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The history of the world’s most important drum sample – the Amen drum break. An oldie but goodie, that was just passed my way again.

“Despite being ten years old now [still] hundreds of tracks, dozens of DJs, a number of clubs and events, in effect an entire subculture, based on this one drum loop, I mean, based on these six seconds from 1969.“

If you listen to almost any kind of music made in the last two decades, you will enjoy this.

Nice organ music. The real find here, however is in the comments on youtube: proof that, if something exists, there are people arguing about it on the internet somewhere.

YouTube – Koopman: Schmücke Dich, o liebe Seele BWV 654 – J.S. Bach

Listening to music releases the same “feelgood” chemicals as eating and having sex, researchers have found.The neuroscientist and former rock music producer Prof Daniel Levitin said music activates the brain area responsible for feeling pleasure, excitement and satisfaction.

A woman listening to music, music vibes as good as sex and food
Research shows that music has specific effects on the body’s physiology

Prof Levitin, an associate professor of psychology at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests that understanding how different types of music affects the body can help people choose songs or bands that could help them achieve tasks or goals.

He found the brain of someone listening to music reacts in a similar way to that of a gambler when winning a bet, a skydiver about to leap out of a plane or someone who has just taken drugs.

Music vibes as good as sex and food – Telegraph

This is a peice of art. Along with Ishkur’s guide to electronic music, it’s required watching.

Interesting discussion the history of an early live sequencer. It sounds a hell of a lot more live than the crap we live with today. Check out the specs:

From Leiner Media

The Zyklus MIDI PERFORMANCE SYSTEM is a MIDI equipment controller designed provide an unprecedented level of musical control. It achieves this by allowing the musician to interact with previously recorded MIDI data such as sequences so that comlex music can be build up in real time. In a typical setup, the MIDI PERFORMANCE SYSTEM would be used in conjunction with a MIDI master keyboard or keyboard synthesiser, plus up to 64 slave MIDI devices – synthesisers, expanders, drum machines, MIDI-equiped signal processors, etc.
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Jim Griffin on the pho list asked the question today, ‘What “rules of the road” from your business do you offer those traveling this information highway?”‘

My response, as an artist trying to get my groovetronica project heard:

— The internet is not a panacea. It’s getting there, though. —

1. The internet is not a replacement for capable hands, doing work.

You can’t do this on your own. Enlist the help of others who share your dream, but are interested in a different parts of it. There will always be lots and lots of work to do. It’s a competition thing – anything a machine can do for you, it can do for others, and probably is.

2. The internet is the great equalizer, but only among peers.

The competition out there isn’t just massive – it’s complete: you will soon be in competition with practically every other musician on the planet. I picked up a new piece of gear for the studio, and the manual came in a bunch of different languages, including Russian. I’d never seen a multi-lingual manual in Russian before.

Also, the vast majority of the concerns being discussed and addressed in terms of emerging media are of only peripheral relevance to you – the focus is still on the haves – current owners of the music industry Your principal concern online should be obtaining sticky listenership. Give away product – don’t try to sell stuff until you have people hooked.

However, you know both of those facts already. I’m merely restating the obvious to lead into:

3. The internet is not a replacement for personal relationships

Personal relationships are more important than ever. Why? Because of #2 (the internet is the great equalizer, among peers) and #1 (the internet is not a replacement for actual work). You are going to get ahead because someone likes you music enough to work it for you. You are going to get ahead because your music is reviewed by the right websites and people, and played by the right djs. Your chances of this happening increase considerably if know the persons doing it.

And people are also how we make sense of the web. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t stop laughing. The wave files that ship with the windows media player were edited on a pirated copy of Sound Forge. The proof is incontrovertible – try it for yourself.

From Slash dot:

An anonymous reader writes “German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called “Deepz0ne” who happen to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium.”

If you haven’t been here yet, you should really try it. Use the search function at the top of the page to look for a favourite artist of yours, and you will get a list of all the playlists composed by others, of free mp3s, that contain that artist.

Webjay – Playlist Community