A Tasty New Year
Anyone who visits here with any sort of regularity will have noticed that I am partial to the odd challenge now and again. From the latest String Quartet to Every Photo Tells… or SpinTunes, challenges are a great way to…
Oddities
I had no plan to produce two instrumental albums within the space of this year, yet only five months after the release of ‘Obscurities‘, I’m delighted to announce the release of ‘Oddities’. This can be viewed as a direct sequel…
Obscurities
After some fine-tuning of the music from the ‘10 Weeks : 10 Sounds‘ project, I have compiled it into an album that is now ready to download from Bandcamp. The music is embedded on the right-hand side of this site,…
Sound Brush and Rührtrommel
I thought this last challenge was going to be more fun and less challenging than it turned out to be. A quick glance at SoundBrush gives the impression that it could be quite a usable application, a more visual take…
Piano, Ocarina and Rainstick
The piano is certainly the least unusual of all the instruments used in this set of challenges. We have a digital piano (a Yamaha Arius), which can technically also produce string, organ and choir sounds, but I wanted to try…
Launchkey and Thai Gong
We’re back in iOS land this week, with a fairly new instrument application from Novation (who normally specialise in hardware synths and MIDI controllers) called Launchkey. Unlike the other apps I’ve used in this challenge, this is not a music…
MeeBlip and Busilacchio Organ
In late 2011 I received and built a Meeblip synthesiser. This is an open source synth that you build yourself (though a pre-built version is now available). It only costs $50 (for the kit version) and is very well supported…
GarageBand and Egg Shaker
Garageband for the iPad is a ridiculously specified application. I can’t compare it with the regular version of Garageband, as I have never used that, but it certainly seems to possess the hands-on ease of use that I have heard…
More Challenging
Having managed to get halfway through the “10 Weeks – 10 Sounds” challenge with an interesting collection of new tunes, the time has come to step it up a little. February is home to two musical equivalents of NaNoWriMo that…
BeatPad and Mouth Organ
BeatPad is another iOS drum machine, but one that is quite different from DM1, being perhaps more like a variant of the Akai MPC series (though I’ve never used one of those, so I can’t say for certain). Like DM1,…