The Subliminal Kid in the Studio

Low-Gain shared this video with me as inspiration for our performance tonight at the Honey Lounge. Although it’s a few years old, I hadn’t encountered it before. I enjoyed it thoroughly (several times) and thought it would be good to share it here.

Ostracon and Low-Gain Live: Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Unearthed Music just got a new run of cassettes made of my release, Unauthorized Modifications by Ostracon (me and Graham O’Brien). We will have them at shows and select local record stores including Shuga Records in Northeast Minneapolis. Checkout unearthedmusic.com for more details.

A great place to get your tape is at our show this Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at the Honey Lounge in Minneapolis. Master modular maestro, Low-Gain, shares the bill with us. Doors are at 9:00pm and music starts at 10. The new cassettes will be on sale at the show for $5, which includes a free download code (normally $8 just for the download) and if you are one of the 25 customers who bought the previous cassette that was recorded only on one side, bring it to the show and I’ll swap it with a new one for free!

Here’s a sample from our release show on June 24, 2011:
Ostracon Release Show Segment 3

Handmade Music Minneapolis Number Eight

Checkout the eighth installment of Hand Made Music Minneapolis on July 25, 2011 at 9pm at the Hack Factory.

This time the line-up includes Rifflord playing heavy music on handmade gear, Mike Hutchins talking about the same gear, Adam Loper playing his modified organ and leslie cabinet, and Dust Buns.

More information is available here www.tcmaker.org/blog/2011/07/handmade-music-minneapolis-number-eight/.

Brash Ice Video

Jack Sack alerted me to the work of Cheryl E. Leonard who makes instruments, sounds and music from natural materials such as stones and ice. Visit her blog for more information about her work.

Analog Noise Slow Filter Sweep on SoundCloud

Although I’ve used it for few things before, I have decided to try using SoundCloud to distribute some of the sounds from my One Synthesizer Sound Every Day project. I really like the way that people can comment on the audio at different points within the timeline. It also seems like a good way to share beyond the scope of AudioCookbook.org.

On the other hand I recently had a reader comment on how they liked ACB’s current audio player (WPaudio) because it works on iOS. Unfortunately, because it is Flash (iOS doesn’t support Flash) the SoundCloud player will not work on iOS. Conversely WPaudio doesn’t work on Android, although it should. I am curious and would like to get some feedback from ACB readers on this. How many of you use SoundCloud? And what do you think of it becoming the main method of distributing sounds on ACB? Are you an iOS user and will that be a problem for you?

I’d like to use the HTML5 audio element, but then Firefox users would not be able to play the MP3s and although I would like to, I’m not going to find time to convert three and a half years of audio to Ogg files. My ideal audio player would automatically use the HTML5 audio element when it was available and compatible with the format, otherwise it would automatically switch to using a Flash player, and lastly default to a link when nothing else worked. If you know of a player that does this, please let me know. Perhaps it needs to be developed, but it seems like something like this should be out there by now.

In any case, without further ado here’s the first of my daily synthesizer sounds to be published on SoundClound. I’m including it with the WPaudio player and HTML5 audio element as well for comparison purposes. To produce this analog noise I used the LFO on the Roland MKS-80 to slowly sweep the filter. Nothing fancy, but pleasant none-the-less. I ran it through a ping pong delay for some stereo imagery.

The Original WPaudio Player:
Analog Noise Slow Filter Sweep

The SoundCloud Player:
Analog Noise Slow Filter Sweep by Ostraka

Using the HTML5 Audio Element:
Analog Noise Slow Filter Sweep