DJ Hoax and Friends: Live at Psystream Radio

.:DJ Hoax and Friends: Live at Psystream Radio:.

This week's liveset comes from DJ Hoax from Psystream radio.

Virus TI Atomizer Effect

So I'm willing to bet that most of you have seen the TI's Atomizer effect in the videos posted from NAMM and other trade shows. Well the OS was released to the public as a beta version about two weeks ago (May 12) and while you can't yet process your audio with the TI in a contained computer environment, you can run audio from an external source through the TI for processing. The results so far are pretty amazing, and tonight I recorded a sample live set while using the Atomizer effect. I hope you'll check it out and enjoy it! It's in podcast form FYI, so in order to hear it you'll need to subscribe to the feed.

Click here

Mikronesia Live at Ambient Ping (April 25, 2006)

Mikronesia Live at Ambient Ping (April 25, 2006)

This week's liveset is improvised ambient music by Mikronesia at the Ambient Ping series in Toronto, Canada April 25 2006. Sit back close your eyes and take this one in.

More information can be found at his/her website at: Mikronesia.com

Attigo TT: Touchscreen Turntable Prototype

Final Product // ATTIGO TT from Scott Hobbs on Vimeo.

Now here is something super sweet and something I actually am surprised we have not seen sooner. The Attigo is a touchscreen turntable, basically two touch screens with a large streaming audio interface that you can drag and manipulate in real-time. Not unlike the experimental Protein DS Scratch software.

The device is a prototype right now but Scott Hobbs, the creator is looking to bring it to the mass market.

 

via Crunchgear.com

Tijuana Sound Machine Live

Great video of the group Tijuana Sound Machine showcasing some real talent and a variety of instruments in a live setting.

via Matrixsynth

Leveraging Your Online Presence

Well, I really have been sort of on this online presence and community thing as of late. It is probably due to the fact that I really don't have the time to invest in performing live all that often anymore and I am looking for different avenues to present my music. Online communities (artist or otherwise), music distribution sites and so forth have at the moment become something I have wanted to focus a little bit more attention on. It is a topic that is often talked about briefly but never really discussed deeply. There are so many numerous websites out there that the whole process can be overwhelming. I myself for instance previously went with the approach of getting my music onto as many of these websites as possible to get to as many ears as possible. I have no idea of this approach really worked or not but in the end I inevitably found that I only had the time to concentrate on a couple of websites. For me those ended up being Soundclick.com and to some extent Myspace. I as everyone else jumped onto the Myspace bandwagon when the rush was happening and had quite a bit of traffic on the page....for a while. Now with most all of these websites I have seen traffic dip significantly over the past year. In part due to me not keeping up with the site and in part due to the just lower traffic I think. In that time since I have moved onto numerous other social sites to try to promote myself. Virb, Last.FM and many others that I honestly can't even remember.

 

It makes you sort of wonder though how is the best way to approach this whole online process. On the one hand you want to get in on the ground floor to any site while it is starting. I personally have the strong opinion that in some of the bigger sites it is way too easy to get lost in the crowd. If one joined Myspace today would they even get hits without having some sort of method to channel people to the site? It certainly is too big for the sort of stumbling around method that it had a couple of years ago. On the other site of the fence you are in the same boat of perhaps diluting your time and resources too thinly. Who is to say how much of a user base or traffic these pages are ultimately going to get. Virb is an excellent example of this. The site is great, the flexibility is awesome and there are a few artists on there who are getting hits. Ultimately though I find by browsing through their pages that almost everyone there who is not on the front page has less than 100 song listens and very few friends. It just doesn't have the critical mass to make it appealing in some sense. Do you hang on and hope it pops or let it go?

 

As I mentioned before I have always taken the shotgun approach in the past to these pages, but perhaps a more focused approach to alternative promotion sites is a better way to approach the entire thing. Lets face it. Myspace for example has a ton of problems with it. When all is said and done it is a recognizable brand like Youtube. Putting that link on your business card or flyer is a pretty much sure way to get some hits and people are familiar with it. 

 

Ultimately though I am curious as to what other live musicians are doing. Are there any sites that are really hitting your interest right now? Is Myspace still your staple despite its recent slow down in growth? Did you take the shotgun approach much as I have or are you focusing your listeners to a couple of sites?

 

I would love to hear from what people have found successful.

The Development of Chuck

The above video is a nice introduction inside the development of Chuck, the live performance programming language being developed by the brain heads over at Princeton. Well worth the watch.

You can find out some more information about Chuck on some of our previous posts.

Create Digital Music:Hands on with Audio Cubes

.:Audio Cubes Hands On:.

We have discussed the audiocube on this website before and it is an interesting alternative to controlling software and visuals live. CreateDigitalMusic has posted up a very in depth hands on review of the device that shows some great movies. If you were ever curious about these little cubes this is a great place to start to read more on them.

Justice Live Video

Justice LIVE - D.A.N.C.E / DVNO medley
by justice

Here is a great live video of the group Justice, which I have never heard of. But if you are looking for a little bit of gear porn wait till about two minutes into the video and you will get a nice little look. I won't spoil it for ya.


via Matrixsynth.blogspot.com

Electronic Music Production Communities

This is just a post out to the reader base. Does anyone have any good recommendations for some electronic music communities? As I have mentioned previous on the blog here I am in a sort of funk phase of production at the moment and that may partly be due to the fact that my participation level with other artists online and offline has really fallen off in the past couple of years. This has been doubled by the fact that the two most popular forums that I visited (Samplecity.net and Serious-Sounds.net) are either now gone or not really active anymore.

Now I have made my rounds to the usual suspects: Future-Producers, IDMForums, EM411, Garageband, Sectionz. I am just not getting all that much of a good vibe from any of them. They either come off as too large and too full of wankers spamming their links and never posting real discussions, or as overly pretentious focusing too much on one particular style of music or concept of production. Sectionz for example seems full of FL Studio users who have the same animated attitude towards software as MS and Apple fanboys do to their computer.

So I am sort of on the hunt to look for a good artist community to bounce ideas off of, see what is happening in the latest circles and so forth. There is of course the LivePA.org forums and I am not forgetting those, but I think I am looking for a general user community to just listen to other's music on and may be avoid the pretentiousness, wankery, posturing and so forth that I see on so many other sites.

May be on a side note if no one has any suggestions what sort of stuff would you like to see in a music community for fellow artists?