Geo Synth is the new app by Wizdom Music, and it is fantastic. It’s a new synthesizer with a very smart and useful arrangement of the notes. It comes with dozens of presets, but of course you’re free to create your own.
I’ve been playing with it for a while, and here is a little improvisation I made in my studio:
Highly recommended. I will for sure use it in my little tour in Catalonia this January.
Alright!
EDIT: El divendres 13 toquem a GRANOLLERS (no el dissabte 14)!.
So, now that I’m going to Barcelona for a few weeks, I’ll play a long tour of 2 or 3 nights covering most of the earth’s surface, especially a small region of catalonia.
Serà increïble. Serà gratuït. Tocaré amb en Daniel Bolsa Madrid i amb en Marc Prim Garcia. Hem estat nomenats el grup revelació del 2011. El Bolsa és amish. Serà interactiu.
El dijous 12 de Gener a Barcelona, al Bar Macondo a les 21:30h. Aquí teniu el cartell:
I el concert final de gira, celebrant tantes hores de ruta, serà a Granollers, el divendres 13 de Gener, a les 22h, a l’esquerda:
Veniu, que hi haurà huevada! Tinc ganes titans!
Songle is the new impressive application by Masataka Goto that presented this past weekend in ISMIR 2011. There has been a lot of buzz about crowd sourcing for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) lately.
What Goto has published is a tool to display automatically extracted chords, segments, pitch, onsets, beats, of any uploaded song. Not only that, but it also makes it easy to edit the annotations yourself, making this app a ultimate tool towards a crowd sourcing ground truth for MIR. Even though the catalogue of songs is still -disappointingly- small, and there are still some issues with its interface (I get an error when I try to sign up with my OpenID!), I think this application has the power to make a (small?) MIR revolution using the power of crowd sourcing in the shortcoming future.
In this picture we can see the extracted vocal melody (red lines), chords, parts of the song (blue and orange tracks), onsets and beats (triangles on the bottom), … I’m simply amazed right now. What a great piece of software!
I’ve been playing this one for a long time. It’s one of my favorite Opeth songs. I finally recorded it with a (relatively) decent equipment at Jarl’em All Studios, and when Eyal Amir, from ProjectRnL, listened to it, he proposed me to do a video of this cover.
And it’s the best solo video I’ve ever had. And here it is. And I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating it:
Thanks Eyal for doing this!
Yesterday at MARL (Music and Audio Research Laboratory at NYU) we had the pleasure to have a talk by Eyal Amir, the musician, composer, and producer behind ProjectRnL.
He talked about how he “decomposes” a simple song from a musical style that he might not be familiar with and then he brings it to his own world, a world full of impossible rhythms, jazzy chords, and without any tempo / harmony restrictions.
He focused on his extraordinary cover of Slim Shady (by Eminem), and he showed us his original mix, and how he deals with the new rhythms, based on Eminem’s lead vocals line. It was so great to have Eyal in the department, people were fascinated with his job.
Thanks for coming Eyal, we had a great time!
In my office!
I have been featured in the new album by The Cloud Runner, a band from the UK with the great Andy Feehan as its leader and composer.
My voice is on the 9th track of the album, a song called Haunter. The lyrics are about the epic A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. I was reading the second book of this amazing saga when I wrote the lyrics.
Here you have the song:
( http://www.youtube.com/embed/5biC-t0av8M )
The voices were recorded at Jarl’em All Studios, where the rest of the music was recorded, mixed and mastered by Andy Feehan somewhere in the UK.
You can get the album here.
Alright! Thanks Andy for putting this altogether!
La semana pasada fui a probablemente el mejor concierto del año. Opeth presentaban su nuevo Heritage. Y Katatonia no presentaban nada, pero no hace falta, pues su catálogo me vuelve tan loco que por mí se pueden dedicar a no sacar discos y tocar muchas veces, que yo voy a seguir yendo.
Me gustó tanto que escribí una crónica algo nogueriana del concierto para Ovella Negra Rock. La podéis leer aquí (gracias por publicarla Ritxi!).
Madre mía, pero qué grandes, los dos grupos. No os perdáis el Heritage, que es increíble. Por supuesto, Steven Wilson lo ha producido. Lo cual confirma mi teoría de que cada cosa que toca este tío la convierte en una obra maestra. Jodidamente bueno.
The Book of Mormon is the 9 Tonny Awards Winner Broadway musical by the creators of South Park Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The show started on March this year, but it has been so successful that no available tickets (for a reasonable price) can be purchased until June next year (!!).
I knew about this show long time ago, since it was published in the South Park official site over a year ago. But for different reasons I didn’t go, but I knew I had to. This is the first Broadway show by these guys that I love for everything they do, I happen to be in NY, and, last but not least, it is about Mormons, my favorite religion after Pastafarianism. The most comprehensive explanation in Mormon religion can be found in this South Park episode called “All About the Mormons”.
When I finally decided to buy tickets, and they told me that the earlier I could go was in November if I was willing to pay over $200 for each ticket, I decided that I had to win the lottery. Two hours before every show they give away 22 tickets for $32 each. They are either front row or box tickets (i.e. extremely amazing locations).
Watch this video, in the beginning you will see the lottery process (beware, spoilers ahead!):
After going 7 times with my beloved roommate (so chances of winning doubled if we were two), yesterday we won 2 tickets to The Book Of Mormon. Oh shit. We made it. We fucking made it! We were so, so happy.
Winner Entry!
We were in one of the front boxes. The view was simply espectacular.
Inside the Eugene O'Neill Theater, seated in one of the boxes. So nice.
And yes. The show was simply perfect. Really. I have never seen something like this. I dare to say it is the BEST show I have ever seen. Amazing. I couldn’t stop smiling during the whole show. Felt like crying of laughter over a dozen times. Felt like crying of happiness like 2 or 3 times. Really. So, so, so, so good.
Thank you Trey and Matt for making our lives much, much better.
Ferran, vaya oasis.
Hasa Diga Eebowai!
Here I present a little Python script I wrote to resample 48kHz audio files to 44.1kHz (16 bits).
The script uses a Kaiser Window instead of a Rectangular Window to better filter out the aliasing. Here it is the Kaiser Windowed Impulse Response used in this script:
As you can see, the lower ribs are smoothed out compared to just a impulse response (rectangularly windowed), so that the aliasing will be much more silenced using this Keiser Window. More information in the great article by Julius O. Smith on resampling.
To apply the filter, I used an algorithm based on the “efficient polyphase filter bank with resampling” found on page 129 (Figure 4.3-8d) of the book “Multirate Systems and Filter Banks” by Vaidyanathan.
The code is fully documented. If you have any comments or questions, or find any bug, please let me know.
Oh, and just to let you know: Python is the next and much better version of Matlab.
Alright.
