TomWhitwell
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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.
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.
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.
Music Thing: MIDI-powered Roomba Vacuum Cleaner
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: Can there be any greater expression of man's ingenuity than hacking a robotic vacuum cleaner so that it can pay the Mario Brothers theme? Roombas contain a little beeper and several noisy motors. So Tod Kurt decided he could put the whole thing under MIDI control, so you can play a Roomba from a MIDI keyboard, or sequence it from a computer. Tod wrote a Java application called RoombaMidi, which runs on a Mac driving the Roomba. Connect a keyboard, and when you play an E three octaves below middle C, the robot will spin left. Press the key harder, and it will spin faster. Play a low C sharp and the LED will flash. Hit the key harder, and it will change colour. The low C triggers the vacuum motor, which creates a kind of kick drum thud. Despite featuring both the Pacman theme and Mario Brothers, Tod's demo video isn't too musical, but the sofware can control up to 16 Roombas over different MIDI channels, so a Roomba orchestra is surely coming soon.
Music Thing: The Glitchdesk
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: Circuit Bending, as I'm sure you know, is when you crack open a Speak & Spell or an old Casio keyboard and poke wires into the innards until it sounds freaky. It's one of those things that's fun to do and fun to talk about, although the enjoyment often ends when the music starts.Highly Liquid build high-end circuit bent instruments. They'll take an old Casio SK1 keyboard and turn it into an aluminium keytar with switches on the neck, or they'll sell you a kit to add a MIDI interface to a Speak & Spell. Their new thing is the Glitchdesk system. $249 gets you a big banana jack patchbay, with some clever extras. You (or more likely Mr. Highly Liquid) take your TR-505, or Speak & Math or whatever and run all the contact points out to an RS232 socket. You can plug that into the back of your Glitchdesk, and get instant MIDI control over the bends. It seems like a cool idea, and a pretty reasonable price, given the amount of development work that must have gone into it. However, Circuit Benders tend to be a pretty serious crowd, and they're outraged about the prospect of anyone spending $249 when they could just solder the thing together themselves, and break out some worms.
Music Thing: Monome Controller
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: "The wonderful thing about this device is that is doesn't do anything really," say the developers of the Monome, a minimalist-but-clever button-covered box. "It wasn't intended for any specific application. We'll make several applications, and others will make more. We hope to share as many of these as possible. Drum machines, loopers, 1-bit video transformers, physics models, virtual sliders, math games, etc." Like all the best new interfaces, it’s pretty much impossible to describe, but once you watch the demo video, it seems to be surprisingly flexible and fast to use. I can’t help thinking that something this (or the similar, but different, Tenori On box developed for Yamaha) has huge commercial potential as a cheap and funky sound toy. At the moment, though, it’s a tool for high-end supergeeks, like the wonderful Jazz Mutant Lemur (which is now in production and sells for $2,495).
