To MIDIfy a VL-1

So, having got my VL-1 and located my VL-1 MIDI kit, I suddenly realise that I don’t have any instructions to go with it!

I’ve asked highly-liquid for some help as they made the kit.

Getting going with uLoops, or PocketBand …

This is another of those ‘I’ve been meaning to do this for ages …’ type projects. Although not really a project. uLoops, or PocketBand as it seems to be called now is one of a very few Android apps that will a) run on my machine, and b) seems to work.

For a long time I’ve meant to move beyond the basic free version of the app and get the full version, and as it was on sale over the weekend I decided that now was a great time to do just that.

So I hope to get playing with it soon and even make something worthwhile. Who knows, I might even try and get it running on the Android install on my 3G!

App revisit: Star6

It was only through going over my old apps in iTunes that I actually remembered this one. Really quite innovative when it came out, and a lot of fun to play with now. I got it running again on my 3G and it works fine, so much so that I found myself playing around with it for a lot longer than I’d expected to. So it will stay!

Star6 - Agile Partners

Music 4.5 Conference

I thought I’d post this link to a handy article about the Music 4.5 conference on mobile music which I spoke at last week, and also their blog is always a good read for music and tech.

The Vintage Engine

I recorded these samples whilst watching / helping out at last year’s London to Brighton Vintage Car Rally. I made the rhythm track a while back and them it sat there for ages. Then last week a few ideas came together and this got made.

I hope you like it.

App Revisits

It seems strange to be ‘revisiting’ apps in an app economy that’s not even 4 years old as yet, but a lot has happened in the iOS and the mobile world in general in the last 3 and a bit years and I realised the other day that there were loads of apps I didn’t use anymore at all.

Not because they were bad, not because they didn’t serve a purpose, but just because I’d moved on. So I decided to load a whole bunch of them to my older iPhone 3G and see if I could really make it a dedicated music making machine. As I’m writing this I’ve loaded on about 100 ‘old’ apps and I plan to go through them a few at a time, or maybe just one at a time to see if they’re still useful and have a purpose on this device.

So expect to see a stream of posts about these old apps over the next however long it takes.

VL-1 Arrived

I had a VL-1 when they first came out, but I got rid of them. I wish I hadn’t. So I’ve finally got around to getting a new one, or rather a second hand one that is. It’s a little grubby but I think it’ll be quite easy to get cleaned up. Once that’s done, my plan is to MIDIfy it. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Solar Theremin

I decided to build this kit after having it for ages and ages. So I made the whole thing and put it all together and it doesn’t work. I’ve checked every connection, and I can’t find anything wrong with it at all. Except that it doesn’t work. Which is a real shame.

I actually thought I did a really good job of soldering it, which makes it a little worse in a way. Anyway, I think I’ll leave it for a while and go back to it to see if I can work out what’s wrong with it.

New section on hard to find Palm OS music apps added

Of interest to very few people I know, but even so I’ve decided to put it up here in case anyone is desperate for these things. It seems that now I’ve started to look for these things I keep remembering and finding more things that I think would be useful for this section.

So I’ll add more as a little archive of Palm OS music making history.

Playing with Android Inventor: A very simple drum pad

I mentioned before that I’ve been playing with Android inventor now that it’s on MIT’s servers. The first thing I tried to do with it was to make something vaguely musical. Well, ok, not that musical to be honest. I thought I’d try and do something like a little drum pad to start with.

It works, sort of, but it really isn’t too useful sadly, as the drum sound only triggers when you take your finger off the button and not when you press it. So I really need a new way of getting that to work.