New Ways to Play Better at video games than piano? It could be your ticket to a career in music.
By Miles Raymer
April 17, 2008
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Local electronic musician Protman, aka Joe Hahn, might not be making music at all if he hadn’t moved past traditional instruments. “Most computer musicians I know employ a piano-based MIDI controller, which also employs a few knobs, pads, sliders, et cetera,” he explains via e-mail. “I’ve probably gone through a couple thousand dollars’ worth of these trying to find something that encourages me to use it and make more music with it, but they always wind up collecting dust.”
What Hahn does instead is adapt controllers from video-game consoles—Nintendo NES, Xbox 360—so that they can interact with composition software. For him, it’s a matter of ergonomics. The problem with piano-style controllers, he says, is that “you can maybe control two or three parameters simultaneously depending on the interface, and they often require such exaggerated, sloppy motions to get anything interesting done with them. Game controllers are designed to maximize ergonomics and perform with great immediacy. Punch now! Kick now! Tweak now! Transpose now! Throw that snare drum into the delay chain now! Swap between your choice of random toy-instrument samples now!”
Hahn acknowledges that the community of game-modding musicians attracts lots of people who are just looking for kitschy kicks, and his own act is powerful nerd bait—he often works a Dance Dance Revolution mat with his feet and a video-game controller with his hands. But for Hahn the important thing about modding is the chance to transfer a highly refined skill set from the reactive task of gameplay to the creative work of making music. “I spent easily a thousand, if not several thousand times the amount of time improving my video-game skills than practicing the Casio piano my family bought me when I decided to take piano lessons,” he says....
Marc-Alan Gray is faking waves. He recently deejayed with Justice of Ed Banger records, and is a major player in the Friday night series Robot Rock at Le Royale NYC. He has been kind enough to share his most recent remix work in collaboration w/ Vasali Gavre, under the moniker HeartMe!. MAG will be in Chicago next month playing the new Electro/Indie series Modern Love at Liars Club, as well as some raw underground party appearances. Get ready.
Mike to Fakebeat is a sound from the eye of the storm of what has been and what will be in pop and underground – his DJing, production, and current journalism in New York City. His music, much like his bio, is a map of sonic cause and effect. Even Russian glam-metal, ordained to reign supreme but of stillborn fame as its western counterparts perished before the fall of the Iron Curtain, is fulfilling this destiny through none other than Mike Dextro. His father is the drummer of eastern rock legend Kruiz. The culmination of the analog of the very nature of reality that are Dextro's degrees of separation from everything everywhere is the music itself. Mike is finshing his mp3 album in 2008 and joins Alexander Bassett and Protman bringing New York and Chicago nu-skoolers closer together, with spare time to kiss kittens.
Tracklisting:
1.The Sky Was Pink (Icelandic Version) Nathan Fake
2.Friday Night (Titts Bonus Beat) Just Blaze
3.Throw Some D’s (ESTAW fix) Rich Boy
4.Good (Original Mix) John Acquaviva & Olivier Giacomotto
5.Heart Of The City (Stuffa Remix) The Touch
6.Is You (Les Petits Pilous Remix) D.I.M.
7.Chicken (Original Mix) WTF?
8.Big Time (Linus Loves Remix) Dada Life
9.Plantage (Brabe Remix) Under Byen
10.H-Bomb (Fistfight Edit) Style Of Eye
11.Flesh Python (Stop Die Resuscitate Remix) Vitamins For You
12.Evil Dub (nt89 re-work) Trentemoller Featuring Jim Morrison
13.Black Betty vs. Get Up Off Thing Ram Jam vs. James Brown
14.Bathroom Gurgle - Tronik Youth Mix Late Of The Pier
15.For Sale (Henrik B & Plec Remix) Buy Now
16.Lip Gloss Remix Krazyfiesta
17.The Feeling Dead Radar
18.Gangsters (Mike B SkaMore Edit) The Specials
19.Nympho (Mowgli RMX) [Bombaman re-edot] Speculum
A programmer going by the handle "Dr Petter" has recently created one of my favorite software synthesizers. It's functionality is fairly simple, and the sounds it creates are often a bit cheesy and low-fidelity, but like the majority of Tweakbench VST plug-ins, it has the entirely redeeming "RANDOMIZE" button. Since I've downloaded it, the first thing I've been doing each morning is generating a couple dozen sounds, previewing through several hundred randomizations. It also has a "Mutate" button which allows one to randomly nudge all the parameters from their current state until they settle to a more favorable place. It's like Darwinism for bouncy stabbing bass and doomsday laser blasts. Convert some of the results to mp3 and make yourself the most aggravating cellphone theme on the block.
What I present here is, if you will, an MS Paint for sound effects… or something along those lines. It’s meant to make it dead easy for anyone to whip up a few simple sound effects and save them as .WAV files.
Basic usage involves clicking the left-most buttons to automatically generate random sounds loosely targeted at certain categories. For more advanced users it's possible to spend some additional time to manually create fairly varied and interesting sound effects.
The interface is based entirely around sliders for controlling sound parameters, along with a few buttons. Even if you don’t want to spend time learning about all the sliders you can still have some fun just hammering away at them and listening to the various sounds that come out.
Hopefully this will mean that there's no longer any valid excuse for anyone to get N/A in sound!
I am of the belief that one's home should always have sound and music playing in it, 24/7/365. It can be music meant for direct listening, music for getting the dishes done or cleaning your toilet, music to listen to while you're making other music, or any sort of ambient or noise-masking sound designed to break the silence and occupy the mind's-ear in an effort to block out the voices of the neighbors, or even the voices in your head telling you what you ought to do to the neighbors. In any event, it should always be there. It's education. It's exercise. It helps circulate the air.
Arcade Ambiance has recently been added to my collection of about twelve hours of sound and music I play when I simply want to stop the silence without necessarily distracting myself. It's the "Russian Ark" of video game noise music.
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Marc-Alan Gray is faking waves. He recently deejayed with Justice of Ed Banger records, and is a major player in the Friday night series Robot Rock at Le Royale NYC. He has been kind enough to share his most recent remix work in collaboration w/ Vasali Gavre, under the moniker HeartMe!. MAG will be in Chicago next month playing the new Electro/Indie series Modern Love at Liars Club, as well as some raw underground party appearances. Get ready.
Mike to Fakebeat is a sound from the eye of the storm of what has been and what will be in pop and underground – his DJing, production, and current journalism in New York City. His music, much like his bio, is a map of sonic cause and effect. Even Russian glam-metal, ordained to reign supreme but of stillborn fame as its western counterparts perished before the fall of the Iron Curtain, is fulfilling this destiny through none other than Mike Dextro. His father is the drummer of eastern rock legend Kruiz. The culmination of the analog of the very nature of reality that are Dextro's degrees of separation from everything everywhere is the music itself. Mike is finshing his mp3 album in 2008 and joins Alexander Bassett and Protman bringing New York and Chicago nu-skoolers closer together, with spare time to kiss kittens.
A programmer going by the handle "
I am of the belief that one's home should always have sound and music playing in it, 24/7/365. It can be music meant for direct listening, music for getting the dishes done or cleaning your toilet, music to listen to while you're making other music, or any sort of ambient or noise-masking sound designed to break the silence and occupy the mind's-ear in an effort to block out the voices of the neighbors, or even the voices in your head telling you what you ought to do to the neighbors. In any event, it should always be there. It's education. It's exercise. It helps circulate the air.