The AudioOrchard blog has moved! We can now be found at our new blog site. We’re going to leave this blog here, just for old times sake. But don’t come round here looking for anything new, ‘cuz we’re gone!
Category: Uncategorized
Well, you’re poking about AO’s site and perhaps making music here. You probably like DIY stuff, eh? After all, instead of just listening to Pandora all day, you’re making some of your own music.
I love me some DIY. Here are some other types of do-it-yourself things involving music, mostly hardware:
- fEarful™ Bass Cabinets. Build your own bass guitar or double bass amplification cabinet (you’ll need your own amplifier in addition to the cabinet). The plans are free, and the threads on TalkBass.com are copious. Being that TalkBass is a huge forum, if you have a question during the build, ask away. Someone’s bound to answer. While doing this woodworking is pretty time-consuming, you’ll save a lot of money in sweat equity if you do it this way, and the chosen speaker drivers are supposedly killer for great tone and lots of headroom. Small, lightweight, and loud. That’s a triple threat.
- PAiA Audio Projects. There are tons of projects here. You can build a full-on analog synth with MIDI capability, a theremin, guitar stomp boxes, studio gear, mid-side microphones—the list goes on. Some of the projects, like the Quadrafuzz (which I’ve built), are designed by Craig Anderton, one of the biggest names in DIY music electronics. If you like the smell of solder, and you don’t mind putting together some relatively easy projects, check out PAiA.
- Line 6 ToneCore Developer’s Kit. Now we’re talkin’. I like woodwork, and I like solder, but this is just cool. Having designed DSP effects over the years, this is some cool stuff. In short, you get a guitar stomp box that you can program with your own DSP effects. Yes, you have to know something about DSP, but that’s what www.musicdsp.org is for! Not for the faint of heart or for the luddite, but if you have a mind for a little math and a little research, this is an incredibly cool thing—a platform for your flights of FX fancy.
A little Google-fu will give you tons more options for Guitar Stompbox kits, tube amp kits (guitar or hi-fi), speaker designs, and the like. If you do music, enjoy the process of making something, like to learn, and can afford to spend time in exchange for cash, DIY audio projects might be worth it.
If you haven’t read The Long Tail, well, don’t worry. I haven’t either.
But the concept is familiar to many of us. Instead most of us getting our stuff—our information, our products, our services—from a few providers, as in the “old days,” now we get a little bit of stuff from a lot of different providers.
In the old days, there was NBC, CBS, and ABC. Now, those networks’ news divisions are all hurting, and we have CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox Business, CNN Headline News—you get the idea.
Record companies are not just trying to deal with rampant piracy on the Internet; they’re also having to deal with the next true threat: the Long Tail of small-time-cum-big-time musicians on places like YouTube. The Pomplamooses and OK Go’s start out small, but then go viral. That’s the kind of thing that sells deodorant, if you’re marketing to the suits at the RIAA.
Places like WordPress allow tons of different people to publish their thoughts for the world to see. Bloggers routinely move up in the world nowadays, just based on viral spread (cf. Waiter Rant, Julie and Julia, Sleep Talkin’ Man). Places like Cafepress let, well, bloggers and many other resourceful folks print T-Shirts and coffee mugs and baby clothes for others to buy. Nickel and dime, for the most part. Which is the point.
We live in the Age of the Long Tail indeed.
And, if you’re on Audio Orchard, you’re part of it! You’re perhaps not a professional musician, but you hope to be. But you can not only publish your works on the site, you can also invite others to participate in yet unfinished songs. Lots of people doing what they like, and sharing it with lots of other people who like the immediacy and reality of music that’s not overproduced and not churned out of some pop music hook machine.
So if I can massacre a Shakespeare quote, “If lots of ‘small-time’ music be the food lots of us love, then play on.”
We’re really excited about the next release of AudioOrchard. We’re working hard on some pretty cool features. Here are a few of the bigger ones that we think you’re going to like
- Ability to create “private” songs (i.e. only visible to you and people you invite)
- Effects (Reverb, Delay, and EQ)
- Visualization of the audio waveform (lets you “see” the music)
- Ability to trim the beginning and ending of recorded tracks
- Ability to manually position recorded tracks (i.e. drag it to the left or right)
The goal is to have this next version live by mid to late September. But, we are looking for people who would be interested in being part of the early beta testing program. If you’re interested, let us know in the comments below. Beta testers will have early access to these new features. Plus, just to sweeten the deal, we’ll give beta testers a free one year “Premium” membership (more on this later).
Oh, and here’s a little sneak peak at some of the progress on these new features. What do you think?
Edward Bass over at Audio Silver Lining was gracious enough to do an interview about AudioOrchard.com. Audio Silver Lining is a blog dedicated to online audio tools. He’s covered a lot of the tools in the space and it sounds like he’s got some great interviews lined up this month. Definitely check out his site.
The interview is here…
http://audiosilverlining.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/interview-audio-orchard/
Ok, this week we’ve got another set of videos. I do have a couple of things I really want to write about soon, but today is my birthday and who has time to write on their birthday? 
Peter Erskine has an incredible groove to his playing. These are some short videos on his thoughts about developing your feel. They’re demostrated on the drums, but these ideas really apply to any instrument and any style of music. Check ‘em out!
Do you like notes? Do you like lots of notes? No, I mean LOTS of notes? Then this music is for you!
Paco De Lucia, John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola are all incredible musicians in their own right, but this is just nuts. I wonder if they were getting payed by the note
If you’ve even been to Vegas, you know that sound that greets you when you walk in the door. That beautiful sound of ten gazillion slot machines all chiming at the same time. Ah, the sound of money! Have you ever noticed that their all in the same key? It turns out most slot machines are in the key of C major. There are a few reasons for this. First, having everything in the same key helps prevent massive dis-harmony. I mean, the sound is pretty chaotic as it is, but imagine if everything was in different keys as well. The shear cacophony would drive people out of the casino (which I think would be bad for the casinos revenue). But, the other reason is that some people believe the key of C major is the “happiest” of all keys…. at least that’s what I’ve been told. Also, D minor is the saddest of all keys. So, if you want to keep people at your machine as long as possible, play them happy music. I’m not sure how scientific that is, but I guess if you have to pick a key you might as well pick C major (at the very least, don’t pick a minor key).
Why do I bring this up? Yesterday I got home from the office and my son was playing the latest Mario Galaxy video game (for Nintendo Wii) in the other room. I started noticing the little chime sound that played whenever he would pick up a coin, and it sounded a whole lot like something you’d hear in Vegas. Out of curiosity I walked over to the piano and played a middle C. Same note. Interesting.
For the football loving musicians, here’s the sheet music for a nice little song…
A friend and I were talking the other day about how hard it is to teach music. Keeping students interested is always difficult, but even more so on an instrument like the guitar. It seems a lot of guitar students just want to be able to play their favorite songs from their iPod.
This gots us to usin’ our brains a bit. What about using AudioOrchard.com to help students play along to songs they like? A teacher could set up a song for their students (i.e. drums, bass, vocals, backing guitars, whatever) and then the students assignment for the week is to record themselves playing along each day. At the next lesson the teacher and student could listen back to the recordings from the week and talk about what was good and what needs improvement. By giving students a way to actually hear themselves playing along with their favorite songs they would be more engaged in practice, progress more quickly, have more fun, and therefor (hopefully) continue to pay for more lessons.
So what do you think teachers? Would something like this be helpful for teaching? What could we add to AudioOrchard.com to make it even better as a teaching tool?
