thewhippinpost's blog
The new Windows Vista operating system from Microsoft is basically upon us now. So I've spent a fair number of hours trawling through a small mass of Microsoft techno-babble (around 2 years worth FFS!!) to get a grasp of what goodness - if any - there is in store for us computer-musicians... 'cos let's face it, sooner or later, most of us will be confirmed "Vistarians"!
Making music has just become a little easier with TheWhippinpost's latest new section, simply called: Answers.
That's right, my knowledge-thirsty music-freaks with no lives, after several hours of programming, using Yahoo's freely available Answers API service, TheWhippinpost fired hundreds of music-making questions at it and gathered together all the answers submitted by Yahoo's community into one place, here.
Kicking-off with 10 digestible nuggets of sound mixing essentials you should be practicing when either shaping sounds or balancing the mix.
You might know all, or some of these tips already - cool. However, they've been chosen precisely because they are ones we most-often let slide from our thoughts when dancing with the fairies in laa-laa-land (Note: I'm talking about you here - I've personally never been to laa-laa-land, preferring STRICTLY HETERO nightclubs instead, HTH).
"90 per cent. of musicians are not millionaires—they earn about £15,000 a year from their royalties."
Michael Connarty - Labour MP, Falkirk East.
40,000 musicians and 3,500 record labels (that number seems large to me) have apparently signed a petition to increase the length of time copyright exists on their art... and by extension, of course, the duration royalties are paid.
You'll rarely read posts by me urging you to check-out an artist - in fact, this is the first - but when I do, you're in for an intimate education.
I recently heard Grimewatch on Mary Anne Hobbs' show on BBC Radio 1 and immediately thereafter had to masturbate... I urge you to join me.
Here's a list of Windows Vista-compatible sound cards, as compiled by the good folks at IeXwiki, with comments where appropriate. I've also included what they list as incompatible - but workable - and the just plain incompatible.
On the sleeve-notes to one of Brian Eno's albums (sorry, can't remember which one), I remember reading how he came across an easy trick to achieve an "all-round ambient-type" sound from a stereo recording by wiring a third rear speaker into a stereo amplifier - Brian Eno, for those who don't know, is regarded as the grandfather of ambient sound.
It's been a while since I last read a good 'ole warez debate on the forums.
Press play.
Think of any popular brand in software - Cubase, Reason, FruityLoops, Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc - and you see a brand owing at least some of its success to the "freedom-fighters" of the web: the software crackers.
A side to the software piracy debate that is often overlooked is the scene can potentially be worth $millions to the right company with the right software. I'm gonna show you how this works using a forum post written by a member called Prime:
I was watching a Reason tutorial video the other day and there was this dude who obviously hadn't learnt the art of editing video... 'cos there wasn't any! We're left watching this guy sitting at his PC figuring out where to go with this sample that was looping... and looping... and looping!
We've already discussed a few tips to find the key of a song which invlolved mainly trial and error.
But as with anything, practise makes perfect and with this piece of kit from Solfege, you can train your ears to recognise chords and timing intervals, plus more by the looks of it:
