to my happy horror it was accepted and posted. Typical for /. the comment thread ranges from somewhat informative to ignorant to painful including the requisite “I don’t get remixing” clodormara. Also typical for having a post in /. the Mixter site was completely overwhelmed. The first thing to break was MySQL, then Geeklog, then the whole site. (The whole site will be shaky today so it’s not much use to visit it.)

Meanwhile, Lucas Gonze is a Good Guy. Amongst other accomplishments he created WebJay and did the initial coding for CC Mixter that I eventually took over. Without him there would be no Mixter. Plus he’s been an invaluable asset since launch, I often turn to him for sanity, insanity, consulting and brainstorming. I’ve never personally thanked him publicly or privately and I wanted to rectify that.

When you need that boost, just add a little Jesusonic aka “God’s own effect processor.”

Andy at Waxy is pointing to an eBay Auction of every SubPop single ever. I am two degrees of separation from this Seattle label and I used to pass it almost every day on my way to my favorite coffee joint and gaze wistfully into the very cool looking offices wondering if they would be interested in an over-the-hill ACID splicer who would never, ever play live. Ah, what could have been…

Talk about rock by the numbers! Busted!

http://www.thewebshite.net/nickelback.htm

Pretty amazing, listen all the way through. [via uk-dance]

First let me say, there’s absolutely nothing ACID specific about this particular tutorial, it’s just the way it turned out.

Buried in the Tweakheadz “The Perfect Mix” is this neato trick:

This clip of the great singer songwriter Donkey T demonstrates this technique. What you’re listening for: when the vocals are soft, there is little reverb on it. When he starts singing louder there’s no jump in volume, but the reverb kicks in a lot more.

Cool indeed. Here’s how to do it in ACID:

Read the rest of this page »

I’m such a fuckin hobnobber. While no where near as jealousy irking as the London Blog in my own version of wish-you-were-here-we’re-so-fabulous I attended the Creative Commons party last night and got to hang out with matt, matt and matt all of them sweeter than the next guy, all of them wondering who let the grey beard rabbi in the room. Thanks to the CC crew for sneaking me in.

The party itself? Well, what can I say about a room full of white left-coast lawyers congratulating themselves? The bar was busy.

Many of my readers don’t know that in a previous life I worked on Internet Explorer 3.0 (or Internet Exploder as we called) ten years ago at Microsoft. I was part of the effort that stupidly, blindly and ignorantly insisted on making IE ‘developer friendly.’ In the process we made it the best friend a slimy ad-ware hacker never even dare dream of. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m so fucking sorry. Really.

Now there’s a scare that adware has penetrated the music file format and unfortunately, it’s more than a scare, I know of a few cases where this has struck.

Note in the article that the hole is not in WMA, not in DRM but in IE which is used as a component in the whole process.

Evil on top of stupidity on top of evil blessed by ignorance.

Sigh.

brad sucks has had a very good year. The fact that he was featured on Australia’s Triple-j is actually a really, really big deal. He’s on his way.

Not exactly on the same level, but freaky nice nontheless, I could point out that the current Staccato show features my remix of Norine Braun’s “Be Brave” from Chronic Dreams. The a capella for this song is on CC Mixter.