Check out Kong’s FX modules in their entirety!   There’s some pretty sweet ones on offer.

Time to show you the sampling in Reason 5!   NN-Nano and Nurse Rex

A quick look at what the Synth-y Analog Modelling modules on Kong can do!

A quick look at what the Physical Modelling modules on Kong can do!

Check out featured artist subver5ion here: http://soundcloud.com/subver5ion

Video Text:
Hi, and welcome to boyinaband news!

Our top stories this month are…

- You and What Army won the red bull bedroom jam competition and have played 5 festivals!
- Next 7 day song will be…
- Office is finished!
- Stats and Free Stuff!
- Being in da studio with a freakin’ ace producer

Dave’s band You and What Army won the Red Bull Bedroom Jam Competition thanks in no small part to you guys.   Dave is very appreciative, and as a reward, he will stop speaking in the third person.

I’ve played all 5 festivals and this summer has been absolutely surreal.

Download involved getting to see Rage Against The Machine, meeting Dave Grohl amongst other famous people, and realising too late that the 1000 people packed into the tent when we played didn’t quite get my sense of humour when I joked that I was too big for download festival.   Whoops!   I still managed to get a bunch of what looked like zombies to make a circle pit to nebula, though.

T in the Park was less about the famous people and more about seeing freakin’ Eminem.   I’ve been listening to him since before I even understood half the words he was saying, so it was frickin’ sweet to say the least.   Playing T in the Park was good too, mainly since the security were more lax than at Download, so I got to jump off speaker stacks and we got to run around in the audience.   It’s also worth noting that

- muse played the most disgusting riff of all time,
- if you haven’t heard Dizzee Rascal – Heavy then you should, and
- it’s not advisable to start driving from Scotland to the middle of England at 11:30pm unless you think of those “Don’t drive tired” signs as a challenge.

At Sonisphere, we really got the crowd going, so much so that Kerrang Magazine gave us a 4/5K review this week – Sweet!   And apparently I’m a “Crazed professor of music”, which is always a good thing to be.

Underage festival was perhaps my favourite to play, simply because I’ve never seen so many kids attacking each other to my music before.   I cannot wait to play London again.

Hevy was more of a social event to me, though the festival was ace, I got to hang out with the other bands in the competition and enjoy the atmosphere (i.e. being surrounded by hundreds of inebriated musicians).

Next thing is that 3 bands get picked for another online vote and the winner gets to tour with Kids in Glass Houses, a band that have a huge following.   So suffice to say, if we get picked, I’m probably going to need your help!

7 Day Song

And the winner is… Psytrance!   Hardstyle fought bravely, being only a few percent behind, but it looks like you guys are really into your hypnotic, high-tempo riffs.

I’m afraid to say the next 7 day song will be a bit later than normal.   But that is for good reason, I’ll explain later.   To make up for it, I’ve got another project I’ve been working on that I plan to release soon.   I’m really looking forward to seeing what you think of it.

So the boyinaband.com poll is now about something else – I want to venture into some different videos than simply Reason tutorials, but what should I do?

- Original Performances (MPC stuff or other quirky performance videos?)
- Interviews (Talk to some ace producers about their experiences)
- Reader Questions (Answer some of your questions in a video)
- Reviews (Review more pieces of software or hardware)

Head over to boyinaband.com and let me know!

The Studioffice!

It’s all put together now!   Take a look.

Swivel chairs, green screen blinds and a guy with a beard and a clapper board that keeps appearing in my update videos for some reason.   What more could I ask for?

One thing I’ve learned from making this office is that Ikea meatballs are incredible.

Stats Time! + Free Stuff!

July brought in boyinaband’s 6000th subscriber!   The site is also averaging about 180,000 pageviews a month now, which is frickin’ sweet.   Another cool thing on the YouTube front – I hit a million total views back at the end of April, now we’re over 2 million here in August.   So it took about 2 years from my first video to the one million mark, now it’s taken about 1/8th of that time to double it.

Also, I’ve just realised that having over 6000 subscribers gives me the ability to get free stuff to review!   So you can expect reviews for Melodyne Editor and Superior Drummer 2 in the near future.   I’ve also got Reason 5 and Record 1.5 before it comes out, which is freakin’ exciting – expect reviews of all the devices in there soon.   Have you seen all the stuff about Neptune and Kong?   It sounds like Propellerheads are turning Reason into valhalla or something.

Proxies

I’ve been working on a project called Proxies, which is a band put together by a homeslice of mine, Jordan and his mates. He found me through boyinaband ages ago, thought I had mad skillz, then we wrote some freakin’ awesome tunes.

Now, suffice to say I wouldn’t join another band without good reason – I frickin’ love YAWA and that’s where my focus lies musically, but Jordan has some seriously awesome connections and the Proxies tunes are completely different.   Recently we went into the studio with a producer who’s worked on some seriously high profile artists.

Let’s just say that if you’ve listened to the radio recently, you’ve heard his work.   It’s not set in stone yet, but I’m not one to pass up a chance to get wildly excited about things before they’re definitely happening, hence why I’ve had to push the 7 day song back.   It could totally be worth it if I can learn some tricks of the trade to teach you in future studio sessions.

Featured Artist

This month’s featured artist from the boyinaband.com forum is Subver5ion, who has some quality drum and bass to show off.   His liquid stuff is ace, check out the track “Running Dry” for some chilled, jazz-tastic piano.   The wobble took a while for me to get used to, but it grew on me.   See if it does the same for you!

http://soundcloud.com/subver5ion

If you want to be the featured artist next month and promote your tunes to over 6000 boyinaband subscribers, head over to the boyinaband.com forum at  www.boyinaband.com/forum and post your music in the “Share your music” section.

As always, make sure you share your opinions on other people’s songs as well, otherwise you won’t be eligible!   I want to encourage friendly constructive criticism

Coming soon to boyinaband

So coming up, we’ve got…

- The Psytrance 7 day song
- A cool video I can’t wait to share with you
- Reason 5 preview-y goodness

Not too shabby, huh?

That’s it from me in August 2010 – Hope you enjoy the videos coming up in the next month, and I’ll see you all again for another update soon!

One last thing before I go – I’ve been thinking about another competition and thought I’d do it a bit differently.   I thought about getting you guys to make synths and make tutorials on how you made them, then getting the boyinaband audience to vote on the best synth tutorial.   How many of you guys would be up for making tutorials for a competition to win a bunch of stuff?   Let me know in a comment!

Cheers for watching and have a nice day!

This blog was written for primeloops.com – check them out for some ace samples and to see my blogs 2 months earlier!

Over the past few decades, video games have become a vital part of the music industry.

With licensed soundtracks, original theme songs and games that are entirely music-based dominating the video game charts, they certainly pack a punch when it comes to promoting popular music.

So let’s take a look at some of the matches made in heaven between popular music and video games…

Licensed soundtracks

Many games have opted to include soundtracks from popular artists to accompany the on-screen action. One of the first was…

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

Setting a precedent that still goes on today, the Tony Hawk’s franchise incorporated tracks from punk bands and rap artists to perfectly reflect the energy of the extreme sport. Or “X-treme” sport as their marketing team has been trying to tell us.

Anyway, bands like The Vandals, Anthrax and Papa Roach adorned the soundtracks of the first few titles in the series, going on to add Motorhead, Xzibit, House of Pain, Red Hot Chili Peppers and zillions(ish) more. Many young gamers developed their first love of alternative music through these games – I’m sure they played no small part in attributing to the success of some of the younger bands.

However, taking the idea of licensed music a whole step further was…

Grand Theft Auto 3

Amongst other ground-breaking video game firsts, GTA had an in-game radio with multiple stations featuring multiple licensed songs, including from artists as popular as Debby Harry! This theme has continued through the games, with different genres of music on different stations, making the game’s soundtrack appeal to a massive range of gamers with different music tastes.

Original Music

It’s not just licensed music that’s been affected by video games, however…

Nine Inch Nails and Quake

Trent Reznor was the first popular musician to take to video game composition after working on the score for the violent first person shooting game “Quake” in 1996. An inspired teaming as the industrial music fit the grimey, similarly industrial looking visuals in the game.

Kumi Koda and Final Fantasy

However, it’s not just evil music, more recently in Japan, Kumi Koda, essentially Japan’s version of Britney Spears, recorded the vocals for Final Fantasy X-2′s theme songs “Real Emotion” and “1000 words”, even releasing the former as a single! She also did the motion capture for a large introductory CG scene at the start of the game where the main character is performing the song. Now if that doesn’t show the popularity of video games, I don’t know what does.

Halo 2

Going back to the alternative scene for a moment – artists such as Joe Satriani, Incubus, Breaking Benjamin, and Hoobastank all contributed to the soundtrack for the best selling Xbox game ever – Incubus even went as far as to call their album “light grenade” after an in-game weapon.

Music Games

And then we come to games that rely entirely on pop music – these have become so popular that they’ve already made billions, saturated the market and declined in sales. That market saturation has had quite an effect on popular musicians, however…

Guitar Hero

The series that sparked it all in the western world, Guitar Hero put legendary rock band’s songs in the hands of untrained gamers and allowed them to live out their dreams – whilst listening to a host of popular music. This meant a young audience was exposed to older music, giving bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple new audiences that may have completely missed them had they not had these games. Newer bands such as Sum 41 and Franz Ferdinand were included as well, however – and there’s little doubt that this propelled their fan base through the roof too.

Singstar

Karaoke has always been popular, but competitive karaoke was popularised by the Singstar games, which actually measured the pitch of the player’s voice. A scary amount of Singstar titles have been released (over 70!), essentially adopting a “NOW that’s what I call music” approach and releasing whatever’s popular at the time. This has become a huge sales phenomenon and opened up a new level of interactivity with the charts for music lovers and a new method of accessing music for gamers.

Audiosurf

It’s not all licensing, though – games like Audiosurf generate the in-game content from music. Audiosurf makes racetracks based upon the music loaded into it, for example.

There are loads of innovative musical games about; as the music industry declines, the ever-growing video game industry will be able to give it a breath of life in the form of vital promotion through popular games. The music charts are already being affected by what people have heard in-game.

Things have come a long way from the blips and bloops of yesteryear, that’s for sure.

This blog was written for primeloops.com – check them out for some ace samples and to see my blogs 2 months earlier!

So you’re entering the dehumanising world of robotic voices…

Attempting to find the right sound for you amongst the sharp, emotionless and downright alien sounding tones you can get from digitally processed vocals can be a veritable nightmare – so here are 5 different paths you can take to start your computer communicating with you! 

1. Ring Modulation

Ring modulators multiply two waveforms together and output the sum and difference of the frequencies present in each waveform. This creates a signal with lots of harmonic overtones from both signals, making some mental metallic sounds.

While ring modulation has an uncanny habit of destroying melodic sounds, it works wonders on speech. I fact, chances are you’ve already hear the effects of ring modulation on vocals exclaiming “Exterminate!” at you – the Daleks in Doctor Who are great examples of the robotic tones that can be achieved.

2. Speech Synthesis

If you just don’t want the bother of recording, then speech synthesis is for you! This method entails the computer generating the vocals from scratch.

Great if you’re going for that entirely artificial “A computer is talking to you” or “This is what they thought robots sounded like in the 1950s” effect with your Robovocals.

3. Pitch Correction

Automatically correcting pitch can have more uses than just on singing vocals – Crank up the speed and auto-tune amount to full and get that Cher – Believe vocal effect. Then, simply run your speech through it to give it a very synthetic tone!

4. Comb Filter

For a cheap and quick metallic voice that gives an unmistakeable air of robosity (I just invented that word, hope you don’t mind), a comb filter is the way to go – it’s essentially a really quick delay (under 10ms) with a really high feedback. The sharpness of the metallic tone is ideal for Decepticon-like vocals.

5. Vocoder

Speaking of Decepticons, “Soundwave” from the original transformers series was brought to life (kinda) by running the voice actor through a vocoder! This device removed all the original tone and changed the pitch to whatever the synth plugged into the vocoder’s carrier signal played. This allowed the Decepticonic tones to come through when the sound engineers played his voice through a minor second chord. Pure evil.

And a bonus suggestion:

Vocaloids – computer programs that generate singing vocals from just lyrics and melody without a microphone in sight! These are programs that are getting better by the year and soon we’ll no doubt see them hit the charts. Another example of robots coming over here and taking our jobs…

Man, I love videos like this – seeing how companies grew to what they are.  

Especially when those companies make my synth software of choice!

I dream of building a company that innovates like that. Are you guys excited about Reason 5 yet?

This blog was written for primeloops.com – check them out for some ace samples and to see my blogs 2 months earlier!

Hip Hop has long had a specific stigma attached to it.

Whether it’s the masses’ misinterpretation that it’s all self-promoting arrogant rhymes over simple sampled beats or chart-fodder for people who can’t operate an auto-tune unit, it has been misunderstood for a long time.

But now Hip Hop has well and truly grown up in the eyes of the mainstream…

The New Wave of Hip Hop

Where in the past Hip Hop has been considered party music or something for rude boys to test out the new subwoofers in their car, the new wave of Hip Hop is considerably more versatile.

All kinds of genres have found their way into the tracks of new “Alternative Hip Hop” artists; rock, pop, jazz, indie, country, electronica and even gospel have been drawn from to create this evolution.

It’s not just musically that things have changed either – Lyrics have veered away from the ego-food of yesteryear as Gangsta Rap’s sales continue their steady decline.   Whether it’s about dealing with emotions or political messages, there is clearly a change in character of the conventional rapper.

Ideology

The idea behind this new wave of Hip hop is not one specific thing – It’s a collection; a positive plethora of ideas and directions to take the genre.

Old concepts that have never before hit it big in the charts and new thoughts that draw from the preferences of the individual artists pushing them.

Basically – trying something different.   People still love Hip Hop, but they’re tired of the same re-worked idea sitting at the top of their charts every week.

Proponents

There are loads of different rappers taking the Alt Hip Hop route through their career, but here are just a few case studies…

Kanye

With his album 808s & Heartbreak sounding like an emo band name and yet going on to hit the number one spot and go platinum, it’s clear that his decision to go for purely emotional lyrical content was a commercially viable one.

The music took heavy influence from synthpop and, unsurprisingly, featured a considerably amount of the Roland TR-808 drum machine.

M.I.A.

Now considered one of the world’s top 100 most influential people by Time magazine, M.I.A.’s infinitely versatile musical outlet has gone from strength to strength as she’s gone from country to country, sharing her political messages in cleverly masked, mainstream-worthy songs.

Whether it’s the innocent edge of “Paper Planes” or the darker, more driving “Born Free”, her music is certainly different to the Hip Hop that has previously graced the charts.

Outkast

The owner of the best selling rap album of all time only found their worldwide fame after experimenting outside their previous comfort zone of of Dirty South and G-Funk.   The two rappers brought a considerable change to Hip Hop back in 2003 with the album “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” and went on to sell over 11 million copies.


The Future

Since experimenting with obscure genres and lyrical themes seems to be working, no doubt more obscure and interesting interpretations of Hip Hop will grace the charts in the future!

With styles like Glitch Hip and Wonky music taking influence from Dubstep and tailoring it to Hip Hop, and the boundaries between Dance and Hip Hop getting smaller thanks to people like Kid Cudi and Black Eyed Peas, who knows where popular rap music will take us?