Innovator, producer, rapper and multiple alter ego having artist... Kool Keith, has been incorporating synthesizers into his music for well over two decades. With Dozens and dozens of albums and almost the same amount of different aliases...Kool Keith stands alone and has never let the mainstream categorize his artistry and eccentricism within Hop hop....
His music will inspire artists for ages to come...
Some of my favorite videos:
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
80's synths
I find it interesting that music programs have only been expanding, while not that much has changed stylistically.
DJ Skizm in the house
http://www.myspace.com/wholesickcrew
http://www.myspace.com/skizmatic26
Blow 'em up, produced by DJ Skizm featuring me:
Blow em up ver 3 -
Synthesize THIS
The sounds of the future are made with electricity. This blog will explore the instruments that create the sounds we can expect to hear in the years past, present and racing towards us, serving as a database of musicians who best encapsulate the tones of a robot's soul, and how musical technology has changed the process of music making entirely.
Synthesizers are unique electronic instruments that capacitate various methods of both producing and shaping sound. The sounds synthesizers make are distinguished from those possible of other musical instruments because they are the combining notes of different frequencies rather than amplified acoustics. Electronic music has deeply impacted my life as it gives me happiness in the form of listening, writing, and dancing to soulful beats. The following posts will include some of my biggest inspirations, as well as groundbreaking and influential individuals from various generations.
Synthesizers are unique electronic instruments that capacitate various methods of both producing and shaping sound. The sounds synthesizers make are distinguished from those possible of other musical instruments because they are the combining notes of different frequencies rather than amplified acoustics. Electronic music has deeply impacted my life as it gives me happiness in the form of listening, writing, and dancing to soulful beats. The following posts will include some of my biggest inspirations, as well as groundbreaking and influential individuals from various generations.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
awesome electronic music in the New York Times
MUSIC; Electronic Music, Always Current
By KYLE GANN
Published: Sunday, July 9, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/09/arts/music-electronic-music-always-current.html
IT takes maybe 15 minutes to input the first page of Stravinsky's ''Sacre du Printemps'' into music notation software on my computer. I press the space bar, and it plays back instantly, with simulations of the original woodwind tones. Compare that process with the dozens of hours it took pioneers like Milton Babbitt to get just a single tone out of a synthesizer 40 years ago -- or even with the hundreds of IBM cards I tediously punched in a computer music class only 20 years ago, with three notes to show for it -- and it is clear that the very meaning of the term ''electronic music'' has changed. In fact, as the millennium turns over, it is appropriate to ask whether the term still means anything at all.
Does an orchestral film score made on a computer with sampled acoustic instruments count as ''electronic music''? How about a piece for amplified string quartet? Do recordings of regular string quartets become electronic music when a D.J. fuses them in a turntable collage? Is a computerized score still electronic music when it is realized on an acoustic Disklavier piano? The boundary seems infinitely permeable.
The Electronic Evolution series, beginning Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, seems conceived and programmed specifically to drive such ambiguities home. It is surely not the program of performerless tape pieces one might expect; audiences will not sit in the dark listening to loudspeakers, although the program Friday at Columbia University features some early classics of tape music, including Stockhausen's ''Gesang der Junglinge'' and Varese's ''Poeme Electronique.''
Instead, the festival is dominated by the role of electronic instruments in performance. This is not the repertory the term ''electronic music'' brings to mind. In fact, it seems calculated to assuage the fear most widely associated with electronic music: that live performers will be replaced by machines. This electronic festival revolves around the live musician, not the stationary, unemotive tape recorder or computer.
Nor does Electronic Evolution try to summarize the history of the medium or redefine it; ours is not a point in history in which summarization or redefinition is possible. From 1948 to 1983, the term ''electronic music'' meant something very specific, which it probably never will again. Since 1983 we have inhabited a wildly transitional period, in which the impact of electronics on music seems to grow more powerful by the month, but in directions impossible to predict. I pick those dates because in 1948 Pierre Schaeffer made the first piece for electronic tape, and in 1983 technicians from Roland, Oberheim and Sequential Circuits developed a universal interface for electronic instruments known as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), bringing the clear-cut era of electronic music to an end.
DURING most of those 35 years, ''electronic composers'' were people who worked in large studios with large equipment. It was often a collaborative activity: Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky produced some of the first tape music together; Schaeffer and Pierre Henry; Mr. Babbitt and Mario Davidovsky. Electronic music in this age was divided into two kinds, depending on the sound sources. ''Musique concrete'' consisted of ''natural,'' acoustic sounds captured on tape and modified, generally painstakingly spliced together with razor blades and tape. Early classics of musique concrete include ''Poeme Electronique,'' Iannis Xenakis's ''Bohor'' (also included in the festival), Luening's ''Fantasy in Space'' and Luc Ferrari's ''Presque Rien'' No. 1.
Today, the ubiquity of samplers, which record natural sounds and play them back at the touch of a keyboard, renders ''musique concrete'' a quaint and outmoded term. ''Poeme Electronique'' sounded like music from Mars when I first heard the old Columbia recording in 1972, but students today giggle when they hear it: its spooky ''ooooo gaaah'' voice samples seem camp in comparison with the sampling experiments of any ambitious high school computer jockey.
continue reading at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/09/arts/music-electronic-music-always-current.html
By KYLE GANN
Published: Sunday, July 9, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/09/arts/music-electronic-music-always-current.html
IT takes maybe 15 minutes to input the first page of Stravinsky's ''Sacre du Printemps'' into music notation software on my computer. I press the space bar, and it plays back instantly, with simulations of the original woodwind tones. Compare that process with the dozens of hours it took pioneers like Milton Babbitt to get just a single tone out of a synthesizer 40 years ago -- or even with the hundreds of IBM cards I tediously punched in a computer music class only 20 years ago, with three notes to show for it -- and it is clear that the very meaning of the term ''electronic music'' has changed. In fact, as the millennium turns over, it is appropriate to ask whether the term still means anything at all.
Does an orchestral film score made on a computer with sampled acoustic instruments count as ''electronic music''? How about a piece for amplified string quartet? Do recordings of regular string quartets become electronic music when a D.J. fuses them in a turntable collage? Is a computerized score still electronic music when it is realized on an acoustic Disklavier piano? The boundary seems infinitely permeable.
The Electronic Evolution series, beginning Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, seems conceived and programmed specifically to drive such ambiguities home. It is surely not the program of performerless tape pieces one might expect; audiences will not sit in the dark listening to loudspeakers, although the program Friday at Columbia University features some early classics of tape music, including Stockhausen's ''Gesang der Junglinge'' and Varese's ''Poeme Electronique.''
Instead, the festival is dominated by the role of electronic instruments in performance. This is not the repertory the term ''electronic music'' brings to mind. In fact, it seems calculated to assuage the fear most widely associated with electronic music: that live performers will be replaced by machines. This electronic festival revolves around the live musician, not the stationary, unemotive tape recorder or computer.
Nor does Electronic Evolution try to summarize the history of the medium or redefine it; ours is not a point in history in which summarization or redefinition is possible. From 1948 to 1983, the term ''electronic music'' meant something very specific, which it probably never will again. Since 1983 we have inhabited a wildly transitional period, in which the impact of electronics on music seems to grow more powerful by the month, but in directions impossible to predict. I pick those dates because in 1948 Pierre Schaeffer made the first piece for electronic tape, and in 1983 technicians from Roland, Oberheim and Sequential Circuits developed a universal interface for electronic instruments known as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), bringing the clear-cut era of electronic music to an end.
DURING most of those 35 years, ''electronic composers'' were people who worked in large studios with large equipment. It was often a collaborative activity: Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky produced some of the first tape music together; Schaeffer and Pierre Henry; Mr. Babbitt and Mario Davidovsky. Electronic music in this age was divided into two kinds, depending on the sound sources. ''Musique concrete'' consisted of ''natural,'' acoustic sounds captured on tape and modified, generally painstakingly spliced together with razor blades and tape. Early classics of musique concrete include ''Poeme Electronique,'' Iannis Xenakis's ''Bohor'' (also included in the festival), Luening's ''Fantasy in Space'' and Luc Ferrari's ''Presque Rien'' No. 1.
Today, the ubiquity of samplers, which record natural sounds and play them back at the touch of a keyboard, renders ''musique concrete'' a quaint and outmoded term. ''Poeme Electronique'' sounded like music from Mars when I first heard the old Columbia recording in 1972, but students today giggle when they hear it: its spooky ''ooooo gaaah'' voice samples seem camp in comparison with the sampling experiments of any ambitious high school computer jockey.
continue reading at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/09/arts/music-electronic-music-always-current.html
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Interesting article explaining invention of modern synths
New Scientist
December 23, 1995
In the Moog: From just one small box come thousands of instruments and voices. But what inspired the modern synthesiser?
BYLINE: BARRY FOX
SECTION: Features, Pg. 5252
LENGTH: 1261 words
WHEN jazz and pop guitarist George Benson performed live in London earlier this year, one keyboard player in his small backing group recreated the full fat sound that the trumpets, trombones and saxophones of the Count Basie Big Band had produced on record for the artist. And it was all thanks to Robert Moog, the American engineer born in 1934 and the father of modern music synthesis. Musicians who would once have hauled a massive Hammond organ to their concerts, along with the enormous rotating loudspeakers that gave the instrument its characteristic sound, can now dial up the Hammond sound on a portable electronic synthesiser.
A keyboard triggers the music's release, either from an electronic sound generator or from a memory of recorded natural sounds. It then lets the performer shape the waveform of the sound electronically so that the music mimics a real instrument, or creates something altogether new. Moog's invention, which came on the market in the mid-1960s, certainly changed the face of music. But where did Moog get his inspiration from?Magazine
Music synthesis was hardly a new idea in the late 1940s when the young Moog started tinkering with electronic gadgets with his father. One of the first inventors to use the term was probably Thaddeus Cahill of New York. In 1896, he filed a patent on the "art of and apparatus for generating and distributing music electrically", an idea that led to the creation of an enormous tone generator built from a series of conducting shafts, which Cahill later called a Dynamophone or Telharmonium.
By 1928, Maurice Martenot in Paris had built his Ondes Martenot, which used a keyboard to control a pair of oscillators. The frequencies generated by an oscillator circuit depend on its components - Martenot's - instrument used oscillators that worked at around 80 kilohertz. One frequency was fixed and the other could be varied across a few hundred hertz. Though the frequencies were too high to be heard, mixing the two signals produced audible sounds, a mechanism that allowed a skilled performer to make music. More sophisticated offspring included, in 1934, Laurens Hammond's mighty electric organ with its two keyboards.
But it was a completely different type of instrument that the young Moog cut his electronic teeth on, one that had two aerials instead of a keyboard, and relied on vacuum tubes, or valves. The aerials sense the position of a performer's hands, which vary the electrical capacitance between themselves and the aerials. Bringing a hand closer to one aerial varies the tuning of the oscillator, and changes the note. Moving the other hand near the second aerial controls the volume of the sound by varying the current that heats the filaments of the valves. The effect is strange and instantly recognisable, a cross between the violin and a soprano voice. The musical range can extend to around 5 octaves.
The Theremin, as the instrument became known, was the brainchild of Leon Theremin, or Lev Termen as he was first called. Born in Russia at the turn of the century, Termen studied physics at Petrograd University and, in 1920, demonstrated his musical synthesiser, which was powered by what was then a new device, the vacuum tube. The instrument used two oscillators, one running at a fixed frequency of 170 kilohertz, and the other varying between 168 and 170 kilohertz. Mixing the signals gave audible tones of up to 2 kilohertz.
World tour
By 1924 Termen was playing his strange instrument on stage with the Leningrad Philharmonic and, three years later, he went on a European tour that took in Frankfurt, Berlin, London and Paris. In December 1927, he took New York by storm as Leon Theremin. The New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra gave a concert with four Theremins and orchestra.
In 1929, RCA took out a licence to manufacture and sell Theremins to the public. They were offered through ordinary radio shops, with the implicit promise that anyone who could whistle a tune, could play a Theremin. Inevitably customers were disappointed. People who lived near them were doubtless even more disappointed because a Theremin sounds truly nasty in the hands of a novice.
Although RCA soon stopped making home models, the device remained very popular for concerts. This was largely due to another Russian, Clara Rockmore. She had been a child prodigy, learning the violin at the Conservatory in St. Petersberg, and playing professionally by the time she was nine. In 1927, Rockmore also went to the US where Theremin trained her to play his electronic instrument.
Rockmore, with perfect pitch, was able to identify musical pitch by ear alone, and became a virtuoso on the Theremin. By 1934, she was giving solo concerts, accompanied by her sister on piano. She toured the world, sometimes with singer Paul Robeson, and sometimes with an orchestra under Leopold Stokowski.
Composer Joseph Schillinger, who later taught musical theory to both Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, wrote a Suite for RCA Theremin and Orchestra in 1929, to promote the instrument. In the 1940s and 1950s, musicians toured with the Theremin, giving solo performances. I vividly remember a travelling Thereminist who gave a concert at my old school in the 1950s.
Rockmore was still playing in 1975, and Moog arranged for her and her sister to record in hifi in a New York studio, a performance that was issued as a vinyl LP (Delos 25437). Moog had a very special reason for recording Rockmore. One of the first electronic gadgets he built as a boy was a Theremin, whose patent had by then expired. Giving due credit to Theremin's pioneering work, Moog went on to devise a transistorised version of the original valve design, which he made and sold in the 1950s.
Good vibrations
Although all the other early electronic instruments have either disappeared or become antique collectibles, the Theremin remains a working tool. Some modern synthesisers have a pre-programmed "Theremin sound". It is there mainly because The Beach Boys guaranteed the Theremin a place in history by using one on their seminal recording, Good Vibrations. In September this year, the British monthly magazine Everyday with Practical Electronics published details of how to make a simplified version of the original instrument.
More recently, music for a film about the life of Ed Wood, the legendary Hollywood director who made some of the worst science fiction movies ever, includes a new recording of a genuine Theremin. British musicians recorded the music at George Martin's Air Studios in north London. The composer wrote a part for the Theremin, but there was no original instrument and no-one in Britain who could play it. Eventually, a working Thereminist was tracked down in Hamburg and flown in for the job. The orchestra and studio engineers gathered round, curious to find out what strange contraption the guest musician was setting up. They were even more intrigued when the music began - and now one of the professional synthesiser players wants his own Theremin.
Anyone who has lived next door to a student violinist, or would-be soprano, will be excused from hoping that no electronics company has the bright idea of marketing a low cost Theremin. Subtly combining the penetration power of both sounds, and requiring the rare gift of perfect pitch to play properly, it could well go straight into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most unwelcome Christmas present.
For more science news see http://www.newscientist.com
COUNTRY: UNITED KINGDOM (58%);
CITY: LONDON, ENGLAND (73%);
SUBJECT: WIND INSTRUMENTS (93%); MUSIC (91%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (90%); MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (90%); KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS (90%); JAZZ & BLUES (90%);
PERSON: LEON THEREMIN (91%); ROBERT MOOG (90%); CLARA ROCKMORE (60%); LEV TERMEN (60%); MAURICE MARTENOT (59%);
LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1997
LANGUAGE: EnglishFeatures
December 23, 1995
In the Moog: From just one small box come thousands of instruments and voices. But what inspired the modern synthesiser?
BYLINE: BARRY FOX
SECTION: Features, Pg. 5252
LENGTH: 1261 words
WHEN jazz and pop guitarist George Benson performed live in London earlier this year, one keyboard player in his small backing group recreated the full fat sound that the trumpets, trombones and saxophones of the Count Basie Big Band had produced on record for the artist. And it was all thanks to Robert Moog, the American engineer born in 1934 and the father of modern music synthesis. Musicians who would once have hauled a massive Hammond organ to their concerts, along with the enormous rotating loudspeakers that gave the instrument its characteristic sound, can now dial up the Hammond sound on a portable electronic synthesiser.
A keyboard triggers the music's release, either from an electronic sound generator or from a memory of recorded natural sounds. It then lets the performer shape the waveform of the sound electronically so that the music mimics a real instrument, or creates something altogether new. Moog's invention, which came on the market in the mid-1960s, certainly changed the face of music. But where did Moog get his inspiration from?Magazine
Music synthesis was hardly a new idea in the late 1940s when the young Moog started tinkering with electronic gadgets with his father. One of the first inventors to use the term was probably Thaddeus Cahill of New York. In 1896, he filed a patent on the "art of and apparatus for generating and distributing music electrically", an idea that led to the creation of an enormous tone generator built from a series of conducting shafts, which Cahill later called a Dynamophone or Telharmonium.
By 1928, Maurice Martenot in Paris had built his Ondes Martenot, which used a keyboard to control a pair of oscillators. The frequencies generated by an oscillator circuit depend on its components - Martenot's - instrument used oscillators that worked at around 80 kilohertz. One frequency was fixed and the other could be varied across a few hundred hertz. Though the frequencies were too high to be heard, mixing the two signals produced audible sounds, a mechanism that allowed a skilled performer to make music. More sophisticated offspring included, in 1934, Laurens Hammond's mighty electric organ with its two keyboards.
But it was a completely different type of instrument that the young Moog cut his electronic teeth on, one that had two aerials instead of a keyboard, and relied on vacuum tubes, or valves. The aerials sense the position of a performer's hands, which vary the electrical capacitance between themselves and the aerials. Bringing a hand closer to one aerial varies the tuning of the oscillator, and changes the note. Moving the other hand near the second aerial controls the volume of the sound by varying the current that heats the filaments of the valves. The effect is strange and instantly recognisable, a cross between the violin and a soprano voice. The musical range can extend to around 5 octaves.
The Theremin, as the instrument became known, was the brainchild of Leon Theremin, or Lev Termen as he was first called. Born in Russia at the turn of the century, Termen studied physics at Petrograd University and, in 1920, demonstrated his musical synthesiser, which was powered by what was then a new device, the vacuum tube. The instrument used two oscillators, one running at a fixed frequency of 170 kilohertz, and the other varying between 168 and 170 kilohertz. Mixing the signals gave audible tones of up to 2 kilohertz.
World tour
By 1924 Termen was playing his strange instrument on stage with the Leningrad Philharmonic and, three years later, he went on a European tour that took in Frankfurt, Berlin, London and Paris. In December 1927, he took New York by storm as Leon Theremin. The New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra gave a concert with four Theremins and orchestra.
In 1929, RCA took out a licence to manufacture and sell Theremins to the public. They were offered through ordinary radio shops, with the implicit promise that anyone who could whistle a tune, could play a Theremin. Inevitably customers were disappointed. People who lived near them were doubtless even more disappointed because a Theremin sounds truly nasty in the hands of a novice.
Although RCA soon stopped making home models, the device remained very popular for concerts. This was largely due to another Russian, Clara Rockmore. She had been a child prodigy, learning the violin at the Conservatory in St. Petersberg, and playing professionally by the time she was nine. In 1927, Rockmore also went to the US where Theremin trained her to play his electronic instrument.
Rockmore, with perfect pitch, was able to identify musical pitch by ear alone, and became a virtuoso on the Theremin. By 1934, she was giving solo concerts, accompanied by her sister on piano. She toured the world, sometimes with singer Paul Robeson, and sometimes with an orchestra under Leopold Stokowski.
Composer Joseph Schillinger, who later taught musical theory to both Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, wrote a Suite for RCA Theremin and Orchestra in 1929, to promote the instrument. In the 1940s and 1950s, musicians toured with the Theremin, giving solo performances. I vividly remember a travelling Thereminist who gave a concert at my old school in the 1950s.
Rockmore was still playing in 1975, and Moog arranged for her and her sister to record in hifi in a New York studio, a performance that was issued as a vinyl LP (Delos 25437). Moog had a very special reason for recording Rockmore. One of the first electronic gadgets he built as a boy was a Theremin, whose patent had by then expired. Giving due credit to Theremin's pioneering work, Moog went on to devise a transistorised version of the original valve design, which he made and sold in the 1950s.
Good vibrations
Although all the other early electronic instruments have either disappeared or become antique collectibles, the Theremin remains a working tool. Some modern synthesisers have a pre-programmed "Theremin sound". It is there mainly because The Beach Boys guaranteed the Theremin a place in history by using one on their seminal recording, Good Vibrations. In September this year, the British monthly magazine Everyday with Practical Electronics published details of how to make a simplified version of the original instrument.
More recently, music for a film about the life of Ed Wood, the legendary Hollywood director who made some of the worst science fiction movies ever, includes a new recording of a genuine Theremin. British musicians recorded the music at George Martin's Air Studios in north London. The composer wrote a part for the Theremin, but there was no original instrument and no-one in Britain who could play it. Eventually, a working Thereminist was tracked down in Hamburg and flown in for the job. The orchestra and studio engineers gathered round, curious to find out what strange contraption the guest musician was setting up. They were even more intrigued when the music began - and now one of the professional synthesiser players wants his own Theremin.
Anyone who has lived next door to a student violinist, or would-be soprano, will be excused from hoping that no electronics company has the bright idea of marketing a low cost Theremin. Subtly combining the penetration power of both sounds, and requiring the rare gift of perfect pitch to play properly, it could well go straight into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most unwelcome Christmas present.
For more science news see http://www.newscientist.com
COUNTRY: UNITED KINGDOM (58%);
CITY: LONDON, ENGLAND (73%);
SUBJECT: WIND INSTRUMENTS (93%); MUSIC (91%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (90%); MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (90%); KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS (90%); JAZZ & BLUES (90%);
PERSON: LEON THEREMIN (91%); ROBERT MOOG (90%); CLARA ROCKMORE (60%); LEV TERMEN (60%); MAURICE MARTENOT (59%);
LOAD-DATE: March 17, 1997
LANGUAGE: EnglishFeatures
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)