WeeklyBeats

WeeklyBeats is a new site set up to encourage artists to be more productive, by challenging them to create a new piece of music every week.

Certainly something I need in my life, and I'll try my best to take part.

How it works

Starting on Monday Jan 2nd 2012 00:00:00 GMT (12am), Weeklybeats Members will be allowed to upload 1 song per each week of the year. At the end of the week the upload counter on the home page will restart and all submissions from the previous week will become available for listening and downloading. Members are encouraged to create a new unreleased song for each given week (of course you may submit your song elsewhere as you hold all rights to your content, but it spoils the fun if you release it before hand!)

The objective of Weeklybeats is to encourage musicians to be productive, creative, and have fun!

Contact Mic

I made my first contact mic today.

I damaged it slightly when I was playing with it, but hasn't affected the sound at all.  I still need to find something to house it in, and I need an easy way to attach it to vertical surfaces with out it sliding off.  I read some where about someone using magnets to do it, which I may do.  But what about non metallic surfaces?

Got any tips?

I've got a lot of piezo discs lying around, so I'm going to be making more of these and experimenting with them.  In fact, next time I'll be building one with a FET buffer preamp, following the schematic and advice on this page (thanks to Durk Kooistra for sharing this with me).  I'll also be attempting to make a hydrophone. ^.^

Here's a little recording I made with it by pressing it against a USB fan:

Download: MP3/WAV

The Sound of 'Black Swan'

ChipdiscoDJ

Crayolon (aka Syphus... aka Brendan Ratliff) has released a very neat piece of software built with Processing!

ChipdiscoDJ allows you to mix your MOD/XM/S3M files, in almost the same way a real life DJ would with records!

Only it's better, because modules allow you more control over the song than a static format like MP3, WAV, or a crappy piece of vinyl (teehee).

ChipdiscoDJ Allows you to mute and unmute channels within the each song, so you can mix certain elements together (e.g. drums from one track, bass and melody from another).  It can also change the BPM without altering the pitch, so now you can beatmatch and stay in tune!

Visit Crayolon.net for other cool stuff by Syphus!

GameSoundCon 2010: "Introduction to Game Audio"