Got contacted by this animator and he seems to be a serious guy so it could be interesting to be involved in doing the music not only for his latest project but if things work out good why not for other projects? It is interesting as in his first animation and this one he is using only Android devices and Android applications and he has a blog where you can follow his exploits... http://animandroidproject.blogspot.com.es/ If you are interested in doing animations with your device there is some videos there that would be good to see as he goes through how he made the first animation and what applications and how he used them. Just one small detail... they are in Spanish but it can be worth seeing anyway even if you do not know the language to get the basic meaning of them and what apps he has been using... The music he is looking for in his own words: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First of all, the music must be made using android apps. I want to work with orchestral sounds, some kind of Scott Bradley music as in the Tom & Jerry animations. Specifically the special way that the sound fit the emotions in the actions of the movie, but working with loops too, because loops and repetitions are a very important part of the movies artistic concept. Of course, I'm open to suggestions. My email address is- josetonnymarquez@gmail.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To finish there is two videos one when he is using Sketch Book Mobile doing the matte paintings for the new animation and one where there is a short preview of the animation that is being worked on... Yes!
Even if it is not an official release Mr Nightradio managed to update all four of his major creations in a short time before the new year!. So there is some new things of course and some of them look interesting but it is hard to say how much as they need to be used to fully understand the scope of them. Maybe the hippest of these is that now you can use SunVox for your Raspberry PI computers! I am looking forward to try it out but guess have to wait for New Years to pass. Specially curious how the sound2ctl module works as the explanation is not clear to me but it sounds like it would have a lot of potential. Here is the list: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can get it here: http://warmplace.ru/soft/beta/sunvox1.7.4.beta1.zip It is available for Windows, Linux, OSX, PalmOS, Windows Mobile and Raspberry Pi (linux_arm). So as you can see so far it is for the free versions and for Android you have to wait a little bit... Sometimes it is good to go old school and with the cameras being good on most devices nowadays you can make professional animation / stop motion videos with your device. Maybe the two problems to run into is to have an area undisturbed and with lights that would work good enough depending on what you want to do... So here is five animation classes from the sixties and lastly there is one video with Michel Gondry working on an animated movie about Noam Chomsky. As the first five videos are more technical and if you have no patience would recommend to at least see the Michel Gondry video as it is a more loose way to do it... I have used one application called Clayframes. Which I like a lot. It has so called onion skin to see an afterimage of the recent photo so you can adjust for the next photo... It also have three options for taking the image- touch, timelapse and best of all sound trigger so if you have set up your device and to be sure that it does not get moved you can fingersnap or handclap and it will take the image and device would never be touched... You can also just use your camera without any application and there is free video editors that you can use to import your images and make into an video... So yes this do not have too much with music making but in this day it seems to me that to get some more attention to your music it is good to make some kind of video and as animation is one way that you can use to make high quality videos it could be a good thing to look into... And with some imagination you can start to use all kinds of applications that can manipulate photos and make highly interesting and personal animations/videos. Playstore link: Clayframes Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968 from B.Pows on Vimeo. Just when you thought that Christmas was over... G-Stomper invites you on a sonic journey for free with three sample packs. One that came ten days ago that I was going to write about but... It is a concept that have been on my mind but G-Stomper beat me to it! It is based on one track by R1772 featuring AmaliaTC and you get all the samples that are used for the song. Think that it is an excellent idea to have the song and it's single shot samples to work with. So here you can listen to the song and here what samples are included. Then there is two sample packs that just came out made as a Christmas gift from
G-Stomper / Functionloops... To hear how they sound like you can go here but as they are free maybe that is not necessary? http://www.planet-h.com/gstomperbb/viewtopic.php?f=7&p=572#p572 Playstore links: GST-FLPH MIXED-3 FREE GST-FLPH MIXED-4 FREE G-Stomper Pak R1772 / AmaliaTC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6YNHq1qc44&feature=player_embedded#t=0
http://vimeo.com/user4921740 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXsCCo8OCw&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvI1VfPQLjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UJFw2aXYE4 http://www.citeworld.com/consumerization/22803/iron-maiden-musicmetric?page=0 If you have the urge to record Ultrasonic sounds with your device here is two microphones that works with Android devices that can use the USB - OTG cable.
Have been thinking about different ways to capture sound lately for samples and even more so after coming across recording made with ultra sensitive microphones capturing the sounds of insects like banana flies and suchlike. Like the idea that you can use such specialized microphones as the ones above on your Android device even though there is not many of us that will have much use of capturing Ultrasonic sounds there is maybe one or two that will find this useful? Here is some information from their website: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Characteristics - 200 K sampling per second. ULTRAMIC200K. - 250 K sampling per second. ULTRAMIC250K. - True 16 bits resolution. - Frequency range up to 100 KHz - 125 KHz. - MEMS high sensistivity Surface Mount Wide-band Ultrasonic Acoustic Sensor. - High quality and low noise analog amplification. - USB device full speed port with a mini B USB connector. - 32 bit 80 MHz integrated microcontroller. - Dimentions: 130 mm lenght x 20 mm diameter. - 8th order antialiasing low pass filter. Applications The ultramic can be used by scientific researchers for: - Environmental impact assessment for wind farms. - Detection and recording of biological ultrasounds for bioacoustic studies on insects, rodents and bats. - Recording and analyzing mouse ultrasonic vocalizations for pharmacological studies. - Detection of the high-frequency noises emitted by switching power supply, by LCD screens, and also by the turbines of car and truck engines. In your house or in your office, discover the ultrasonic noise emitted by your TV, your computers, and by the power adapters of all your electronic devices. Outside, use the UltraMic to record the ultrasonic signals bats emit to echolocate and discover the ultrasonic cries of small rodents. Bats are a very important component of our ecosystems, they are protected since 1930 and recent studies demonstrate that they are important to keep down the population of insects and mosquitos. The ultramic has been developed with the scientific support of CIBRA / University of Pavia. Prices ULTRAMIC200K 200 euros + V.A.T. + shipping cost. ULTRAMIC250K 290 euros + V.A.T. + shipping cost. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To read more about it go here: http://www.dodotronic.com/acoustic-devices/ultramics As the rest of my day is going to include a lot of beer, some herbal tea and Virtual ANS was thinking that I needed to post this song made using SunVox and Virtual ANS. Have started to hear more music being made taking advantage of Virtual ANS as an supplement to music and not as just one standalone music maker by itself. Think that as in this song including Virtual ANS as a synthesizer is a good thing but soon there should be cropping up some more exciting uses of this wonderful application! Just wish that I had more time... Ahhh here is a good in depth review of Syntheogen where he is pointing out the strengths of this interesting multi track application. Please take your time and read it and then support the developer of this excellent application or at least take some time to try out the free demo.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FIRST LOOK REVIEW: Syntheogen 0.10.0 for Android Posted by r on December 16, 2013 Developers of mobile apps for musicians have enough of a challenge set before them without having to consider the evolving nature of mobile-device input. Ten years ago, it was a world of hardware buttons and resistive touchscreens with fine-point styli. Now, of course, the mobile world is all capacitive screens, with no real usable buttons to count on… and if the end user DOES have a stylus, it’ll be fat, sloppy and imprecise at the tip, just like their fingers. With each new fad in mobile-device input, devs targeting mobile devices have had to change up their approach. Apps like SunVox, originally built around the tighter input precision possible with a resistive stylus, may have scads of power but simply aren’t anywhere near as efficient or fun to use on a small screen in our modern capacitive / fat-fingered world. And while the mobile port of Nanoloop has fared quite well with careful work from its developer, most other well-known Gameboy music apps like LSDj quickly go from “total pleasure” to “total PITA” when the easy-to-locate hard buttons of the originally-intended hardware are forcibly traded in for fussy onscreen softkeys in an emulator. As for the many music apps built from scratch for iOS and Android, developers are still figuring out the best approach to the interface. Most such apps, especially those built around the usual sequencer-DAW paradigm, are still trying to clone venerable desktop music apps too closely in their design. Speed of creativity and input often suffer noticeably as a result, even in the best-designed mobile music apps. Maybe we musicians can’t have it all, and are bound to get totally screwed in one way or another as the world continues moving toward simpler / dumber / more portable devices. But I’ve still got to applaud any developer who’s still trying to reinvent this particular wheel in an effort to create a faster shirt-pocket-sized vehicle for musical creation on the go. I see a great deal of this sort of attempted reinvention in Android semi-newcomer Syntheogen, which is stupidly cheap to purchase as of this writing. While the developer is still working, and big changes / important new features are surely to come down the road, I thought I’d make a case that smart musicians with Android devices shouldget in on the Syntheogen ground floor right now… or at least sit down for a couple serious days with the demo. Syntheogen is, as its name would suggest, a synth- and sample-based app at the core. The current sound generation engine is deceptively simple, with plenty of power to get some real music-making done as it stands (even though hardcore synth nerds spoiled by today’s over-engineered, super-whizbang VSTis may needlessly whine a little at first). Basic subtractive 2-osc, FM, single-sample, and wavetable / “hybrid” sampling are currently available. A reasonable selection of LFO- / envelope-patching possibilities and a rather healthy assortment of DSP effects add greatly to the capabilities of Syntheogen’s sonic engine. Just about any useful Android music app is going to be built around some kind of sequencer, since realtime-playable latency is still essentially an impossibility on Android (I send Google a personally-generated, lovingly-selected fecal emission via FedEx on the first of each month to remind them of the importance of legitimately addressing this issue in Android, but I don’t know what else I can do). Syntheogen is no exception, but its sequencer is designed a bit differently from most other such apps. More so than most other mobile apps, and particularly most other viable music apps on Android at this time, Syntheogen has been smartly, cleanly designed to make the absolute most of a phone-sized, mostly-thumb-managed screen at any given time. This is obvious from the first few minutes of tinkering in its very clean-looking interface. The buttons are few and perfectly thumb-sized. The app’s mechanics are all about keeping as few buttons on screen at any time as possible. The screen is given over as much as possible to information that matters about the music you’re making. One very important aspect of Syntheogen’s efficiency– and one that is surprisingly rare among mobile music apps– is the implementation of infinitely-variable pinch-zooming in multiple axes on the note-entry piano roll, the method of note entry in Syntheogen. Trying to enter notes in a piano-roll matrix on a small touchscreen is normally frustrating at best; with this seemingly obvious addition (and a few clever tweaks to its implementation), Syntheogen eases this kind of pain significantly. Whether you need to get a handful of two-octave-wide chords in fast or enter a delicate and tightly-bounded chromatic melody, whether you are hoping to slap down a no-brainer four-on-the-floor-ish kick drum across eight measures or add a disorienting quarter-note-long blast of 64th notes in the middle of a measure, you’re usually never more than a moment’s pinch or two away from the exact view you need to get the job done on that dumb little screen you’ve stuck yourself with. Another factor contributing to mobile usability is the nested, hierarchy-based structure of Syntheogen songs, which should be at least a little familiar to tracker users and/or lovers of loop-based apps like Acid or Ableton. In Syntheogen parlance, “songs” are made from “loops,” which in turn are built up from simultaneously-playing “tracks” (which might better be described as “clips” or “patterns”). Quick access to / movement between these three different levels of musical “structure,” along with their sub-parameters like associated synth and effects patches, is made possible by a thin toolbar on the right-hand side of the screen (starting in v. 0.10.0). Tracks / clips used in a loop can be easily, selectively muted when that loop is brought into a song, and the loop can be “reconfigured” thusly each time it is re-added to the song’s loop playlist. I could easily make, say, a minimal house track with a single all-encompassing loop, controlling the addition and removal of tracks entirely from the Syntheogen song editor with each iteration of the loop. Naturally, there are many more musical applications for this very useful feature. A Syntheogen loop structure must be the same length or longer than its shortest track (i.e. clip). If you bring in a track that is shorter in length than the loop it’s destined for, Syntheogen will simply autoloop the track-clip until the end of the loop. This can add up to quasi-aleatoric fun quickly– try a 16-beat loop comprised of 4-, 7- and 9-beat tracks, for instance. Each song, track and loop is stored as a separate file in Syntheogen, and the user provides the name for each element on creation. Track materials can be reused in multiple patterns and/or songs; by design, tracks and loops can also be easily “cloned” into new copies so as to create new materials based on already-entered stuff. One of the most intriguing and potentially time-saving features of Syntheogen is perhaps not so obvious on the first few uses. This involves its ability to do not just transposition, but “modally-aware” transposition of tracks / clips. This may require a little explanation; here I go. When you start a new track, Syntheogen will ask for the tonic note and modality of the clip– say, C major. If you go with that default option, the only notes visible in the piano roll for that track will be the ones for C major; this also greatly speeds entry and aids usability on mobile devices, as it maximizes the useful pitch-range of the screen and prevents many types of “fat-finger wrong notes.” (Don’t worry, would-be 12-tone serialists; the chromatic mode is also available at the very top of the mode-list, along with some other non-diatonic possibilities like whole-tone scales.) Now let’s say you want to move your C-major idea over the diatonic pitch class B, but remain in C major. If you apply a simple chromatic-transposition operation, as would be the only option available in many such apps, a C-D-E-F-G figure would become B-C#-D#-E-F#. (This option is available in Syntheogen too, by cloning a C major pattern / track into another new track, with a stated move to B major upfront.) But if you want that entered figure to stay diatonic in C major with a minimum of trouble or required editing, just tell Syntheogen to change your already-entered C major,C-D-E-F-G pattern to B Locrian. Doing so will produce the “C-major-correct” B-C-D-E-F. Want to move the same five-note pattern to start on F and still stay diatonic in C? You guessed it: transpose it (or “clone” directly into a new, separate clip) over F Lydian, and out comes F-G-A-B-C. In other words, Syntheogen’s “smarter-than-usual” transposition options give music-theory-literate users the power to creatively recycle materials very quickly without ever having to dig into the piano roll editor to fix resulting “wrong” notes. And on the other hand, there are also many potential creatively-empowering / idea-generating “wrong-note” uses for this interesting aspect of Syntheogen’s design. (See what happens when you move a chromatically-entered passage in Syntheogen into a diatonic mode, or vice versa.) There are lots of other neat features of Syntheogen’s design that maximize the efficient usage of both limited materials and limited screen real estate. Some of them, like the remarkably user-configurable quantization grids / “guides” and the numerically-controlled ability to use only the first x beats of a longer loop when bringing it into a song, hold significant added bonuses for adventurous or academically-oriented composers who want to play with truly crazy rhythms and metric structures once they have the lay of the land in this app. Very few desktop sequencers I’ve used make it so easy to enter, say, a string of 32nd-note septuplets starting exactly a sixteenth-note-quintuplet off the downbeat. (It thusly goes w/o saying that dubstep triplet-to-eighth wobble-toggle is not a problem.) The current versions of Syntheogen run quite efficiently and reliably / predictably. Rendering to .wav is possible at the song or loop level for easy export of Syntheogen materials to your DAW, etc. There are still some important missing features, such as the ability to export Syntheogen songs or other elements in data form directly in-app (although Syntheogen stores everything from individual patches to songs as faux-XML files in a single location, so a filesystem-savvy user can still get this kind of thing done pretty easily). The developer, Jeremy of Anthemion, is actively working on quite a few such features / refinements, and seems unusually responsive to end-user feedback besides. With its carefully-thought-out design for your dumb thumbs, Syntheogen is probably the first half-serious Android music app I’ve tried that is actually fun to use for music-making on a phone-sized screen (maybe more so than on a tablet, actually, although it’s plenty of fun there too). The mobile-optimized workflow means a bit of a learning curve, if not a huge or intimidating one; thankfully, documentation / help is good in-app, with much more detail available online. For anyone interested in making music portably on Android devices, it’s definitely worth trying out Syntheogen and spending a good couple of earnest hours to learn how it works. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Rob Bennett for sharing this review with us. To read more writings of his you can go to his Blog here: http://blargh.lossfoundation.com/ To take a deeper look at all the functions here is the homepage of Syntheogen: http://www.syntheogen.com/about.html There is also an article written by the developer for Musical Android here: http://www.musicalandroid.com/14/post/2013/09/syntheogen-article-by-the-developer-jeremy-neal-kelly.html Playstore link: Syntheogen Here is a short but to the point how to make percussion sounds using subtractive synthesis. The intersting part that it is made using a high end Moog synthesizer and it would be funky if you dear readers tried out any of your Android synthesizers using the same instructions and see how close you can get. If you are happy with your result please share with us. You can send your result and presets etc here - musicalandroid@yahoo.com Here is a Dark ambient album made with Caustic that may be just what you need to curb some of all the Christmas cheer... The last month or so I discovered a wordpress site called Binary Heap by someone going under the name Reaktorplayer. It is a nice site for finding some interesting free music and video software that are unique and different. Would also recommend to follow Reaktorplayer on Twitter as there he also links to other interesting nuggets pertaining to the musical world.
Links: http://reaktorplayer.wordpress.com/ https://twitter.com/reaktorplayer This is just something that have to get shared but take it as something that probably will happen but when and how etc...
There will be Pixilang integration into SunVox... For you that knows what that means you just know how great that will be! And how SunVox will become one Funky Monster of creative possibilities! Yes have to study harder my programming skills to take advantage of Pixilang. In either case there is already some code written by various persons and if it gets integrated there is a big possibility that it will explode as it will get a direct implementation and instant gratification being used inside SunVox. This is for me crazy good news! Here is an announcement from the developer of G-Stomper and the VA-Beast Synthesizer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hi Developers and Sound Designers! The public G-Stomper Content Pack API has been released. The API opens the creation of Add-On Packs to any developer for G-Stomper Beat Studio and G-Stomper VA-Beast Synthesizer (no deep programming skills required). So if you want to create your own Sample-Packs for G-Stomper Beat Studio, Preset Packs for the G-Stomper VA-Beast Synthesizer, or any other Add-On Packs around G-Stomper, check out the API at: https://github.com/planethcom/gstomper-content-pack ... and follow the Readme.md. If you have any questions or just need help to get into it, feel free to ask on the G-Stomper Beat Studio forum. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Will definitely take a closer look at this. G-Stomper Forum: http://www.planet-h.com/gstomperbb/index.php Not exactly Android related but think that it should be posted anyway... To see the Kickstarter page:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chironbramberger/trash-secret-a-musical-journey-inside-technology |
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