Keston and Westdal at Nublu NYC

Posted on February 6, 2009 by John CS Keston

One Sound Every Day entries are likely to be a little scarce until Monday or Tuesday because I’ll be in New York for a performance at Nublu. The group playing is Keston and Westdal with Graham O’Brien on drums. We’ve been busy preparing for this and other events lately, including the Spark Festival in Minneapolis. I’m excited to be visiting New York again. This will be our fifth performance there as Keston and Westdal, and the third time at Nublu, which is a really great venue. I’m also eagerly anticipating the Spark Festival having just learned that Pole will be performing on February 21, 2009.

That said, while I’m in New York I’m planning on making some binaural recordings of environments, street musicians, musical performances, and general mayhem as I encounter it, so I expect to catch upsoon after I return. New York readers and visitors, please stop by Nublu (between 4th and 5th on Avenue C) this Saturday, February 7. We’ll be playing two sets starting at midnight. Here’s an example of what you might hear during our show.

Ostracon
by Keston and Westdal (Unearthed Music, 2008)

Audio Cookbook on Make: Blog

Posted on January 28, 2009 by John CS Keston

Yesterday afternoon the popular and renowned Make: Blog posted an article about my recent ACB entry, Processing Sound Using Photoshop. From the article:

Over at Audio Cookbook, John Keston has been running a few experiments with using image filters in Photoshop to process sound. Running the audio data through a Gaussian blur or Spherize filter, he was able to create some incredibly diverse effects from a simple electric piano input.

Thanks to Make: Blog author Jason Striegel for the good words. Checkout the full article over on the Make: Blog website. In addition to Make: the article has been written about on many other blogs in English and German including Synthtopia and Media Synesthesia. Who knew it would create such a stir?

Live Looping: Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

Posted on January 18, 2009 by John CS Keston

A few years ago I created a technique for live looping in Ableton Live. I wanted to record and stop recording a clip in the session view without using a bulky MIDI foot controller. So, I came up with the idea of modding a mouse by connecting a simple sustain pedal into the left button. This way I could keep playing my instrument with both hands and record to any clip that the mouse cursor was resting on.

I found that I could do lots of other things while continuing to play two handed, like start a scene, stop a clip, mute a track, etc. Usually I reserve setting up my modded mouse for shows, but it’s a very useful tool in the studio for capturing two handed keyboard parts, like the Rhodes in this segment from a new track.

Live Looped Studio Rhodes

Happy Anniversary Audio Cookbook

Posted on January 16, 2009 by John CS Keston

I registered the AudioCookbook.org domain in December 2007, but the first few entries on the site happened on January 14, 2008, which I am hereby declaring as the birthday of ACB making it one year old as of Wednesday. It has been an interesting year. In July, 2008 I started the One Sound Every Day project. Creating at least seven sounds a week with written accompaniment has been at times exhausting and exhilarating. Regular readers, commentary and contributions from around the globe have kept it fun and inspiring for me along the way. Thanks to sponsorship from Unearthed Music, who provide the hosting for ACB, we are non-profit and free of advertisements.

I would like to thank all the readers / listeners who have set their eyes / ears on ACB. A special thanks goes out to everyone who has commented, either with words or sound, keeping the discussions alive. A very special thanks goes out to the contributors including Simone Giuliani, Michael Koppelman, Nils Westdal, Leafcutter John, and Tom Player. I’d also like to thank Peter Kirn for helping to legitimizing ACB on his site Create Digital Music. Here’s a link to one of Keston and Westdal’s most popular tracks from the late nineties, Sonny’s Cut, off of our first album, Super Structure Baby.

Sonny’s Cut
from Super Structure Baby (2004, Unearthed Music).

Flash Player Version 10.0.12.36 Audio Playback Bug

Posted on December 1, 2008 by John CS Keston

Windows users who have upgraded their Adobe Flash players to version 10.0.12.36 will hear warping and distortion in most of the audio examples on ACB. The problem is a documented bug in the Flash player that only manifests while playing audio that is rendered at either 22kHz or 48kHz. Since most of my mixes are at 48kHz before I convert them to mp3s this problem will effect a lot of ACB readers. Hopefully Adobe will have a fix out soon, but until then please click on the title of the audio rather than the player button to listen if you are experiencing playback issues. If you have an older version of the player, or use a Mac you will not be effected by this bug. Update: apparently Mac users with the new version of the plugin have the problem as well. The problem is described here with an AS2 workaround. I’m still looking at solutions, in the meantime, other than clicking on the title versus the play button, the only other solution is to downgrade your Flash player.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-862