Another year gone, another bumper crop of tips, tricks and trivia to summarise. It’s been quite a big year for Podcomplex, with a lot of content added to the blog and a massive database of music opened up in the independent artists section. The OMS platform has itself been evolving, and artists can now sell their music here as well as distributing it for free. But what are the blog highlights of the past year?
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Social networking sites have obvious benefits for artist promotion - they provide a platform where groups of people sharing common interests and tastes can interact, and they facilitate communication to and between these people. Sites like MySpace have long been hubs of musical promotion, but Facebook has now opened its doors to musicians also…
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The ‘music industry’ has at last awoken to acknowledge the existence of ‘new’ music distribution networks such as the World Wide Web and P2P. It has also begun to realise that quashing these technologies by imposing crippling Digital Rights Management on digital recordings may not be terribly effective, and so a new business model has been proposed - the 360-Degree record deal…
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Stockhausen is one of the legendary names of experimental music, developing music concréte and arcane audio technology in ways that were both pioneering and remarkably complex. He passed away on December 5th, but many people may only have a vague notion of him as the guy who made weird noises using trains and helicopters - and he was the one who called 9/11 a “work of art”…
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Apologies for the title, but it’s been too long since I’ve had a pun on here - and after all, a good pun is its own reword. Anyway, to the topic at hand: I was working on Cubase recently, and felt the need to expand my sonic arsenal somewhat. Although Steinberg make a lot of very high-quality VST instruments and effects, they tend to be quite pricey. A good alternative is to have a look for free VST plugins, of which there are many. Of those many, here are a few…
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a bit about using sound loops as a way to kickstart your music production creativity. Today I have some more information about the sound loop world, as well as a few free sound loops you can download and use in your projects…
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The JazzMutant Lemur is a controller like no other - a multi-touch external device with its own CPU, GPU and floating-point processors that can be configured in a modular way to control pretty much any media manipulation software imaginable. Whether you’re a DJ, visual artist or DAW studio music producer, the Lemur is certainly worth a second look…
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I’m not talking about the incredibly unlikely (yet exceedingly useful) Babelfish - rather, the more sophisticated alternatives to those bulky in-ear headphones bundled with your iPod, Zen or (horror) mobile phone. There is a huge range of earbuds out there designed for people who demand a bit more from their portable music playback equipment…
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Few people would argue that technology isn’t changing music - but is technology actually killing music? Certain excerpts from Mark Katz’s book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music seem to express the view that the commodification of music is fundamentally damaging to music as a social and cultural artform - and it all began with Edison…
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The electronic musician on the move will need to choose all hardware carefully - the first thing you need is a reliable computer, and the second is a reliable sound card. I’ve covered some of the aspects of choosing a music laptop in previous posts, but for beginners the task of choosing an audio interface can be even more daunting. Fear not, however, as help is at hand…
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