Tom Whitwell

Accessories

Accessories By Tom Whitwell

Music thing: The Sixty Inch Subwoofer

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: Yes. It's a Sixty Inch Subwoofer. No, it's not new, and it's certainly not coming to a car near you soon (not even the new Renault with three iPod docks). This is a one-off custom unit built in 1997 with the help of a physicist from Georgia Tech: "The cone moves 6 inches peak to peak under full-tilt output... Unfortunately, Tim and his crew didn't realize just how much acoustical power the sub could generate, and didn't build the vehicle to contain it appropriately. Even at less than 1/2 output, the doors were blown off the tracks, and the entire vehicle ballooned in and out several inches."For car audio freaks, bass is a weapon. Search YouTube for 'subwoofer' and you'll enter the slightly alarming world of extreme bass - clips of girls' hair blown up by the bass, and speakers catching fire under the load. For audiophiles, bass is expensive. The biggest subwoofer in the world is an underground chamber containing 16 eighteen-inch speakers, built underneath what they call "the greatest audio room for private listening in the world". Incredibly, the sixteen speakers are all driven by one eleven-watt tube amp. That's eleven watts, not eleven kilowatts. Awesome.

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News By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: VW's free guitar deal

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: So, VW is giving away a free guitar with (almost) every car sold betweeen October and December as part of a slightly baffling promotion of the iPod-friendly auxillary input in their new car audio system. Yeah, I'm a little confused, too.The guitar is made by First Act, an interesting company who got rich selling children's guitars in Wal-Mart. They're very marketing savvy - with a large custom shop churning out one-offs for bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Franz Ferdinand. The firm was founded by one Bernard Chiu, who made a fortune selling air humidifiers in the '90s.The VW GarageMaster guitar looks ok, if you can excuse the clunky-looking VW logo control knobs. And the cheesy VW gang sign on the headstock. In a world of identical Fender/Gibson clones, it's nice to see a guitar that's part Hagstrom, part Rickenbacker, part Burns, with a scratchplate to match the colour of your car and a VW logo at the 12th fret.The only real innovation in the VW guitar is a built in active analog amp modelling circuit, which I'm guessing works a little like a SansAmp pedal. It means you can plug the guitar straight into your VW car stereo and... well, I'm not exactly sure how you're supposed to play in your car, but that's the idea. Of course, if you like the guitar but don't want to buy the car, expect these things to be all over eBay in a few weeks, and cluttering up lofts for years to come.

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Music Thing: Frontier Alphatrack

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: At first glance, there are few things outside a 747 flight deck that are more intimidating than a big old recording console. I remember seeing them in music videos when I was a child and wondering how any human being could ever remember what all those hundred of knobs and buttons and sliders were for. Then I grew up and realised that they're really just 40-odd identical channel strips, which do nothing more magical than the volume and tone controls on a home stereo. Unfortunately for lovers of dust and beautifully over-engineered gear, the room-sized recording console is dying out fast, replaced by software and small, neat, racks of pre-amps and analog summing mixers. But the need for faders and knobs remains, and has inspired two slightly weird-looking gadgets. Intrigued? Read on, friends, read on...

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Computing

Computing By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Akai's portable MPC-500

Sometimes, vapourware turns out to be real. There have been rumors, complete with stupid photoshop images, that a portable, pocket-sized sampler/drum machine called the MPC-500 was about to be launched by Akai for at least two years. Last week, after a few leaked photos appeared, it was finally announced: a little black box running on 6 AA batteries, with 12 pads, 16mb of memory and a two-line LCD display beamed straight out of a 1985 pocket calculator. Is it the greatest piece of pocketable audio kit since the Walkman iPod, or just an overpriced toy for DJ wannabes? Keep reading for the full scoop...

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Reviews

Reviews By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Korg's Kaoss Pad 3

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: Yes, it does look like the control panel from a TIE fighter. Yes, it could be a useful part of a Darth Vader Halloween costume. This is the Korg Kaoss Pad 3, announced this week after a leak on Music Thing. Kaoss Pads are fairly cheap digital effects/sampling boxes, but what makes them special is the interface -- a backlit touch-sensitive X-Y pad. When you move your finger over the pad, it changes the sound, tweaking delay time, shifting pitch, scrubbing a sample backwards and forwards. The first Kaoss Pad was introduced in 1999 as a DJ tool (even the new KP3 has only phono ins and outs) and pretty soon it started getting namechecked by the cool kids. Radiohead used them live to recreate studio effects, seen very clearly in this YouTube clip. Meanwhile, Brian Eno was collecting the things: "Kaoss Pads... are a way of taking sounds into the domain of muscular control," he said, as he does. "If you have a few Kaoss Pads in line, like I do, you can really start playing with sound itself, with the physical character of the sound." The KP2 arrived in 2002, with a bit more memory , a few more effects, and a more gig-ready aluminium case. The KP3 is again the same idea, but with still more memory, a USB connection, and SD card so samples can be stored and a crazy pixellated display which can, for no apparent reason, display scrolling text messages. UK Price is £315, and it should be in the shops in October.

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Entertainment By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Boutique effects pedals

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: About a year ago, I wrote about boutique synthesizers -- fantastically obscure boxes hand-made by freaks (normally Scandinavian). Compared with synths, effects pedals are relatively simple -- sometimes just a handful of components, a switch and a couple of knobs in a steel box -- so there are loads of people experimenting and making great-looking but expensive pedals for guitarists. Most of the pedals mentioned here are in the $350-$500 range. Sure, that would buy you a dozen Chinese-made Behringer pedals, but would that make you happy? Zvex RingtoneDisappointingly, Zachary Vex's new Ringtone pedal won't make your vintage strat sound like the Crazy Frog. Instead, it's a 8-step sequencer driving a ring modulator -- the early sound effect used to make the voice of the Daleks, and built into the Commodore 64's SID sound effects chip. It's pretty hard to understand what the Ringtone does, or why it's cool, without watching Zachary's wonderful demo video. Like all boutique pedals, the Ringtone is crazy expensive at $349, but that gets you a hand-made, hand-painted pedal. After the break: Kitsch Brazilian pedals, butch American pedals, clever English pedals, and a fuzzbox with a joystick...

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Accessories

Accessories By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Numark's all-USB DJ console

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: Not so long ago, DJing was simple. You turned up with a box of 12-inch vinyl records. The club / bar / shed / bedroom you were playing would have a pair of Technics SL1200 (or 1210 - the same but black) turntables. The DJ before you would explain how the switches worked on the mixer, you'd try to work out how to get sound in your headphones, and you were in business. Now things are different. Numark's D² Director has one USB port on the front, and two on the back. It can play tracks from a flash drive, an iPod or a portable hard drive.The huge LCD display shows waveforms and playlists, so you can assign tracks to either channel with the assisted beat-matching that's now common. If you can bear the shame, it's even possible to plug a USB keyboard into the thing, so you can search for songs by name. Essentially, it's a more professional version of Numark's IDJ2 iPod mixing console, with the Fisher-Price styling toned down and no iPod dock. Also, unlike the IDJ2, you'll need an external DJ mixer to crossfade between the two outputs. The suggested retail price is $799, which is considerably less than you'll get for a used pair of Technics decks on eBay. Numark has also released a load of other high-high-high end digital DJ gear at Summer NAMM, including the iCDX, a $999 CD player/pod dock, while the HD Mix is a all-in-one mixer, CD player, 80GB hard drive, USB host and effects box for a slightly eye-watering $1,699.

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News By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Roland Micro-BR and Trinity DAW

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: Two new shiny boxes were announced this week. They both run on batteries and can record and edit audio, but they couldn't be more different. In the trashy and corporate corner is the Boss Micro-BR. It's a four-track, with guitar and mic inputs. It's "slightly larger than an iPod," runs on 2 AA batteries, has built in drum sound and effects, and is shinier than a cheap Korean DAP from 2005. This unit is the spiritual offspring of the cassette four-track, which anyone who was in a band in the '80s or early '90s will remember with a mixture of fondness and dread. If for some reason you're recording a demo by yourself, and you can't get to a laptop, it's probably perfect. No price yet, but it won't be much. Meanwhile, in the open source startup corner is the Trinity DAW, a Linux-powered stand alone audio recorder. It's has the professional ins and outs that the Micro-BR so obviously lacks, and is built around a 500mhz processor, 128mb memory, 20gb hard drive and a real screen. It ships with Audacity software which, like most Linux software, is great/cruddy depending who you ask. It can record in stereo with professional microphones that need phantom power, and there's a nifty circular touchpad next to the screen to navigate around the GUI. Unfortunately, there's a whiff of vapour around the project, which currently only exists in rendered form, with an eye-watering price tag of $999. For which price you could probably buy 16 tracks of Micro-BR, or a decent laptop and a pile of software.

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Accessories

Accessories By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Novation's ultra-cheap synth/soundcard/interface

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: Wait! Come back! Stop scrolling! Why should you read about a boring-looking grey synthesizer? I'll tell you why. This week, music geeks have been talking about two things. The first is the Bleep Labs Thingamagoop, the tiny, cute, handmade-in-America noise box with a strobing LED tentacle and surprisingly reasonable $100 price tag. The Thingamagoop represents one end of what's interesting in music gear at the moment -- fun, handmade, not necessarily very practical analog gear put together in garages by Make magazine readers.Then there's this grey plastic synth. It's Novation's new Xio, which represents the other big thing happening in music gear: astonishing value for money. This thing is a USB audio interface, with phantom power and a pre-amp, so you can record using real professional microphones. It's a MIDI controller for racks and soft-synths, with a cool touchpad and joystick and lots of knobs. It's a nice-feeling (if short) semi-weighted keyboard (there's also a 49-key version). And, it's a real stand-alone analog-modelling synth, which you can tweak in your deckchair while it runs off 6 AA batteries. The Xio costs £229 (Maybe $350-$399 retail), significantly cheaper than it's nearest rival, the 3 year-old MicroKorg, which has mini keys and no controller or USB audio features. It's amazing.Chinese manufacturing and cheap DSP chips have revolutionised the music gear business. Sure, this stuff doesn't have much soul, and it probably won't be collectable in 20 years, but it's making the average dorm-room studio a far more exciting place to be. Anyway, you can always invest the change in a small family of Thingamagoops.

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All-tube digital clock, seven years in the making

Nixie clocks, which use little vacuum tubes to display the numbers, have been around for a while. Geeks build them, hipsters put them in their lofts, and they range from very cool to not so cool. Now Friedhelm Bruegmann, a member of the German Tube Collectors Association, has spent seven years of his life putting together an all-tube digital clock. Instead of a little quartz module, he uses 103 tubes to calculate and display the time. Yes, it looks like a small army of pointy silver-headed robots. No, it's not for sale, but Friedhelm's site is so detailed, you can probably hack one together yourself in a decade or so.[Via Music Thing]

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News By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Qwerty Keytars

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: Nothing screams 'wrong' quite as loudly as a keytar. If you've ever seen Belinda Bedekovic, the Croatian keytar queen, you'll know what I mean. But while traditional keytars are undergoing a kitsch rennaisance (witness Justin Hawkins from the Darkness riding a giant tiger while playing a Roland AX-7), wiley Euro supergeeks tend to roll their own qwerty keytars for live gigs. The guy in the picture is Droon, a breakcore musician and video game designer from Antwerp, Belgium, playing at a party called 'Breakcore Gives Me Wood'. If you want to swap the MIG helmet for a pink feather boa, Swiss techno producer Aster Oh has an awesome pink zebra-fur covered keyboard, and Alexi Shulgin, who covers Nirvana songs on an old PC as 386DX, plays a vanilla PC keyboard with a guitar strap on stage at events like Dorkbot London.Aside from laughing at arty Europeans, the interesting thing about gigging with a ASCII keyboard rather than black and white notes is that it makes a lot of sense. If you're using loop-based software like Ableton Live, then triggering loops from 100+ clearly labelled keys works just fine. Alternatively, you could keep it old school and use Back To Basics, a simple $40 program to trigger samples from a keyboard.

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Reviews

Reviews By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: Tomy Voice-Corder

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: Even after decades of home taping on cassettes, burning CDs and recording 48 digital tracks on a $300 PC, there's something magic about the idea of making your own vinyl. If we could all press 12-inch singles in our bedrooms, wouldn't that be cool? That's why it's such a shame that the Tomy Voice-Corder falls into the 'noteworthy vintage equipment' department. Of course, it's also a toy, not a serious piece of kit. Launched in 1972, but still looking hot today, the Voice-Corder allowed spoilt Japanese kids to record minature plastic disks. The blue arm records, while the red arm plays back. The Voice-Corder was, inevitably, a financial disaster, and is now so rare that it's only recently been rediscovered by Miniorgan.com, the fantastic online library of kitsch sound boxes from the last century.

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Entertainment By Tom Whitwell

Blue Man Group's crazy musical instrument toys

We're no fans of over-enthusiastic men in face paint, but there's something very appealing about this, the first of the Blue Man Group's new toy range. They all rocking the same PVC tubing meets Apple G5 meets Fisher Price styling, and feature "new proximity sensor technology, pre-programmed songs [and] interchangeable instrument sounds" to "enable kids to mix and layer music with a simple wave of their hands." This is the 'Percussion Tubes' model; the little green drawer on the right is for your iPod, which can play out of the speakers so you can "jam along with your favourite tracks." There's also a keyboard version, and a more interesting sounding Drum Suit and Air Pole. Can't wait until the circuit benders get their hands on these, which they surely will, the Percussion Tubes being $69, and the Keyboard being $79 -- available in July.

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Entertainment By Tom Whitwell

Music Thing: The Tritare

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment: One of the first columns I ever wrote for Engadget was about Triple Neck Guitars, which are normally played by heavy metal guitarists with curly perms and an enthusiasm for lengthy solos. Now, straight outta the Mathematics department of a Canadian university, comes the Tritare: A guitar with three necks, but only six strings. Last week, at the Acoustical Society of America's 151st meeting in Providence, RI, Sophie Léger of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Université de Moncton, Canada, presented a paper on "A New Family of Stringed Musical Instruments". She's one of the inventors of the Tritare. It has triple-ended strings - one string goes up the fretted neck, and the other two resonate on the second, and third, fretless necks (which the guitar is standing on in this picture). You play it roughly like a normal guitar, with the two necks down to your right. Obviously, the interesting bit is the sound, and this page contains several samples, which are amazing. Presumably they're uneffected, but sound alternately like bells or reverb-covered 'Paris Texas' slide guitar. The Canadial professors are trying to market the Tritare as a product -- there's a homepage at Tritare.com, but absent are prices or availability. They're also experimenting with networks of strings, which at the moment are more at the clanking and atonal end of things. Of course, if three necks doesn't sound hardcore enough, you could always build a double body guitar.

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