Typography numerology

Recently I was working on the design of the page for my new product — Time Tracker for Mac — which is to be deployed soon, by the way. I’m by no means a professional web designer, but like to fiddle with colors, layout and font faces. At least no one can fire me when I do it to my own sites.

Scanning through my web-design blogs for an inspiration, I stumbled upon a couple of interesting places. Both are dedicated to typography, but where the typography is good, everything else thrives. So get your notebooks and start taking notes.

80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design

It seems I spent my entire life wandering around that page. The amount of information is simply overwhelming. If you ever make it to the comments section, leave a quick note there. The author will be pleased to know. Yes, I’m sure. Scanning through the comments, I noticed that many disagree with the selection and claim not enough scripts, sans, whatever. People, if this list to contain every font family everyone found useful during their important designer carrier that would bump the counter to 1,363,203 beautiful fonts and you probably won’t expect it to be for professional design either. So calm down and let it go.

20 Websites with Beautiful Typography

A great collection of great looking sites with short comments. Lots of inspiration, so you may want to use your tea spoon here not to grab too much at a time. I found it immensely useful… and the site too.

P.S. Hey Pito, did you like that Puppia business card layout (20 websites with beautiful typography #17)? We did… very much.

Composer workbench defaults

by dmmaus

The more I think of my music creation process, the more frequently I return to the thought that the most productive environment is when you have all your tools and samples strictly limited. By this I mean that the process of putting the tune together should be simple and constrained at the same time.

Simplicity comes from the notion of having many aspects of the environment standardized to a reasonable extent. One example is having the blank Ableton Live environment versus having some meaningful template with a customized drum-kit and favorite synths loaded, effect channels pre-configured etc — just like when you are dealing with the hardware synths and music creation stations — everything is in the memory of the device and is easily accessible.

This take is pretty constrained as you can see, but not insanely. You can go from the default setup anywhere you want, still you will know that synth patch #45 goes well with the kick on C-3 from your default drum-kit. This is supposed to ease the pain of looking for the right combination of sounds while keeping your new motive in mind in the effort not to let it slip away. The latest versions of Ableton Live let us do many wonderful things with racks and drum tracks.

A little clip for your listening pleasure. Hope it’ll become a tradition in the coming year.

Rhythm Generation With an Euclidian Algorithm

Work by El Buen Matador

The original post on this is at wesen’s where you can pick up the idea and hear some samples. In this post I simply show the Ruby implementation of the algorithm. It doesn’t work with lists, but rather does simple math to achieve the same effect.

The idea of distributing pulses is curious. It lacks one important aspect though — shifting. Currently all patterns start with “1″. Thanks wesen, for sharing this. Here comes the Ruby version.

Working on another piece

Spent a good deal of yesterday’s evening working on another piece for my future live set. Several amusing ideas came in the process.

Analog sounding. Why they still continue to argue about the digital vs analog sound. Where the hell can you still hear it in the original analog form? Almost everything that is recorded these days is distributed on a digital media, which is bits and bytes in its essence. Having that, it all comes down to creating the “correct” analog-sounding sequence of bytes to reproduce that unique sound that you still want to hear on your iPod. Am I right or am I right? What about vinyl records? What about them? I love vinyl and have the collection of my own. Nothing can beat a great grind and especially in techno domain, but… from a producer standpoint, hey, you still need to get the sounds to someone who cuts the plates. Do you use magnetic tapes for that?

During the last few weeks, largely inspired by the banks of sounds concept behind the hardware machines (thanks wesen and 909techno for the monomachine and machinedrum video), I came up with an entirely different setup for my Ableton Live session view when I’m working on a pieces. I now use a couple of Drum Racks that represent some branch of sound (minimalistic, synthesized sounds etc), but never write clips directly for them. Instead I use several MIDI tracks for each individual sample or a group of samples that I route to the channel holding the Drum Rack. This way, I can program patterns for the sounds individually. Let me illustrate it with a picture:

What I have here is the Drum Racks on channels 1 and 5. They are holding my custom kits. The channels 2 through 4 are routed to the first kit (channel 1) and the channel 6 is to the second (channel 5).

If you read attentively, you probably noticed I said I never use the Drum Rack channels. Well, it’s not true. It’s very convenient to create a clip there, play with it and once it’s finished, move it to a separate MIDI track. It’s like a sketch book.

What are the benefits of this layout:

• You keep all your related (kit) samples in one place
• You don’t duplicate kits in multiple channels just to keep things separated
• You do keep things separated, but in more natural way, like how would you do with the hardware
• Thanks to the flexibility of the Drum Rack (and Instrument Rack), you can add effects to each individual sample as well as to the whole channel. In other words, if I need to add some reverb to high hats, I no longer need to take them on a separate channel, I just open the rack and add it. Rarely do I need the same sound with different effects in my tracks. Even if I do, I can easily duplicate the sound in the rack for that.

And by the way, here’s how the piece sounds at the moment:

Music The Way I Do It

Several days ago I was totally bedazzled by Wesen’s openness and the willingness to share information when he laid down all tiniest details of his techno music construction workflow to the readers of his blog. He posted a carefully crafted PDF file with textual information accompanied by the set of loops, samples and sysex data ready for immediate action. You can take it all, play with it, feel it the way he felt and get all inspiration you can.

I had several awe moments, and in this writing I would like to attempt to share my own experience. It’s not going to be as nicely put, but still may be interesting to read and compare to your own views and techniques.

Read the rest of this entry »

Monome: Built and Ready

Two weeks ago my dad has finished another project for me — Monome clone. I wanted it to be different from what’s offered by the respected authors in some ways, and it is obviously cheaper to build it than purchasing the read-made piece from them (of course if you have all necessary tools to carve nice rubber buttons, case, face plates etc).

For those who don’t know, Monome is a USB device with 64, 128, 256 etc number of buttons with LEDs inside each. Buttons can be lid and key events (presses and releases) are sent over the USB to a computer program that does something useful. Classical applications are:

• Controlling a MIDI device (synthesizer, sequencer, sampler etc)
• Visualizing data with LEDs

Here’s what we’ve got as the result:

Features:

• Red wood polished case
• Plastic buttons of increased size (to match the size and spacing of faders on my mixer)
• Soft rubber pads under the buttons for pleasant touch
• Ultra-bright blue LEDs
• Modified firmware to support hardware blinking

And here’s the device in action:

Additionally, I wrote a simple but nice Ableton Live driver to talk to the device, and now enjoying the creative potential of this little thing fully. Currently working on my live set.

THE OFFER

And now something really exciting. It’s probable that we will be building this on demand. Currently there are plans for 64 and 128 button models. We found that the same components are cheaper here and every part of the body is produced in-house making the overall cost visibly lower.

If you have interest in ordering one, leave a comment with a note. Currently we need about 10 orders of the type to launch the production cycle. If there is necessary demand, I will put together a page with the counter and some other helpful info to keep all interested parties informed.

UPDATE: It became obvious that the mass building isn’t going to happen, partially because of people come and go off the list, so that at any given time we have not enough requests to start the process. My apologies to those who still had hopes.

Ferrofluids at work

You have to see it. I’m quite used to technological “miracles” with magnetism like that, but let’s face it — it’s absolutely gorgeous.

And another one…

What adds some oil to the fire is that it wasn’t developed in super-secret laboratories by an army of rocket scientists. It’s the artwork form of a mere mortal like you and me. To me it proves the concept — far not everything is already invented and, what’s more important, a single mind matters.

Thanks to Sachiko Kodama for several minutes of aesthetic pleasure!

Techno is Not a Joke

Here are the amazing “Techno Is Not A Joke” series on YouTube from The Pod: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I share their views to some extent. Techno is a universal music that you can use to express yourself, make people dance or make them think about the past / present / future, or do other magic with minds and souls.

Links were found at Music Thing.

Ableton 7 Suite Box Received

Finally, it’s here in my hands. I’m very excited about it as it took 2 days to come to Kiev from Germany and long 2 weeks to travel a fraction of that distance to my city. The negative side is that customs took another $360 (given that the box cost $999) to give it to me, and UPS got $10 to perform a radiology test that never happened (just a rubber stamp on a paper). That’s the sad part about this country I’m going to leave with a special pleasure very soon. Everyone is robbing everyone else on the legal terms here and it’s fine. No one cares. Even those being robbed.

Anyway, it’s here and it’s what matters after all. Thank you Ableton for a great product!

Here’s a little nice video from their office in Germany:

• Inside Ableton

Purchased the One and Only

Finally, the Ableton Live 7.0.3 is officially installed and running on my laptop. No, the package hasn’t come yet if you wonder, but they were generous enough to send the download link (for the app only of course) and a bunch of the serials along with the order confirmation to get me started immediately upon charging my credit card. So, I spent 10 minutes downloading all the latest while they packed the boxed version for me.

The Ukraine is famous for its unreliable postal services (well, as many other distant corners of the world), however, I believe UPS or FedEx (still not sure are we in the EU or outside it) will do its best to save some silver hair to me. Hopefully there will be no problems with customs and everything. Even 5%-10% tax would be a LOT given the price I paid.

You may wonder, why am I drawing so much attention to the fact of the purchase? It’s easy to understand if you are in a music geek circles, and almost impossible otherwise. Long story short, (a) it’s the best music production workbench with all sines and saws world ever seen, (b) the fact that you purchased any software product in this country (and bordering Russia) is kind of … extraordinary and deserves attention by itself, and finally, (c) it let’s me immerse deeper into the creative part without a stupid thought “do I deserve to use this, or am I a smelly thief”.

Happy.