Category: Music

Music is a huge part of my life so it’s almost certain that this category will have a lot of stuff in it.

The Kane Gang: Crease in his hat

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I’ve just bought this old 80’s album on vinyl. I’m pretty sure that at one point I had a cassette of it, mainly for just one track, “Crease in his hat”. It isn’t the best song in the world, not by a long way, but it is a lovely song and I really enjoy it. However, it is almost impossible to find a digital version of this anywhere. Which is why I decided to go for a vinyl copy instead. Sadly it is a little scratched a poppy, but it’ll do. It may improve with cleaning up.

The song is just as I remember, and has exactly the same effect. Which is good, as sometimes when you go back to a track after a long time it isn’t the same, and in fact, the memory can be better than the reality, which can be disappointing. Not so here. It is as I remember it, and it is just as good. At least it is for me anyway.

Using Conductive Ink Proximity Pads with Ableton

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Conductive Ink Proximity Pads controlling Ableton
Conductive Ink Proximity Pads controlling Ableton
Jo setting up the Conductive Ink Proximity Pads
Jo setting up the Conductive Ink Proximity Pads

One of the technologies we had on show at the SoundLab Play Space was Bare Conductive’s Conductive Ink and TouchBoard. We used these to connect to Ableton Live and control a variety of parameters in a set. It took quite a lot of tinkering around to get the pads and the board to work as we wanted, and a lot of time to calibrate the pads to get them sensing and sending MIDI CCs.

Hopefully I’ll be able to release to arduino code for the set we used soon. Hopefully I’ll be able to make some videos too to show how to get it done.

I think that that the TouchBoard is a really cheap and simple way to create effective gestural control via MIDI.

Barcodas Page updated

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If you’re interested I’ve just updated my page of Barcodas barcodes as I’ve added a couple of new ones. I often wonder if it’s just me that is interested in barcode music. So I checked on twitter to see if this was in fact the case. Aside from my tweets about barcodes I can find almost nothing. Well, nothing at all actually.

That’s a shame really I think.

What happened to the new Heaven 17 album?

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I noticed that they were playing at the O2 Shepherd’s bush next month and remembered that there was a lot of talk early this year about a new album. In fact, when I went to see them play last they even did a few tracks from the new album. So it got me to thinking about where that album had gone.

I hope it’ll still come out as I was really pleased to hear that they’d decided to go back to making studio albums again. So I hope it doesn’t just disappear.

The Selector at the Clapham Grand

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Selector at the Clapham Grand
Selector at the Clapham Grand
Selector at the Clapham Grand
Selector at the Clapham Grand
Selector at the Clapham Grand
Selector at the Clapham Grand

I went to see the Selector last Friday at the Clapham Grand. It was an awesome gig. I was never a massive fan of their stuff although I liked the singles “On my radio”, and “3 minute here”, but it was great to hear them live. They had so much energy and enthusiasm and the crowd loved every minute of it.

I haven’t rushed out to buy their stuff or anything, but I’m glad I went to the gig and saw them. It was well worth it.

Lizzie Emeh at the Albany last night

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Support for Lizzie Emeh at the Albany
Support for Lizzie Emeh at the Albany
Lizzie Emeh at the Albany
Lizzie Emeh at the Albany

This was a truly lovely gig last night at the Albany, which is, in my opinion, a great venue. Lizzie was awesome, and the support (who’s name I sadly didn’t catch) was totally amazing. The clicking song was out of this world!

I am just so glad that I went along, and I’m so glad to be a part of Heart n Soul.