Despite the audio being a bit choppy here and there, this is a great documentary about beatboxing. Trust me, you’re going to love it.

There’s some creative mashing up for you.

Oh here, one more. Geeks + Music = Goooooood.

Oh yes. I am very serious when I say that, as the Queen of Splice, I am hereby declaring this BEATBOX WEEK, and we’re kicking off with a contest.

We’ve had some contests now in which people with fancy equipment are winning all the goodies, and so now we’re going to bring it back to basics: Making music with nothing but YOU. That’s right - beatboxing. I have noticed a lot of beatboxers hiding in the wings around here, and it’s high time we made some noise about it.

A short story: Beatboxing was the inspiration for Splice, you know. Wendell, our CEO and all around fearless leader, is a chronic beatboxer. (A chronic beatboxer who had better contribute some inspiration to this contest. Go bug him about it in a comment!) I have never met a human being who so completely lacks the ability to sit quietly… he is constantly humming, chirping, clicking, tapping, whirring. He can tell the story better than I can, but rumor has it that he was sitting at a table with friends, goofing around and (wait for it….) beatboxing, and suddenly realized how much fun it would be to have a site where you could share this organic rhythmic goodness with the entire universe. A few sleepless nights, a lot of pots of tea and a few months later, and here you go.

So come on, beatboxers of the world - we want to hear your best work. The contest rules are super simple:

1. All entries should be recorded using the Splice sequencer. (Don’t know how? Read this!)

2. Tag your entry with BEATBOXBEATDOWN.

That’s it. Enter as many tracks as you like. We’ll be the judges on this one and the winners will be showcased and revered until the end of time. Oh yeah - AND they will receive a luscious FX5051 5.1 Surround Sound System from Altec Lansing. Looook at it.. It even plugs into your USB port. I love that.

Round up all your best beatboxin’ friends and let’s do it. Contest ends at Midnight (CST) on Sunday, March 4th.

You know, you don’t need any fancy equipment to share sounds with the community here. All you need is my fancy new tutorial on how to use the record feature. Come give it a read and then show me what you’ve got!

With a beatbox competition coming right up*, it seems to be a good time to go over the recording feature here at Splice. I’ve put together a very basic tutorial here to get you going. All you need is some kind of microphone!

1. From the music menu, select Music -> Record Sounds.

That’s it! After you hit save, you can go back and put in the name of your sound, or you can make more. If you have your own tricks you use to record, or if you have questions about how to make something work, come try asking over in the forum and someone will help you out. Have fun!

*OMG did I say that OUT LOUD? Shhhhhh.

Hello, my beautiful and lovely Splicers! Just me, Thaumata, popping in with my periodic friendly reminder about what is ok to upload to Splice, and what is NOT ok to upload to Splice. I like to think of the sounds I upload as Legos. (Remember Legos?) They should be little bricks of sound that other people can stick together in different combinations to create big giant creations that are cool and unique. A drum loop or a melody, for example, are great, and you can make these using all kinds of programs.

What is NOT ok to upload here are entire MP3s of your favorite band or rapper. For starters, even though they are fun to listen to, they’re not very easy to remix, and remixing is what brought us all together, right? Right! Most importantly, these songs are almost always copyrighted, which means that you don’t have that person’s permission to put their music here. These things will get deleted from the site, and that will leave a big hole in your song (and the songs that anyone else made with it.) Nobody wants that, so don’t do it, ok?

The best thing you can do if you want to see a certain artist here is to tell that artist! A little peer pressure can go a long way, you know! So, do your part to keep Splice rockin’, and know that your fellow Splicers will love you for it.

Man, the music from airtone never ceases to amaze me, so I am very pleased to be able to announce this song as the winner of our Remix Petrol contest! Airtone will be receiving an inMotion9 portable speaker system from Altec Lansing. Take a listen to this! It’s beautiful and really does a nice job of using the vocal sounds I love so much:

Great job!

[11:49:12 PM] Amiee says: So I just made this song on our site and then I made it better
[11:49:15 PM] Thaumata says: I feel so accomplished
[11:49:28 PM] Thaumata says: I have contributed something worthy to the community of creative commons
[11:51:58 PM] Rig says: yayyyy
[11:52:07 PM] Rig says: I just finished another version of that song, actually
[11:52:18 PM] Rig says: you vs thatcrooner
[11:52:26 PM] Rig says: I JUST saved it
[11:52:29 PM] Thaumata says: woohoo!
[11:52:35 PM] Thaumata says: I am famous on teh intarnets
[11:52:38 PM] Rig says: I’d wait for the mp3 to show up
[11:52:40 PM] Rig says: haha

We have just had an avalanche of great content lately, and the newest contribution from Fenix might just take the cake. What a cool thing to make!

If you’ve got something fun you want featured in the blog, be sure to let us know!

I’m always telling people that the best thing about Splice is not that it provides a technology for remixing music, but rather that it provides a new kind of venue for building tighter global communities through music. When you think about it, that’s pretty cool. The internet makes us almost telepathic - a thought that I’m having can be typed and trasmitted to your computer, and therefore into your brain, in a matter of seconds. This kind of technology is taken for granted by most people who have it, despite it being in it’s infancy, relatively speaking. (The internet revolution has only just begun, regardless of what my grandmothers would have told you.) It’s an amazing new tool for bringing people closer together. Music, on the other hand, is one of the oldest tools available for this same purpose. There hasn’t been a culture in the history of humanity that hasn’t had music. I think that’s significant.

To me, Splice is a shining caduceus of these two things, and I love nothing more than giving people examples of the neat things that happen when you give people some tools and a little creative breathing room. My example today starts with another long-lost Splicer, ThatCrooner. He’s a performer and singer from Barcelona, Spain. I’ve always enjoyed his unique vocal work and have been missing his contributions to the site. Lo and behold, though, he’s back, too! It’s like a Splice reunion this week (we must be doing something right!):

So, in my joy at having another vocalist come back to play, I recorded some vocal work that I’ve had stashed in my brain for a while. Typically, I am super self conscious about sharing my music online… since I don’t know a lot about recording, I’m never satisfied with how it sounds. But I had this (glaringly obvious) realization that Splice is actually MADE for sharing unfinished work. I mean, we’re here to make projects TOGETHER and not just post shiny and completed mp3s, right? Right! So then I went ahead and posted this lullaby:

As predicted and hoped, someone picked it up and did a few things to it. Rig went ahead and downloaded the vocals, pitch-corrected them in some places* and then re-uploaded them into HIS version of the song:

Which is extra lovely. So there you have it - From Spain to the USA to Canada… this little train of inspiration just keeps going. Who in the world will hear this song and remix it next, or write something else after being inspired by it? I guess you’ll have to stick around to find out, right?

* I have to say I did laugh at Gurdonark’s comment to me that “you ought to tell rig that the dissonance and unexpected key variation is often a charming benefit to a sophisticated track! .” And well, isn’t THAT a nice way to put it?