All of Precambrian Resonance Available for Preview

HamamatsuUnearthed Music has made all of Precambrian Resonance available as full-length 128kbps MP3 previews on Unearthed Music. The entire album is also streaming on last.fm. Here’s track eight, Hamamatsu No. G210. You might remember a rough mix of it from an earlier entry, which revealed how the title came about, and mentioned a release date of March 24, 2009. So, technically I’m four months late on this project. Although negotiating postponement was not an issue, since I’m a label partner. In any case, it’s done and I’m happy with the results.

Hamamatsu No. G210

Synth Pad Automation

nanoRecently I have been endowed with a fortunate amount of new gear. After upgrading to Ableton Suite 8 it became apparent that my first-gen MacBook Pro was not going to pull the plough. So I have upgraded to the latest model. I have yet to put 8 through its paces to see how well it performs on the new machine, but I have found some time to get it installed and play around a bit.

This audio experiment is a result of that. It consists of a patch I created using the MDA JX-10 emulator. I did little to process it other than some delay, but I used a Korg nanoKONTROL to control the filter and volume of the device. Before I attached the controller I was playing with the filter using the track pad on the Mac. When I wasn’t getting the control I wanted I hooked up the nanoKONTROL and felt a bit more confident manipulating the cutoff and resonance with knobs.

Synth Pad Automation

iPod Touch Audio Glitch

touch_waveformLately I’ve been experimenting with iPod Touch applications for recording sound. Generally it’s necessary to use a headset to make a recording, but my goal is to figure out a practical way to bypass the headset with an input for a high quality microphone. While unsuccessfully testing my Audio Technica AT822 stereo mic as an input for the iPod Touch I captured an interesting glitch within the application I was testing.

The low frequency waveform (shown in the image at the left) played at regular intervals while I had the microphone attached. Perhaps it’s some sort of communication protocol for headset controls. I removed the DC offset, but otherwise left it as it was. Perhaps I’ll try playing it back at some higher frequencies to see it’s useful for anything musically.

iPod Touch Glitch

Warning: Unpleasant Audio of Sound Card Glitch

m-audioAfter upgrading my G4 to Safari 4.0.2 today, my M-Audio 2496 PCI bus internal sound card started making this horrible sound anytime audio was played on it. My first instinct was to capture the sound so I plugged a cable into my laptop and grabbed a few seconds of it in Audacity. Listen at your own risk. It’s loud and unpleasant, but somehow fun and delightful (reminding me of someone I once dated in the past). Fortunately after reinstalling the drivers it started behaving properly again (unfortunately this technique doesn’t work on partners).

Sound Card Glitch

Time Correction Mangled Audio With Reverb and Delay

halfIt’s been a while since I have gone crazy applying layers and layers of mad processing to a chunk of sound just to hear what happens, but tonight I was demonstrating signal processing to my audio production class, which gave me an excuse to let loose and over process something into oblivion. I started with a one bar loop that I ripped to a .wav using iTunes, then applied reverse and pitch shifting with and without time correction. I topped it off with reverb and delay to meet the requirements of the exercise.

Mangled Time Corrected Audio