maxBreakwell.com

5February2010

Technical Difficulties

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Random.

FYI

In the process of updat­ing some things on my site today I unknow­ingly erased the down­loads data­base. It’s prob­a­bly going to take me sev­eral hours to maybe a day before every­thing is re-uploaded and work­ing prop­erly. I apol­o­gize to any­one who is try­ing to down­load something.

Come back real soon and I should have things all sorted out.

Thanks,

Max

4February2010

Amazing Jazz Guitar from Kevin O’Neil

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Music.



It’s a shame when life gets in the way of your blog­ging. This has been the case with me ever since the hol­i­days, but I’ll be back soon with some projects and inter­est­ing ideas to share.

In the mean­time, I highly rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to 23 Standards by Anthony Braxton. The entire album is amaz­ing, but as a gui­tarist I was imme­di­ately impressed with the per­for­mance of Kevin O’Neil. His sense of tim­ing and phras­ing is com­pletely orig­i­nal, entirely dif­fer­ent from the funk sen­si­bil­i­ties of my old favorites such as Grant Green or Melvin Sparks. Rather than con­strain­ing his impro­vi­sa­tions to the “in the pocket” feel that most gui­tar play­ers stick to, he man­ages to push, pull, and destroy the groove more like an avant-guard tenor sax player.

He also shreds with incred­i­ble speed and per­sis­tence through­out the entire range of the gui­tar. I have this image in my mind of him hav­ing to buy a new gui­tar every few years or so after wear­ing down the fret­board on the one he cur­rently owns. It’s prob­a­bly not true, but his play­ing sounds that sick.

Give it a lis­ten until you hear from me next. You won’t be disappointed.

15December2009

Ardour and OSC Ideas

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Max/Msp/Jitter; Music.

Ardour is a very inex­pen­sive open source DAW soft­ware that runs on Mac OS and Linux though the use of the Jack Audio Connections Kit. It is essen­tially free, how­ever a small dona­tion will give Mac users the abil­ity to save AU set­tings with a project. In addi­tion to it being open source, many of its func­tions can also be con­trolled through OSC.

Considering the high price tag on most DAW soft­ware I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal of the sta­bil­ity and use­ful­ness of some­thing that was basi­cally being given away for free. No rewire sup­port and its depen­dency on Jack also made me won­der if it was worth the time exploring.

After using Ardour for a few weeks I have to say I was wrong to ever doubt it. I have found it to be a very sta­ble pro­gram that is fully capa­ble for most appli­ca­tions, and the use of Jack to route audio has worked flaw­lessly on my MacBook Pro so far. In fact, being free from the con­straints of what is rewire-able has actu­ally opened up some cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties that I though wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble before. Read the rest of this entry »

13November2009

Jasuto Sounds

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Music.

A com­bi­na­tion of being on vaca­tion, and hav­ing the graph­ics card in my 15.4″ MacBook PRO Laptop Computer fail shortly after I returned, pro­vided an unin­ten­tional oppor­tu­nity to get to know my iPod Touch a lit­tle better.

Jasuto gave me plenty to keep me busy while my com­puter was at the shop. I really enjoy hav­ing so much mod­u­lar synth power on a hand­held device, and I found it’s usage to be fairly intuitive.

Have a look at some more detailed tuto­ri­als and descrip­tions of Jasuto’s fea­tures at the app’s web­page.

Here are a few exmaples of what I could do with Jasuto after a few days of experimentation.

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1October2009

Free Guitar Samples for Beatmaker

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Music.

An assort­ment of ran­dom gui­tar sam­ples, mostly of the funk vari­ety, for use with Beatmaker on your iPhone. I wouldn’t rec­om­mend try­ing to make a song with these sam­ples alone, although some can be used together, most of them are at dif­fer­ent tem­pos, and in dif­fer­ent keys; as well as being mixed differently.

I just wanted to offer up some gui­tar sam­ples to the BeatMaker com­mu­nity. The process actu­ally took much longer than I thought. Honestly, I think some of the sam­ples are a bit rough around the edges, but what­ever, they are free for non-commercial use, so slice’em up and have fun!

Here are a few exam­ples of what you get when you down­load the kit. Also, I have included a small .txt file that gives the bpm for each sam­ple to save you some trouble.

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8September2009

Image Mashups using Jitter

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Max/Msp/Jitter.

After my pre­vi­ous post, Jitter Kaleidoscope and other Cool Effects, I decided to spend some more time with the Peter Elsea Tutorials and see how else I could mashup my pho­tos. His tuto­ri­als on the [jit.repos] object gave me a lot to work with, and for those who are more math­e­mat­i­cally inclined, I’m sure these sim­ple exam­ples could be taken much further.

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14August2009

Making a Jazz MixTape

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Music; Random.

Recently I sat down to do some­thing I haven’t done in a long time. Make a MixTape for a friend. After hear­ing No Room For Squares by Hank Mobley, my friend admit­ted that she was much more knowl­edge­able on the sub­ject of vocal jazz as opposed to instru­men­tal jazz. So, I offered to make her a MixTape of some songs that she might like.

These are the tracks that I decided on. By no means is this a list of tracks I feel to be the most impor­tant or most influ­en­tial in the jazz genre, but rather a com­pi­la­tion of tracks that I enjoy or find unique for a par­tic­u­lar rea­son. Please feel free to leave com­ments on any of the tracks that I men­tion, or ones that you feel should have been included.

The Real McBop Live at the Blue Note by Arturo Sandoval

• Recorded June 10 – 11, 2004 at the Blue Note, NY
  Arturo Sandoval (Trumpet)
  Dennis Marks (Bass)
  Felipe Lamoglia (Saxophone)
  Rene Toledo (Guitar)
  Tomas Cruz (Percussion)
  Alexis Arce (Drums)
  Phil Magallanes (Piano)

This album includes a DVD of the per­for­mance as well as the CD ver­sion. Well worth the money, espe­cially since halfway through the per­for­mance Arturo plays an imag­i­nary Acoustic Bass and does some extended vocal solos that are bet­ter appre­ci­ated seen than just heard. The DVD also includes some inter­views with Arturo Sandoval as an added bonus. The open­ing track, The Real McBop, is a fast Bebop tune pushed along by Afro-Cuban rhythms. I love this sound, and clearly nobody is doing it bet­ter these days than Arturo Sandoval.

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2August2009

BeatMaker — Junky Sounds for Junky Beats

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Music.

This Beatmaker Kit is my attempt at putting together a Lo-Fi col­lec­tion of junky sound­bits for rough noisy beats.

Most of the sounds I used for this kit are from a col­lec­tion of field record­ings that I did years ago on a hand-held tape recorder. My goal with this col­lec­tion was to cre­ate an appeal­ing Lo-Fi kit from what essen­tially was, just some mod­er­ately inter­est­ing record­ings with low qual­ity sound.

I also added a few home­made sam­ples that I recorded directly into my com­puter as well. Have a lis­ten to what I did with it and down­load the Kit if you like.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Junky Kit Download Link

Get Beatmaker Here

20July2009

Jitter Kaleidoscope and other Cool Effects

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Max/Msp/Jitter.

During what free time I have, I usu­ally devote my energy to music, or all things audi­ble for that mat­ter, but recently I have begun exper­i­ment­ing with cre­at­ing visual effects as well.

Original Image

Kaleidoscope Effect

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6July2009

TouchOsc Control for the Nord Electro (updated)

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Max/Msp/Jitter.

Now that the TouchOSC edi­tor has arrived the first thing I did was sit down and cre­ate a more appro­pri­ate lay­out for the draw­bar con­trol appli­ca­tion I made for my Nord Electro 2.

Download the .max­pat ver­sion here.

or the Runtime ver­sion here.

You can view the orig­i­nal post here if you want.

What’s New?

As you can see in the pic­ture, the lay­out now has 9 faders to match each of the Nord Electro Drawbars. I also inverted the direc­tion of the slid­ers to match the direc­tion of the Drawbar LEDs.

There are two pages, the first page (green) con­trols the upper draw­bars, and the sec­ond page (red) con­trols the lower draw­bars. The cus­tom GUI now makes it less con­fus­ing with no funny workarounds for only hav­ing 8 faders.

Read the rest of this entry »

4July2009

Custom Wah Effect

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Max/Msp/Jitter.

After hear­ing some sub­tle yet effec­tive use of the wah-wah pedal on Yusef Lateef’s album, Yusef Lateef’s Detroit Latitude 42º 30º Longitude 83º, I was com­pelled to attempt writ­ing my own “wah” effect patch in Max/MSP.

I’ve been tin­ker­ing with this patch for a few days now, and even though I know it’s surely not per­fect, I think it sounds rea­son­ably cool. Also, I’m tired of mess­ing with it, so I fig­ured I just post it here for any­one inter­ested, or any­one who can pro­vide some advice on how to make it bet­ter. Here is a short sam­ple.

Bear in mind this sam­ple is to dis­play the sound of the effect not my gui­tar play­ing. I didn’t spend much time focussing on “get­ting gui­tar part right” if you know what I mean.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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24June2009

MIDI Generating LFOs Pt. 2

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Max/Msp/Jitter.

After some time of pro­cras­ti­na­tion and a brief period of inspi­ra­tion I finally got around to fur­ther devel­op­ing the project that I started in my pre­vi­ous post on MIDI Generating LFOs. There are two big addi­tions included in the sec­ond ver­sion of this patch. The first is that I bor­rowed some aspects of Gregory Taylor’s excel­lent new tuto­r­ial on the Cycling 74 web­site, and the sec­ond is that I added TouchOSC sup­port to cre­ate cooler ways of con­trol­ling the new para­me­ters. Here is a short exam­ple of what it sounds like through one of my favorite synths.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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12June2009

BeatMaker Beats

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Music; Random.

I’ve been hav­ing entirely too much fun with this awe­some iPhone/iPod Touch appli­ca­tion by Intua. I put off buy­ing BeatMaker for a long time because of the 19.99 price tag. When there are so many good music appli­ca­tions for much less, why bother, right?

The rea­son I both­ered was that you can upload cus­tom sounds. I searched and searched for a cheaper appli­ca­tion that has this same func­tion­al­ity, but in the end I just gave up and dished out the 20 bucks — it was totally worth it!

I don’t really want to make this a review since there have already been plenty of great reviews on BeatMaker, (you can find a very thor­ough review here) but I do want to show some of what I have been doing with it.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

After play­ing around, mak­ing beats on the train like the one above, and learn­ing the ins and outs of this app, I finally got around to cre­at­ing my own kit. I used a col­lec­tion of sam­ples that I down­loaded from freesound.org, (attri­bu­tion page included in down­load) and I also made some sam­ples using my key­board and guitar.

I wanted to have an amount of vari­ety with each sam­ple that I cre­ated. The C7_Rhodes, Organ&GuitarVamp, and OrganBass sam­ples are prob­a­bly all best used after slic­ing down the audio file to a spe­cific sec­tion that you want to use. This isn’t a prob­lem because you can crop down any audio file within BeatMaker eas­ily. Here is a lit­tle beat I cre­ated with my cus­tom set.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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5June2009

MIDI Generating LFOs Audio Example

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Max/Msp/Jitter; Music.

This is an early rough draft of a com­po­si­tion I started work­ing on recently. It uti­lizes the Max/Msp patch that I wrote about in my first post on Midi Generating LFOs. At the end of that ear­lier post I listed four things that I wanted to work on for the next step in this project. I haven’t done any of it. Except to sync up the LFOs in my patch to a musi­cal com­po­si­tion. So far the piece has an elec­tronic drum track, key­board, and the Max/Msp patch — as well as a hand­ful of other effects. Hope you like it!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

31May2009

African Fractals

Posted by maxbreakwell under: Books and Publications.

I recently started read­ing this book after watch­ing Ron Eglash’s lec­ture on Ted.com. While watch­ing the video I real­ized that I had no idea what frac­tals are, or that this par­tic­u­lar sys­tem of geom­e­try played such a vital role in African cul­ture. Ron Eglash does a great job dur­ing this talk on Ted.com of quickly explain­ing the basics to the unin­formed lis­tener, but once I started look­ing through books (other than his) about frac­tals in gen­eral, I was greeted with page after page of math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las that I had no idea how to interpret.

The one big plus about Ron Eglash’s book, African Fracals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, is that it starts with the assump­tion that the reader knows lit­tle or noth­ing about frac­tals in general. After a thor­oughly infor­ma­tive crash course on frac­tal geom­e­try, the book goes on to sys­tem­at­i­cally exam­ine the impor­tance of this geo­met­ric sys­tem in all facets of African culture.

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