someone who's doing some things
Music is a huge part of my life so it’s almost certain that this category will have a lot of stuff in it.
I nearly missed it but found their tweet this morning letting me know that the song of theirs that I love so much “Crease in his hat” is on iTunes, and Amazon, and, after a tiny bit of looking, it’s on Spotify too. All of which is brilliant.
The best thing was that they got in touch with me at all. It reminds me of how different things are these days. There was a time when it was really difficult to get in touch with bands or musicians you liked. These days they get in touch with you!
I think I’ve probably posted all of the individual posts I’m going to now about the Play Space. It was an amazing day and I think it well really well overall. Hopefully we’ll do something like this again in the not too distant future.
If you want to see all of the post about it you can click on the tag SoundLab (just click here).
So I finally got myself a copy of this. Not on the first run. I missed that, and even though I did have a look on eBay for them I decided not to pay the huge prices there. Instead I got one on the second run, for just £8 in the end.
I haven’t heard good things about this. A lot of people seem to have been disappointed by it, but I’ll give it a listen and post again when I have.
I’ve known about SubPac for some time. I think I saw them at a Roli event I was speaking at last year. I thought it was a great idea but I’d never had a chance to try it out, that is not until the SoundLab Play Space event. I have to say that I was really impressed with it. It feels amazing, totally amazing. I think it’s really had to put into words what it’s like as it is really a feeling and an experience and as such it’s difficult to translate it into words.
However, if you ever get a chance to try one out then I’d strongly suggest you do.
I’ve been playing around with this hardware and iOS app for a little while and it’s really good. It works just so well with my Ukulele. I wanted to do some work around creating soundscapes using my Ukulele and iOS effects apps and this has done completely what I needed.
I’ll be putting together some sound samples from this soon, so you’ll be able to hear what I mean.
OMD are playing the Royal Albert Hall next May, and I’ve got tickets. They’re going to play Dazzle Ships and Architecture and Morality too. Dazzle Ships was one of their more experimental albums but actually one of the ones I liked the most. I thought it was a really interesting album and I’ve always enjoyed it.
So I’m looking forward to seeing them live again, but it’s a long time to wait.
I’ve mentioned the Ototo a number of times before, I’m a fan. I really like it. I think that Ototo is a really useful, and a really fun piece of equipment. So it was great to have the Ototo from Dentaku at the SoundLab Play Space. As usual we got it hooked up to a bunch of fruit, which, whilst fun to play with, kind of doesn’t show just how much it can do.
Personally I think that the Ototo excels when used with its interesting range of sensors. Of course, the other thing that you can use the Ototo with is conductive ink. Yep, that works, and works well too. I should post some of the interactions that are possible using the Ototo, and will do soon.
I don’t know what Dentaku have planned for the Ototo, but I do hope it keeps going and moves forward. Anything else would be a shame.
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.
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.
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.
I am Ashley Elsdon 