Don’t ask me how I found it but someone on the BuzzChurch forums, er, “reprinted” Computer Music Magazine’s latest EQ Frequency Use Chart.

Sometimes you want “dirt” in your final mix, most often you don’t. In either case you want to be in control of it. Of course there no substitute for using your ears (heaven forbid!) but every bit helps.

If you are a remixer and don’t already have one you really should and it may as well be this one.

I submitted a remix with samples, ztutz downloads it and records vocals for it and now teru posted his remix:
Deep Down « stream here ».

Oh, and it totally rocks.

Colduct (my favorite turntable artist) and Ablelton anncounced a remix contest. The source materials are in Live format (haven’t heard them yet myself) and there are no rules or prizes (!) posted anywhere. To enter, which you can only do once per contestant, you email in your entry — which again, has no stated formatting. This last point is particularly sticky since Live only renders uncompressed WAVs and AIFFs.

If this was anybody but Coldcut I would call it the lamest contest ever. As it is, I am freaked with excitement to try my hand at it.

Beastie Boys a cappellas for your “personal use” only. (thanks teru)

Penguin Books (UK) is having a remix contest of sorts. “Penguin will publish the winning submissions in a digital audio book with proceeds being donated to charity.”

The samples are spoken word recitals of classics and other stuff I’ve never heard of. “Moby Dick”, “Great Gatsby”, Oscar Wilde, Jack Kerouac (ready by David Carradine) and over 20 others. These are clean, dry recordings, kind of perfect really.

For the life of me I can’t find any license agreement about the samples. Maybe these are Public Domain. That would be too much to ask for.

If you have a wav editor that creates named regions (is there one that doesn’t?) and FL Studio with the Beat Slicer plug-in then you may not realize just what a powerful, customizable beat-slicer you have at your disposal.

If you start with a beat (or voice track) or anything that has easily isolated snippets of sounds, you can mark them off in your wav editor, name them something meaningful to you and load them in FL Studio’s Beat Slicer to assign those names to MIDI keys.

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A new book and DVD “The Art of Digital Music” actually looks somewhat interesting and worth a read/look (not to mention very similar to a boondoggle I was hoping to take myself some day, ah well). At the very least it looks worth stealing with an interviewee list that is destined to intrigue even the coldest heart. So, anybody got a copy?

The craziest, wackiest soundfont editor has got to be Synth Font. (Free for download, donateware, Windows only).

I just poked at the buttons and hammered on sliders for a while and about half the time it would behave like I expected the other half was just wacky (a little too hard to give examples as they just wouldn’t translate to written word).

This application reminds of what it would look like if you threw an AKAI sampler over the swing-set and it turned inside out. It is without a doubt the labor of crazy obsession. No detail is left unresolved — for better or worse.

I will die long before I have time to dive into something like this very deeply for just random use, but there may come a time when I want to construct a complete universe of sounds and I think soundfonts are the most powerful sample- triggering technology. Especially when the software knows what to do with them. For all it’s cartoony and offbeat user interface, SynthFont seems to have a great backend , good sounding, very responsive and healthy on memory.

The editor itself isn’t bad and definitely the most powerful, flexible one for free I’ve ever seen.

The folks at Cakewalk/SONAR have released a “white paper” on the 64bit port of SONAR which upon reading reminded more of I used call a “press release.”

It’s kind of, sort of, could be, interesting with only a few, minor hitches to adoption: there is no hardware, operating system or software that supports 64bit. But once you get over those tiny obstacles this thing looks great!!!.

Yea, ok if you have a xeon you can grab the alpha XP from Microsoft and a pre-pre-pre relase of the 64bit SONAR. But really, there won’t be anything on market that you should rely on to make music for years. For example, as it says:

If you’re wondering what an ‘existing 32-bit plug-in’ is: it’s every effect you have on your machine, every plug-in on the web and all music software in any format for any platform available in the world.

Ah…. I love the smell of VaporWare in the morning.

What do you set your bitrate to when you make your MP3s? More and more MP3s I encounter are using the VBR encode settings and that has sent me back to take another look at the “128 or bust” approach I’ve been taking. Here is a very good, well written, easy to understand article on the whole question with lots of good pros/cons. It’s written from an Ogg/Vorbis point of view but these are universal attributes and MP3 is used as a comparison so it’s well worth the minutes. Section 7. speakes specifically about CBR, VBR and ABR.

[UPDATE] AAC (Apple) compared to MP3