zeal has been appearing in interesting corners of the blogosphere in the last couple of days. there’s an interview at fiese falle about process and gear. they’re the sort of things that interest me in interviews so maybe you’ll be into it.
also, there’s a write up about my guitar hero to midi app AXIS on one of my fav blogs – hack a day.
the post has drawn out some entertaining flames like: “Get a haircut and a real job. Also, learn to play the real guitar. It’s a lot more fun, I promise.”
upon reading that i got a hair cut and a real job and learned to play the “real” guitar. it’s not as fun.
speaking of fun – fun new things to buy appearing soon and even fun new ways to buy said fun new things. but for now…
spent the last two weeks finishing my new album. i don’t think i’ve mentioned what’s it’s going to be called yet… i don’t think i will now either. but i will moon soon. a few tracks are mastered and i’m being a one man CD duplication factory this very second, pumping out a small pile of cd singles. feels like we should have been done with these lumbering circular plastic things 5 years ago. catch up radio! next step, artwork. it’s quite exciting. you’ll like the album, i promise. it makes mention of robots a few times and there’s this three note refrain that’s sprinkled through out the 15 or so tracks which all weave together. it’s almost a concept album… just with a poorly defined concept… more of a unproven hypothesis album.
also on the work bench, for all you unfortunate souls, i’m getting AXIS up and running on windows… i say that but really xp’s alright. the windows versions going to be minus a few small features just because of the way the windows drivers interpret the guitar (or unless someone else can fix it). this is one big step closer to release meaning it will be out before the years up.
i’ve been making stickers too. as i promised: robots and swear words. if you want one you have two options. the hard way: print out the above robot on sticker paper and cut it out. or the super easy way: enter my EP + sticker give away! there’s four days left and it’s super easy.
upped another vid demoing the Guitar Hero to MIDI app AXIS that i’ll be releasing soon. tilt sensors should be on everything! they make the world so much more fun.
i know i haven’t been gigging very much this year. and i could forgive you for thinking i’ve not been doing much on the live music front but you’d be wrong. so very wrong. i don’t want to make you feel bad or anything, it’s just the truth. this is my new guitar hero to midi max app i’ve been working on. it turns the guitar into a playable instrument while keeping all the control functionality of my previous patch. here’s the hastily thrown together blurb i slapped up on my youtube.
An app i’m working on called AXIS. it enables an xbox usb guitar hero controller to output midi to control ableton or any other software or hardware that eats midi.
it has two modes – play and control.
in control mode the buttons, whammy and 3 tilt sensors send out midi messages. this is intended for interfacing with software.
in play mode any musical scale can be superimposed over a guitar hero scale built on the first four buttons. the up pick can be offset to allow rapid playing of fifths or whatnot. the orange button acts as a modifier key allowing change of key and offset on the fly. the D-pad changes scale and the back and start keys change volume (velocity). the three tilt sensors and whammy send out MIDI CCs to control what ever. the tilt sensors on this guitar are particularly awesome, they sit on three different axes and you can make the guitar really expressive.
there’s a little HUD you can sit on top of what ever you’re controlling to monitor mode, key, volume, offset and scale.
i’m sorting out some documentation and then i’ll release it as a stand alone mac app. if a max-head out there want’s to help me port it over to windows that’d be ace. mac and windows interpret the guitar controller differently. once finished, i’ll release the source so people can modify it for other system’s guitars too. I went for an xbox guitar because it’s usb and the tilt sensors and whammy work which is a problem for ps2 guitars/adapters.
at the moment i’m building up my new live show utilizing the guitar to simultaneously shred, trigger samples and effects, control the rest of the track and control the accompanying video. see, i have been busy! and not just on this. i’ve got a whole album of new material which i’ll be relentlessly plugging through out the near future.
this post is little a bit of a tease, now i think of it. perhaps this video might make it appear more substantial.
winter’s the best but the weather’s been holding back shooting on the agnes kain clip again. i’ve been working on everything that can be done inside out of the way of the falling sky water which luckily includes experimenting with projected backgrounds – parallels are cropping up between the agnes clip and the cuba is japan clip again. planning a big rear projection shoot this week. should be a sort of scaled up, person size version of what’s going on down there. i’ll be sure to post something about it. for the moment i’m setting up the mini version…
if you follow my twitter you’ve probably noticed the robot binge. it’s had it’s effect… behold the homunculus!
late last year i picked up a second hand copy of the playstation2 music software “MTV music generator 2″. i was surprised by a few of the quirks i discovered, most importantly it’s ability to sample with a singstar mic(!). couple this with it’s nifty little sample editor that lets you trim, reverse, filter etc. and it’s stepped up to play a significant role in the recording of my next album. so i thought i’d tell you, the intertron, all about it and it’s glorious quirkiness.
so apparently this game had a usb sampling dongle you could buy to plug in your diskman or walkman or horse or what ever we were using back then. it was basically a usb audio interface for your playstation, which is pretty cool, but you’re unlikely to have one just lying around. lucky for us, the software confuses the singstar mic dongle for the sampling kit which turns your ps2 into a sampler sequencer… and a pretty capable one. Continue reading music gerneration station
WTF?
Zeal is 25 year-old Melbournite, Robert Jarvis. He makes indietronica in his bedroom studio and animated music videos about cats in space on his bedroom floor.
Elsewhere...