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After too long a delay I finally finished my first version of a TouchOSC based transport for Ardour. One of the most difficult aspects of this project was the sheer number of Ardour’s functions that can be controlled via OSC. Deciding what to incorporate into the layout and what to leave out took hours of consideration and experimentation. I tried to keep everything as streamlined as possible only using using functions in my layout that I thought would be of the most use.

As I discussed in my previous post, you will need to run Max5 patch in the background to allow better communication between TouchOSC and Ardour. Please go ahead and download the .zip file which contains the TouchOSC layout, .maxpat file, and a .mxf file as well.  Even if you don’t own Max/Msp/Jitter, the patch should work fine using the Max/Msp runtime version, which is free to download.

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Tags: ardour, cycling 74, daw, digital media, free, jack os, linux, mac, Max/Msp, max5, Music, open source, osc, Software, TouchOSC, transport

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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Tags: BeatMaker, free, funk, funky, guitar, Jazz, Jazzy, Kit, samples

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.

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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.

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Tags: BeatMaker, berimbau, drum kit, electric organ, free, guitar, Intua, iphone, ipod touch, rhodes, samples