NEWMODERNSCIENCE » Geeky

2:17am

Chris — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:23:57 +0000

Anymore now with an extremely active family life (read: 6 year old daughter), it’s difficult to pull together time to think through large arrangements. I’ve found it easier to give myself some boundaries and try to help focus what time I do have towards music. After experimenting a bit, I’ve kind of settled on a 5 track method of coming up with musical sketches. By sticking to this “Fundamental 5″ structure of a melody, counter melody, pad or string layer, bass and drums, I can build sketches relatively quickly.

The second piece of it is turning the sketch into something performable. I used to like to just sit back and watch all of my automation and parts fly by on the sequencer, but these days it’s so much more fun to get in it and work with it on the fly. After much, much buying and selling and playing around with different control surfaces, I’ve settled on primarily a 128 grid system that I’ve customized to control both the arrangement and live effects, with the addition of small, flexible controllers that focus on mixing, percussion, and note entry. Using a customized Ableton Live template, I have a setup that gives me a static set of intuitive controls while allowing me to fly compositions and parts in and out at will, and for the most part, disconnect from the computer screen and just focus on manipulating the music through the control surfaces.

This is a sketch that I came up with in the winter of ’09 while at a beach house with the family. I have played through this song a bunch of times with a sort of loose idea of dynamic direction and arrangement that allows me to experiment and self-correct as I play the song, but for the most part, this is a one take.

The State of Media Content Delivery

Chris — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:10:36 +0000

I had an interesting discussion with Carey tonight regarding the current state of media entertainment. We got into a discussion about buying the new Terminator:Salvation movie, and then I kind of started musing about the future of video entertainment. Taking a step back for a second, I have this personal stance these days regarding what I call the “Convenience Tax” when it comes to just about anything. You pay $10 to get your car washed instead of doing it yourself. You pay $8 for a roasted chicken instead of paying $5 and roasting it yourself. I’m constantly examining my spending habits based on how much of a “convenience tax” you pay for what what is essentially instant gratification.

Anyway, the way this works into entertainment is that, despite the fact that I have a decent current library of DVD’s, I have a hard time buying them anymore. For one, we can’t really watch about 90% of them while my daughter is awake because of violence, language, whatever. Second, there are really only a handful that I care to watch over again with any frequency. The rest, I feel could just be rentals.

I’m not even sure if I want to buy Blu-Ray discs, because I feel like even it is a transitional delivery format, but the biggest reason for not buying now is because the future of media, I believe, is digital content delivery. We’ve already seen Netflix on all kinds of devices, Blu-Ray players, PS3, and we ourselves have a Roku that we use with frequency. The Roku, and devices like it, are the future. The Roku has pretty much changed the way we view media. We have ditched cable TV completely. We have a slow and steady queue of stuff coming from Netflix, and we use the Netflix Instant Watch. Occasionally, we rent a movie or TV episode from Amazon Video On Demand. We listen to Pandora, we look at Facebook photos, I catch shows from Revision 3 and Blip.tv.

Back in September, Dreamworks Studio simultaneouly released “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” to theaters AND Sony Blu-Ray players testing out how viable that would be. Of course, it was $24.99 to rent it for 24 hours, and at that price point, you could almost buy the movie. BUT, it does indicate where things are going. I could see in the future, friends gathering in front of a nice home theater system, and renting a first run film, and splitting the cost with your buddies.

Hopefully in the future there will be a balance struck between the convenience and low cost of digital content delivery for the consumer, and a way for the industry to still make money and support the creation of great entertainment.

Button Mashing: The Monome 40h

Chris — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:14:20 +0000

Last year I went through a phase of interest in the grassroots movement of DIY control interfaces for software. One in particular caught my eye: the monome. The monome is basically a grid button interface that you can use to control things. People mostly use it for music, but i’ve seen it used for video, lighting, games, etc. All sorts of stuff. The beauty is that it’s infinitely flexible, only limited by your imagination and programming skill. Sadly, this is the same thing that killed it for me. The program used to control it primarily, is Max/MSP, though it does support other apps using OSC, it’s primary method of communication. Max is difficult, and expensive. You could run all sorts of patches built by the monome-ing community, but in the end, the things that you missed were things like a good save/recall system for presets, and all the hoops you jump through to get it up and running. I found myself messing with getting patches to work, rather than any actual music being made. That being said, it’s a great performance tool. I had the original 40h, then a 64, then a 128. In the end, I sold it because it just took too much time to do something useful, so it ended up being a really cool decoration in my office. My philosophy about gear is always that if it’s not getting used, it needs to go to someone that will, so I sold it to a nice fellow in California.

Now since then, Ableton has teamed up with Cycling ’74, makers of Max, and developed a Max4Live, that allows you to run Max patches right inside Live. This has been the tie in that everyone has been waiting for, and now has once again piqued my interest. I think this time i’d like to build one though. Here’s one of the original videos that sold me on it:

Here’s a bit of work I did when I had mine: