Of Recordings

There are a whole bunch of Buzz tracker machines, but Fuzzpilz UnwieldyTracker is so good I pretty much stopped using all the others. Its features are well-suited to beat slicing, among other things. Beat slicing involves chopping a drum loop into individual sounds and rearranging them to make a new beat. This tutorial will show you how.

We want to take a drum loop, fit it to our song tempo, re-arrange it to make a new beat, and apply different effects to different sounds. This example starts with a drum loop trimmed to 8 beats. If you don’t have one handy, you can use this one (right-click to save):

Example drum loop

UnwieldyTracker may not be included with your Buzz install. If not, go to Fuzzpilz site and install it first. Then we’re ready to go.

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Techno producer, DJ, and fellow Buzzard Ronny Pries recently re-launched his blog.  Among other things, he has been posting many valuable tips on which of the hundreds of free VSTs are worth downloading.  His latest is on Nomad Factory’s Warmer Phaser plug-in.

If Beatport gets it wrong, who gets it right? Amazon! Shopping for MP3s on Amazon is exactly like shopping for books or blenders. And yes, that’s a good thing. They have spent years refining the buying process on their site– just look at the careful phrasing of the prompts that walk you through signing in and checking out. Why throw out everything you’ve learned to sell another product?

When you’ve been online for a while, you develop an intuition about how web pages work. Many of these intuitions are very subtle, and you probably won’t notice them unless you’ve studied human-computer interaction. A well-designed site like Amazon takes advantage of these expectations to make the sales process easier. A Flash gadget like Beatport’s breaks your expectations and forces you to learn new details.

Of course, Amazon is not DJ-oriented the way Beatport is. But if Beatport (or a competitor; I’m not picky) combined those great DJ features with Amazon’s ease of use, then we would have a killer online record shop. And a music fiend like me would be in heaven.

I am not a Luddite. Although I will always have a soft spot in my heart for actual vinyl, I am on board the digital bandwagon. Bring on the MP3s! (Ignore the fact that I am hopelessly inept at DJing in Live.) And I like a lot of things about Beatport: the broad selection of both big club hits and obscure niche tunes; the fast, high-bitrate downloads; the reasonable prices.

But their website is horrible.

Do not make a large, complicated web application in Flash! Just don’t do it! Yes, Beatport looks all high-tech and pretty. It’s also horribly difficult to use. Your browser’s back and foward buttons don’t work; if you use them, you have to start your Beatport session all over. The Beatport back and forward are in a weird place. Searching in the page doesn’t work. Bookmarks don’t work. Tabbed browsing doesn’t work. The fonts are too small, and you can’t resize them. And don’t forget the minor detail that the site was completely unusable in Linux for about a year.

The sad part is that creating an elaborate custom Flash app like this from scratch is incredibly expensive. They could have taken an open-source, web standards compliant shopping cart application and customized it for a third of the cost. (Beatport, please contact us first next time. Or hey, it’s not too late for us to fix your site…)

Eight years ago, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote a great summary of why Flash is “99% bad.” Sadly, Beatport must have missed the memo.

Create Digital Music reports that the Moog guitar was not a mere April Fool’s joke; instead, it was a bizarre meta-April Fool’s joke, in which we are fooled into believing that the product is a joke. Well played, Moog Music.

A highly scientific survey conducted by Of Recordings reveals that musicians currently in my apartment are split between confusion and apathy:

5. “Music is Math,” Boards of Canada.  (Bonus: “The Smallest Weird Number,” but only if you accept the axiom of choice.)

4. “Algebra,” Bryan Zentz.

3. “Phi*1700 (u/v),” μ-ziq.

2. “Pi*r^2″, Clint Mansell.  (Bonus: “2*Pi*r.”)

1. “Cross Product,” The Alpha Conspiracy.

Honorable mention: “Trickonometry,” Aaron Kelley.

My tutorial on sidechaining last week got quite a few hits, so I thought I would write up some more Buzz techniques.

This tutorial will teach you how to integrate an external MIDI synthesizer (or drum machine, or groovebox ..) with a Buzz song. In this scenario, I have a drum loop playing in Buzz. I want to synchronize the arpeggiator on a hardware synth– say, my beloved microKorg– to Buzz so the synth plays in time with the drum pattern. Then I want to use my favorite Buzz effects on the synth.

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