This new year I promised myself to make some changes. One of them was getting back into shape for my birthday. I used to run a lot, but it gets difficult in the winter here in Chicago. I decided that I wanted to try the Insanity Workout, a 60 day maximum interval training regimin that promised max results. I actually didn’t loose very much weight, but you can tell I’m much more trim and in shape.
Although I expected much more dramatic results, I’m very happy, and feel like I’m in the best shape I have ever been. The workouts were indeed insane, especially after not exercising for a while, but the hardest part was eating 5 meals a day. Working out and eating fresh foods regularly while traveling was also very difficult, and I felt kind of bad for stomping around other people’s homes while visiting (sorry Patrick!). But overall, it wasn’t as impossible to accomplish as I first thought, and I recommend it to anyone who needs to get into shape fast! I’m taking a week off to recoup, but I’m already missing my active lifestyle!
I was out and about yesterday taking time-lapse footage of the Bean, when a conversation with someone reminded me to post a video I have worked on in the past.
This video was filmed in the Badlands South Dakota, and features some very beautiful footage of clouds, unreal landscapes and the Milky Way galaxy. I even captured a lightning storm that was nice enough to pass in front of my lens.
Today’s Pro Tip comes from the distant past: 1986. At the sagacious age of 7, I was already unleashing some of my tip bombs on my fellow friends and colleagues. A true gem, my sister found this masterpiece while we were cleaning out a 30+ year old scholastic garbage pile we had amassed in my parent’s home.
Pantene Pro Tip: You can has shower
This brazen prose titled “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” relays a few juicy pro tips I had gleaned from the subversive yet enlightening movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off“. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot of this movie, it is best described by postmodernbarney.com as “Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement.” By following these tips you can have the wold dance for you!
Friends will notice that my handwriting and spelling has not changed a single iota since second grade. They will also notice that I still lick my pams[sic] when I want to get out of any unpleasant situation. Sure it’s babyish. But so is school.
Some mad genius decided to track steps for one of my songs Valse de Chaton in StepMania, a free rhythm game for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Above is a video of this insanely difficult game in auto play mode. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find the step files for this song. If anyone can find it, let me know.
Ironchef of Music is a competition to create new music from unlikely sources. We love ICOM because it allows us to use sample manipulation in new ways that otherwise wouldn’t be necessary in typical music production. One such practice is creating drum sounds from any given sound.
Typically you would just record a drum, or use one of many drum synthesizers or sample packs. However in ICOM, we do not have the luxury of using outside sounds, or any outside oscillations from drum synthesizers. So what do we do? Using similar techniques of drum modeling found in synthesizers, we reshape the sounds we are given to become more drum like. I was giving some fellow “cheffers” some tips on how to do this, when I decided that it’s a rather tedious task to redo for every chef session, where time is very limited.
Where there is a need, there is innovation! So with a night of tinkering around in Reaktor, I put together a genuine ICOM compliant sample oscillated drum synthesizer. ICSODS uses the mystery sample as the heart of the synthesizer, and models a drum sound out of whatever you throw at it. Since it is all live, you can tweak all the parameters live, making it sound close to a real drum synth in one second, and like a bizarre sound-scape the next. I still have a lot of work I’d like to put into it, but I’m very happy with the different and unexpected sounds I could extrapolate from it that I never would have been able to achieve hand editing the sounds.
Give a listen to a sample of ICSODS as I morph between several presets I made (morphing presets is another unexpected bonus to the machine!) The following recording is produced entirely from the sound of Obama talking about ducks, a sample from a previous ICOM competition.
Above is a recording of the plug-in morphing between 3 presets and finally slowing down to a stop in real time to show some of it’s capabilities. The presets are: non-drums, junkyard kit, and a house kit. I use presets to make new kits from the same sample, and because there are so many controls, it is an easy way to mess with it. Morphing between presets is a Reaktor feature that works well with this instrument.
The kit consists of 8 modules; bass drum, snare, closed hat, open hat, low tom, high tom, zip, and cymbal crash. Each module can be output to a separate routing channel and can send to rudimentary delay, reverb, and phaser modules. I might work on more modules like claps and cow bells. You always need more cow bells.
Ring-like modulation from Anything
One tool that is common in electronic music is a ring modulator. Typically a ring modulator multiplies a sound source with a sine wave. This the reason hard-core “cheffers” frown on the tool. It inserts an outside oscillation into the mix. But ring modulators are a lot of fun, and very useful sound designing tools. So to be able to produce something similar, I made a machine that replaces the sine wave with oscillations found in the mystery sample. It turned out to be easy to make, but also very fun, creating lots of unexpected sound textures.
The first recording is a few examples using a Glenn Beck sample on a Glenn Beck sample from a previous ICOM session, and another using a tone sample with different oscillations on both left and right channels to show off how it works with stereo signals and to show off the updated stereo icom drum machine which is also using the same sound.
Last weekend, a few friends of mine joined me on a road trip to Detroit for the electronic music festival. While we were there, our friend’s John and Paul were very kind in letting us stay at their place, as well as showing us around town. This set was taken on one such adventure exploring the Eastern Market area. This particular corner smelled like delicious onion rings. John is the mastermind behind the Robocop statue that just got funded on Kickstarter, as well as an amazing producer and graphic designer. All of us look forward to our next trip to Detroit! Thanks guys! Find more pics from this set here on flickr. Long live Robocop!
Hi! Welcome to my portfolio and blog! I’m looking forward to sharing my artistic projects with you! Expect to find behind the scenes info, pro tips, artist interviews, and so much more here! Maybe even some off topic discussion on the things floating around in my head. I’m not entirely sure yet! Anywho, feel free to contact me if there is any topic you would like me to discuss!
This new year I promised myself to make some changes. One of them was getting back into shape for my birthday. I used to run a lot, but it gets difficult in the winter here in Chicago. I decided that I wanted to try the Insanity Workout, a 60 day maximum interval training regimin that promised max results. I actually didn’t loose very much weight, but you can tell I’m much more trim and in shape.
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