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Resident Advisor's app leads you to the nearest rave
Electronic dance music is booming far, wide and loud at spectacular festivals. As per Ibiza's International Music Summit report, the EDM industry in North America alone rakes in $1.6 billion from live events. It's not just the monstrous Electric Daisy Carnival-style festivals that contribute to the popularity and the revenue, though. There's a plethora of dance music talent gigging across smaller venues too. Resident Advisor's (RA) been one of the more reliable curators of those gigs for the last 14 years. Whether you're in need of some commercial beats at Pacha in New York or want a dose of an offbeat warehouse gig in Paris, RA's been sorting through the clutter for you. Now the site's extending its expertise with a mobile events guide that's optimized for dance music.
Count The Beats: Playing keys and synth live on a Mac (interview).
Over the coming months, the Count The Beats series is going to be taking a closer look at how the Mac (and the accompanying software) fits in with the various components of a typical rock band (drums, bass, electric guitar etc. You get the idea). In this post we're going to take a closer look at keyboards (playing keys and synths) in a live performance context. From honky-tonk piano's on fire to out-of-control oscillating synths, there is so much gear and software out there it can be difficult to know where to start, especially when it comes to playing in a live performance context. Session musician, and good friend of mine, Jon Dean does a fair bit of this, and does it well. In the last few years he's gone from classically trained pianist to Rock 'n Roll, synth and pad-crazy keys extraordinaire. I managed to pull Jon away from his busy touring schedule to sit down with me and a cup of tea with some After Eight Mints (it's a new kind of Rock 'n Roll out there, apparently) to talk controllers, audio interfaces and moving from PC to Mac, with a couple bad musician jokes thrown in for good measure. Even if you're not a keys player, it's interesting to see how the Mac continues to facilitate and encourage creative musicianship to an extent that just wasn't available a few short years ago. Click the Read More link for the interview. Photo credit: kolleggerium on flickr.
Bring the Noise.io!
Noise.io is an interesting-looking synthesizer app for iPhone, due to appear in the App Store in the coming weeks. What's interesting about it is the emphasis on live performance. This is an app designed for use on stage, and comes complete with the advice: "Simply connect the sound output of your iPhone/iPod touch to the mic/lineinput of your mixer, recorder or sound card - and there you are, now you can enrich your tracks or mixes with superb sound effects." Right now, we shall just have to take the developers' word for that, because the app isn't officially released and all we have to go on are the screenshots and a single preview video that hints at what's to come. For seven bucks, it looks like it might be hard to resist.
