The DAW touch screen: touch screen device that will run with any application

I haven’t posted anything pro-audio lately so here goes.

For all of you who produced music regularly in their home studios, and who have been looking to spend some money on a new cool device that can massively ease-up your configuration, I would recommend checking out this device:

When I first saw the picture up on Red Leaf’s website (www.dawtouch.com), I thought this was yet another touch screen thingy with a dedicated interface. As the video demonstrates, I was in the wrong. What a breakthrough to be able to control any sequencer whatsoever with the Daw Touch. And its not pressure sensitive – the advanced optical imaging technology makes it smoothly and easily manageable with your fingers, a pen or whatever (for those of you who spend hours upon hours mixing and recording in front of your dual-screens, manipulating keyboard and mouse till you fingers get numb, this seems like a life-saver).

This device is pretty darn amazing and will most probably set a standard for the new DAW generations to come, and for most audio geeks $3500 ain’t that big a deal.

Woof

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David Byrne and beautiful musical contraptions

This ain’t new but it’s still worth a mention. First off, here’s a video of “a software-sequencer controlling 8 solenoids, that knock on different things and therefore produce nice rhythmic patterns”.

And here is an introductory video of the “Playing The Building” project.

Both of these musical works was devised by no other than David Byrne, founding member of the avant-garde 70′s new-wave band, the Talking Heads.

Bark

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Zoom’s Q3: audio and video recorder

This is going to be cool. Zoom is coming out with the Q3 in September -  the first ever pocket-size, semi-professional audio and video recorder to hit the market. Zoom is announcing the street price to be around $250. The Q3 will definitely help tons of bands get their live-gigs uploaded to Youtube. Can’t wait to get one myself. Read more about it in the great music/tech blog Create Digital Music.

Woof!

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The 88 records a 14 track song with an iPhone

Two days ago I posted on a singer-songwriter called Reyna Perez who shot her latest music video entirely off of an iPhone 3Gs, and today I stumble upon this other band called The 88 who recorded their latest track “Love Is The Thing” thanks to an iPhone application called FourTrack. Read about it here, and watch the “making-of” bellow:

Results sound good, even through Youtube’s compression and my laptop’s tiny speakers. Now I can add the iPhone to my recommended list of portable digital recorders.

Woof.

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U2 coming out with a “mobile album” for Blackberrys

Research in Motion (creators of Blackberry), who is sponsoring U2′s 360 tour, is preparing to release their first “mobile album”. Go to http://blackberry.com/u2 to see the trailer.

The application itself seems like a pretty basic bundle of features U2 fans will love playing with. Apparently it allows them to listen to the album, write comments, share pictures and whatnot. One interesting aspect shown in the trailer is the part where we see a materialized concert arena with dots pointing out to some people in the audience (pic seen above). The sequence is introduced by the sentence “Experience the tour from all angles”. Wonder what’s behind such an evasive explanation. My first thought was a feature that would enable fans to shoot videos from where they are seated, and have them uploaded to a central server accessible to others. Or maybe will it be a simple chat-like feature that enables fans to share impressions on the gig or something.

Pricing and release date haven’t been officially announced yet.

mruff

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Shoot your music videos with an iPhone 3Gs

For all the iPhone fans out there, you probably heard about the 3G’s video editing capabilities. They said it was gonna be good – well this music video confirms it:

This is the first ever “professional” music video to be entirely shot from a cellphone. The artist is called Rayna Perez. Here’s an extract of her Facebook’s bio: “Video producer Ari Kuschnir, Reyna’s fiancee, purchased the iPhone after a two hour wait, made shorter by listening to the tracks. Hearing the new music and playing with 3GS, he had an idea. Why not debut Reyna with the first iPhone music video? “It became clear that the phone’s camera quality was good enough to shoot a music video. It seemed fitting for the project.”

Over the next few days, the plan and the team came together. Within a week, through a series of collaborations much like the mastering of Reyna’s EP, the video was complete. Watch Love, Love here.”

Check out Reyna Perez on Reverbnation here.

Mruff

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Fans are now crowdsourcing music videos

And we’re back.

Sorry for the lack of posts in this blog for the past week but this doggy has been out on vacation, taking some precious time off of the screen. Usually when we aren’t adding stuff on here, stats go down. But not this time. Since Michael died our numbers have been going crazy thanks to this post: http://gigdoggy.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/the-key-to-music-part-4-the-keys-to-the-80s-pop-era/. It only contains one pic of Michael’s thriller video and a couple of search terms related to the album – that was enough to augment our views by 1000% :)

Anyways, to apologize for the standby, I give you this totally frigin’ amazing crowdsourced video of the song “Hibi no Neiro (Tone of Everyday)” by the Japanese band Sour. This music video was shot for their first mini album ‘Water Flavor EP’. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.

Aside from the beautiful creative result of this work, this experiment once again corroborates the fact that technology is the prime medium through which fans can connect with their bands.

Woof

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Greg’s first experience with Fanteraction™ during a show

Hey guys!

As you’ll probably be able to tell from my writing, I’m not the regular doggy that’s been posting in this here blog.

However, I am one of the 2 people that’s been putting Fanteraction™ together, and I’ve just gotten back from the first show where I’ve actually used and promoted the platform. Thought I would give you my impressions while they’re still hot (it’s 1am right now, got off at 12:20 – so i’m still in the after-show rush).

The gig itself was as low-key as you can get – it was in a small cafe-bar called “L’escalier” (on St-Catherines right off Berri Uqam for those of you living in Montreal), with maybe 25-30 people tops.  Small stage, average sound, you know the drill.

I printed a few business cards with the URL of the gig’s Fanteraction profile and gave them to people before the show, as well as dropped a few off on the bar. The URL for tonight’s gig was http://gigdog.gy/escalier (the last song I played now is accessible through “What song is playing right now?”)

My friend who was playing before me had created an account on gigdoggy, and while he was playing I was doing the “remote-control”, ie: selecting the song that he was playing on-the-fly so that people would automatically have access to it through the platform.

I saw one of two people look at the profile on their phones during his set, but because he didn’t promote the service, it didn’t get much attention.

When I got onstage, I told the audience about the Fanteraction URL, and made a point about showing them that I was selecting the song that I was going to play next.  Some people kind of stared blankly (probably because they had old-school Nokias in their pockets), however a few people automatically took their iphones and blackberries out and logged on.  Bingo.

During my first song, the guitar strap was too loose, and I ended up freestyling and getting thrown off-guard.  I actually forgot how the second verse started, and while I continued playing asked the audience how the song went.

I could not make this up : a guy in the first row automatically yelled out “Y’a bien des fois…” (which is how the second verse starts :) and I was able to pick up where I got lost; people cheered and got into it even more.

During my set, I picked up my phone between every song and selected the next song that was to be played through the remote-control.  It gave me an excuse to introduce the song, and to interact with the audience while reminding them that they could find extra content through the gig’s Fanteraction URL.

After my set, the feedback was great, with people saying they couldn’t keep up with the lyrics (that’s because I tend to rap too quickly when I play by myself :) and that we should add an option that allows people to request all the band’s info to be sent by email.  Happily, that is next on our to-do list!

One thing I keep having to remind myself is that interaction with the audience during a show is what will make the difference between someone going home and thinking “that was good music” and someone going home and looking you up and downloading your music.  At least I like to think so – and in my view our platform certainly played a part in that tonight :)

Good night!

-Greg

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An orchestra made of ringtones and mobile phones

Usually mobile phones aren’t that welcome in public places like concert halls. Well in 2001 a team of geeks defied that social convention and created an orchestra made out of the people in the audience with their phones set-up to full volume.

Golan Levin, Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, and Joerg Lehner produced a “large-scale concert performance whose sounds were wholly produced through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones. Before the concert, participants registered their mobile phone numbers at a series of web terminals; in exchange, new ringtone melodies are automatically transmitted to their phones, and their seating assignment tickets were generated. During the concert, the audience’s phones got dialed up by live performers, using custom software which permits as many as 60 phones to ring simultaneously. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone was known in advance, the Dialtones concert was able to present a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures, such as waves of polyphony which cascade across the audience. Dialtones was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in September 2001, and at the Swiss National Exposition in May and June of 2002.”

Truly amazing.

Woof.

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Cool audio revenge products?

What you see on the left is called a Super Sonic Nausea Device. Although its name may seem graphical enough, I’ll leave you to a portion of the product’s description:

“Super Sonic Nausea is a unique high-pressure acoustical generating device which provides a substantial capability to disrupt and disperse gatherings. Speeches, demonstrations, crowd dynamics, etc. – this device has been used to “influence” more of these than you might expect. Deployed near the podium, you might just have a case of an increasingly un-impressive speaker with diminished sharpness and lacking concentration, or perhaps is even unable to complete his presentation. Or, loitering youths on your property might be enticed to move along with no confrontations necessary.”

So no sign of inducing real throat-wrenching vomiting of any kind, but you can go ahead and annoy people with it.

The Super Sonic Nausea is “the rarely-available government model that the popular commercial product Sonic Nausea was based on.”

Now the Sonic Nausea device on the other hand (seen on the right) truly deserves its name.

“Sonic Nausea is a small electronic device which can really turn one’s stomach. It generates a unique combination of ultra-high frequency soundwaves which soon leads most in its vicinity to queasiness. It can also cause headaches, intense irritation, sweating, imbalance, nausea, or even vomiting. Hiding this device in your inconsiderate neighbor’s house might put an end to their late-night parties. The abusive bureaucrat’s office, the executive lunchroom… the possibilities are endless for that small portion of inventive payback”.

Now you’re probably asking yourself where I found all this info. BoingBoing for one put me on the track (un-surprisingly), and the rest of it I found in a law enforcement and military equipment online retailer called Shomer TEC.

The Super Sonic Nausea can be purchased for $99, and the Sonic Nausea is sold for $29. Both products can be found in the “Cool Stuff” tab, under the “Revenge Product” category.

What a _________ world we live in (wasn’t finding an adjective for that puch-line so I’ll leave it to you).

Barf

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