Ableton Live 8 Looper & Korg nanoPAD

The music of Yoav is heavily loop based, due to the fact that every sound is either produced by his guitar or his voice. To accomplish this he has several looping delay pedals; In some of his videos on youtube you can clearly see the Boss RC-20XL. These pedals are fun to play with because you can loop and overdub anything placed into the input, then improvise over the loop creating nearly any sound possible. Recently Keyboard Magazine ran a 2-part article on using multiple loopers with live, but their instructions are a little unclear unless you're familiar with Live.

Over the weekend I've experimented and played around alot and produced this Live 8 set, and nanoPAD preset. I don't suggest using the nanoPAD with your feet, but for beatboxing in the style of BeardyMan this will get you there. To get instructions, tips, and download the Live set w/ nanoPAD preset, please continue reading.

Cellular Macro-Photography

Over the weekend I stripped down a Fax Machine & an old Scanner.. lots of neat stuff in there & servos, switches, etc. but there was also a TON of optic devices; mirrors, lenses, lasers, all sorts of cool stuff. Last week MAKE posted an article on using the lens from a DVD player to produce these results & that might provide better images (the lens in a fax machine is pretty extreme) So here's my latest Flickr set: Cellular Macro-Photography

nanoPad pt. 2: an update

Got my nanopad back in commissionion, got a replacement @ guitar center w/ a 2 year extended warranty for $20. hopefully I won't have to use it, and extra prays that the nanoPad won't die 2 days after the warranty expires... fingers crossed & knock on wood.

nanoPad

So I've had my nanoPad for a few weeks now, and low & behold, it's broken... argh... I got it @ Guitar Center which without a car is a MAJOR effort to get there (at least 2 hour-long bus rides involved.) But before it broke I loved it immensely, I mean it's more fun than a barrel full of monkeys but now 2 pads don't work @ all & 1 pad is majorly wonky. I reset it to factory defaults a couple times but it's completely borked.

I wonder why Guitar Center is still around? I mean, I got my beautiful black Ibanez acoustic there & within 2 month it was buzzing in awkward ways, whilst all the gear I've gotten from the wonderful Pianos 'n' Stuff has been properly set-up & worked perfectly for years... Maybe I'm jinxed or something...

c'est la vie.

Geek Gear-Day 2k9

Yea-haw... yesterday was geek-day 2k9, and this time I had a bit more dough and a bit more luck... My shopping list was simple:

1. Drum Sticks
2. Bow & Rosin

But I had a good time, and a bit of good luck... Found some decent deals (spent a little over $100 on alot of quality goods)

Drum sticks & Bow are going to be put to use for sound-design, I just need to wrap the sticks other ends to make them mallets (yarn & bouncy balls)... Need to figure out the methodology behind bowing, rosin & friction, expecially since I have absolutely no intent on using it on string-instruments.

Also I aquired a rig that hooks up 3 mics on one stand, which is going to let me use my DanElectro Free Speech Talk-box along with my mic, and the opportunity to connect my telephone-mic too!

But the pièce de résistance is the Korg nanoPad, It's so easy to set-up and use, although if I get other nano-series controllers I'll have to invest in a powered USB-hub, because my computers mobo doesn't play nice with my front-facing USB ports. Korg has included some other goodies, drum programs, a discount for Ableton Live, and a USB A to USB mini-A cable. This thing is beautifully responsive to velocity, feels as nice as an MPC, it's wafer-thin and the roll & flam are controlled by the X-Y pad in some pretty fun ways allowing for amazing controllerism effects with no software setup. The software for the controller allows an insane amount of tweaking what everything does in all 4 scenes, and you can even drag & drop the order of the scenes, very sexy for $60.

I recently downloaded CamStudio so I'll post some production tutorials fairly soon (I promise.) next big purchase will be a camera, so I can show some non-computer-related sound-fun too!