We’re in the last phases of getting ready to open the doors here. Be patient a little while longer and your shiny new site will await you. In the meantime I want to repost something I blogged about a long time ago, to give your hungry music brains something to digest while you’re relaxing in the cool shade of our blog. It’s Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. You can learn SO MUCH from that site, not to mention that it’s really fun to go exploring there. Be warned - there is a bit of language on the site, but if you can handle it, you’ll come out with a better musical education than you might get elsewhere.
Fartlord has been busy while the site is down. He made a video to help promote Splice. I smiled when I watched it and you probably will, too. Thanks, Fartlord!!
Ok, kiddies. My wonderfu friend talk boxfor super cheap. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that most of you are too young to remember good funk and therefore have no idea what I am talking about, therefore, exhibit A:
(Really, the best and rockingest video of Stevie on the talk box is HERE HERE HERE, but it’s got the embedding disabled. Don’t miss it, though. It’s so awesome. Really. I wouldn’t lie to you.)
So, ready to make one of your own? It’s so simple that anyone can do it, really. Even people like me, who have no skill when it comes to objects with wires. So, I challenge you to make your own talk box. I have a set of old speakers around here, somewhere, and I know I have some duct tape. That’s pretty much almost all you need:
Jack Black has pretty much summed it up nicely here, but we should go over this some more.
Here are some things that are NOT OK to upload to Splice, almost always:
Music from most CDs
Music you found on Limewire or other file sharing sites
Most rap a cappellas
Covers of someone else’s music, even if you played them yourself
Clips from movies
Samples from anything listed above
This might seem like it’s kind of limiting, but that’s only until you start to discover how many amazing things are already out there that are ok to use. There are a lot of musicians who like to share their music for remixing. A good place to find them is through the search engine on the Creative Commons website.
But better yet, why not upload something you made all by yourself? You can upload:
your own song or riff
yourself reading some original poetry
your audio diary
your own podcast!
your cat purring
your impromptu breakfast drum session with your fork banging on your coffee mug
Or anything else you can think to put a microphone in front of that’s happening right in front of you. Get creative!
The best thing you can do if you want to hear music from your favorite band’s new CD on Splice is to contact your favorite band and let them know. A lot of artists are starting to allow this kind of remixing, but only when they know their fans really want to join in. Get involved! Just remember that uploading copyrighted works is bad for everyone. It takes a lot of time for the staff here to delete them, and they plug up the works by wasting space and making it really hard for people who want to CREATE music to find legal sounds.
I always tell people to think of music in blocks, and so I was delighted to see these videos of the Tangible Sequencer today. They took that phrase quite literally. Each block contains a single ‘chunk’ of sound and nearby blocks react to that sound. I wish I would have had a set of these when I was small.
This week is just one big dance party in my head. In pursuit of my neverending quest to show you why music is FUN, I bring you this - Yet Another Dancing Robot. Oh yeah.
