Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Perfect Application

Incredibly, someone found a practical use for one of these things. She asks, "Tell me dad, how are you managing with the new iPad we gave you for your birthday?:

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Another Current Show: Chastity Brown

November 25, MPR/The Current and Dave Campbell ran another of the school's Soundbite shows, this time with the incredibly talented Chastity Brown and her band. The student who recorded and mixed this show, Joe Kimple, did an outstanding job and David gave him well-deserved credit for the work. It starts at about 19 minutes (weirdly, right after Funkytown):



The story of the whole show can be seen here http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/11/21/chastity-brown-soundbite and heard here:

Making Music from Scratch

While American music school students whine about not having the right pitch-correction plug-in, a non-vintage Mexican-made Strat, or having to suffer with the indignity of small audiences, these students are creating music and community with "recycled instruments" (instruments made from landfill trash):



On the technology side, give a kid a computer and you might end up with something either surprising or terrifying: "We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

Wirebender Audio Rants

Over the dozen years I taught audio engineering at Musictech College and McNally Smith College of Music, I accumulated a lot of material that might be useful to all sorts of budding audio techs and musicians. This site will include comments and questions about professional audio standards, practices, and equipment. I will add occasional product reviews with as many objective and irrational opinions as possible.