Well Winter NAMM 2012 kicked off this past week and my initial thoughts at the beginning of the week were that it was going to be a bust. If trends mean anything (and apparently they do not) I was under the impression that NAMM was going to be stuck in the perpetual cycle of iterative software announcements. To my pleasant surprise however, we got to see a whole bunch of interesting hardware announcements.
Waldorf Pulse 2
This is one of three serious analog synths announced at this year's NAMM. Analog seems to be back and in a big way. The Waldorf Pulse was the one that excited me the most, mostly because of its form factor. I can see this little guy sitting very nicely next to a Blofield and a DS Evolver.
Arturia
Perhaps garnering the most attention at the show was the Arturia Minibrute. This was a surprise for everyone since Arturia has never produced a hardware synth, let alone an analog. I have seen many a talk over at LivePA.org with excitement about the fact that there is a control for every parameter here. The steiner-parker (no idea what this means) filer also is garnering a lot of talk.
Moog Minitaur
Personally I am not excited about this one, but it has the Moog name on it and is MSRP'd at ~$650. I suppose that is enough for a Moog.
Akai
Akai also seems to have come on very strong this year with a bunch of MPC stuff. The MPC Renaissance is a full on controller for the PC. The MPC Fly looks like a very interesting hardware interface bringing MPC pads to the iPad in a clamshell type case. They also have a nice grouping of Midi controllers that seem to be stepping up the level a notch.
Nektar Panorama Controller for Reason
The final piece of gear that surprised me was the Nektar hardware controller for Reason. We have seen over the past couple of years a lot of dedicated controllers for Ableton Live. It makes sense that Reason would eventually get one too since it has such a constant interface. I am personally not a Reason user, but this controller has a really solid look to it.
Over the past couple of weeks I have taken a new keen interest in trackers. Some of them of the more traditional sort, some of them not. For years I used to use Buzz, before switching entirely over to hardware. With the rise of the iPhone though there has been an increasing amount of software for music creation on the iPhone itself, and what do you know, some of the traditional tracker concepts seem to work well on the iPhone.
I hope to continue my work on the hardware side, but as a side diversion I plan to play with some software both on my iPhone and on my laptop in short increments.
Hopefully in the next several weeks you will see some song snippets from Nanoloop, MilkyTracker and Sunvox as I begin to learn these programs and dig my fingers into them.
Rise of the Solar Empire is a divergence of sorts for me. This album is focused on more dance oriented beats with almost all of tracks featuring a “four to the floor” kick line. Mixed in with the danceable beats however are the signature pads and melody lines you come to expect from Dynamic Interplay.
Tracklisting
- Rain Maker
- Henry Boy
- Night the Morning Come
- Journey to the Edge of the Earth
- Rise of the Solar Empire
- Five ‘Till Touchdown
- Echoes
- Hop Scotch
- Hopes & Space Dreams
- Eyes Closed & Waiting
All Tracks (c) Matthew A. Supert 2007 unless otherwise noted. All work including music and artwork is released under Creative Commons sharealike license 2.5. For more information please visit the .:Creative Commons 2.5 Deed:. for this webpage.
Well it seems I have moved into another one of those writers block moments with my music. These seem to happen with me about every two years. Perhaps I just get bored with what I am doing. Anyone who has known me on these boards knows it takes me an eternity to write any music at all. Usually at least a month for a track. Currently I am in another one of those funks, twiddling my thumbs as to what I want to do now. About two years ago I quit production on the computer to focus on doing LivePA work and to try a new style of music. At first that started out great as anything else does and I was getting some pretty good shows, but at a great expense to me. I now have not done any live shows in over a year. The cost of driving out to those shows and everything was costing me a lot of money, and to be honest not that many people are looking for downtempo livePA acts. Again I am at that sort of point in my music where I am wondering where do I go from here.Do I bring the MAS productions style and alias out of retirement, go back to computer production and back to more ambient music? On the one hand I really do want to do that and I am beginning to miss some of the stuff that I was able to o in Buzz. On the other hand I tried to move away from that vowing to go in a different direction with my music, only to find myself stuck at the same point I was two years ago, and two years even before that. I suppose one of the things I am missing most right now is the gratification of my music. With the computer production I was really putting out some great songs and getting a lot of feedback online for my work. I left that behind for the LivePA work though, and for a while, while I was doing live shows, that was able to satisfy me because I had that feedback from the crowds. But since I have not been really putting out the shows, especially not the music as regularly as I used to, everything just seems to be lacking at this moment. I suppose one of the things that is perhaps behind this as well is that I am done with college and now looking for a job. Ironically enough my time at college the past six years gave me some of the best free-time I have ever had to make music and those two things in my life really connect. My best music came out of those six years. Despite the some of the stereotypes of most college students I was really a hermit for most of college, locking myself in my room on Friday and Saturday nights pounding away at music with my headphones on. I really loved that and I was happy as a clam to do that, having my apartment to myself to get some real work done. I have a feeling I am not going to be able to get away with a lot of that anymore. I can already begin to feel pressures and responsibilities piling, pulling my attention and time elsewhere. Anyways I am just sort of throwing this out there to see if anyone has some insight they can perhaps throw at me. At this point I really feel like getting back into the whole computer production thing, but unfortunately my budget just doesn't allow it at the moment.
Colored faceless is the new album from Dynamic Interplay created with the mindset of minimalism and simplicity at its core. The music has been stripped back to its core sound and was composed live “as is” with only three pieces of gear and minimal post processing.
Tracklisting
- The Light in Your Eyes
- Be Still
- Finder Fip Top
- The Chinese Connection
- Light Waves
- Flutter By
- Raging Bull
- The Tranquility Alternative
- Caught on a Rainbow
All Tracks (c) Matthew A. Supert 2006 unless otherwise noted. All work including music and artwork is released under Creative Commons sharealike license 2.5. For more information please visit the .:Creative Commons 2.5 Deed:. for this webpage.