Free Music Friday

After a couple of weeks' absence, spent dodging Matatus in the amazing town of Mombasa, Free Music Friday is back.

In honour of the majestic continent of Africa, here's an amazing free album from the modestly named "The Very Best".


The band, made up of Esau Mwamwaya and producer Radioclit, met in London, but have produced an album that sounds wonderfully exotic and true to their African roots.

Infectious rhythms and joyous vocals collide with electrifying effect on track after track. If you like this, and I suspect you will, keep an eye out for their new album "Warm Heart of Africa". Tribal pop which brings a bit of sunshine into the most gloomy of winter days.

Download their demo album here. Visit their Myspace for news about their activities, including an exciting remix project here.

And just in case you are hungry for more freeness, we're taking this opportunity to highlight the Eigentum Ist Diebstahl (Property Is Theft) label from Germany.



Their netlabel is now up to it's 19th release. The Eigentum crew have a very open music policy and (contrary to the national stereotype) a very quirky sense of humour, so expect everything from beard-stroking ambient noise to electro-pop covers of "These Boots Were Made For Walking".

With 19 releases, there's a lot to choose from, but I'd recommend Shenpen Senge's EPs as a very accessible starting point. That said, if you're into facial hair, the label's founder D-Tex is pretty hard to beat, as you can see in the picture below. Either way, pay them a visit and grab some of the rather splendid music they give away for free.



More free noises next week.

Get a $1,000 plugin for free

Need to sound like the professionals, but on a tight budget?

Every once in a while, a plugin developer throws us poor bedroom producers a bone. And that's just what the Open Ambience Project has done.

It's taken a mastering process, developed by Bob Katz and sold in plugin form for $990.00, and recreated it in a free VST.

The effect is a "Stereo Haas Effect Ping Pong Inverter" or SHEPPI.

"What SHEPPi describes is this. You set up a ping-pong delay with feedback of around 30mS, which is the sweet spot for the well-known Haas stereo widening effect. Then, in one of the crossfeed delay lines you put an inverter such that the artificial early reflections are bouncing around out of phase (exaggerating the wideness) and out of time with each other. Bob adds some extra control over this effect by determining whether the delay feedback ("Deep" switch) or single-channel crossfeed inverter ("Wide" switch) should be on or off. In addition, the K-Stereo process adds a couple of convenience touches easily simulated with other tools: an M/S matrix processor (also known as a "shuffler") preceding the effect, and a post-effect EQ module for tailoring the synthetic reflections."

In A/B tests the difference between the uber-expensive plug and the freebie are negligible.

The Open Ambience Project created their plugin out of a sense of fairness, saying Mr Katz has no right claiming ownership of processes which are standard practice in most major studios.

"Bob basically took a few mixing concepts already in use (these would include early reflections, ping pong delay, M/S processing and the precedence, or Haas effect), applied them all at once and took out a patent on it - while conveniently sidestepping everything that looked like prior art."

Read more, hear the A/Bs and download the plugin here.

T-t-i-i-m-m-e-e-s-s-t-t-r-r-e-e-t-t-c-c-h-h!

The Akaizer Project by Ben Burchett is a standalone, freeware Windows application that aims to replicate the sound of classic 1990s time-stretching and pitch-shifting.

It's currently in public beta at version 1.4 and if you listen to the sound samples below you can hear he's nailed the classic Akai S950 sound already.

Read about the project, download the app and donate to support further development here.






Listen to these sound samples and drift off into junglist heaven:

Brockwild
Brockwild-300_2000_0
Brockwild-900_2000_0

Amen-100_800_+12
Amen-300_750_0

Chronicles from The Loudness War Trenches

The loudness war is a process that started during the eighties and continued until today. Basically, music producers discovered that louder music sounded better, so they struggled to be louder than anyone else. This means that today's music (Timbaland, Black Eyed Peas) sound like shit, because it has no dynamics - it sounds all the same - very loud, all the time.



The good thing: the war is over. Or at least, that is what this interesting article claims.

Now a new target format - downloadable media combined with jukebox players - has gained acceptance. It hasn't eliminated the CD format, but a tipping point has been reached, and the CD's days are numbered. Mastering engineers are already marketing their services towards the new media. And over the coming decade, mastering engineers will adopt new practices and technologies to exploit the capabilities of this format.

And the Loudness War will end forever.

The question then will simply be - do we need to buy yet another copy of the White Album?

I'm quoting from another website, the audio hall of shame. Here are the albums with more measured clipping.

1 – Black Eyed Peas – Elephunk (54 clips/second)
2 – Wheatus – Wheatus (47 clips/second)
3 – Sheryl Crow – Cmon cmon (41 clips/second)
4 – Jennifer Lopez – JLO (36 clips/second)
5 – Madonna – True Blue Remastered ( 43 clips/second)
6 – Gorillaz – Gorillaz (25 clips/second)
7 – Shakira – Laundry Service (32 clips/second)
8 – Macy Gray – On how life is (26 clips/second)
9 – The Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path Single (31 clips/second)
10 – Eminem – The Marshall Mathers CD1 (26 clips/second)
11 – Turin Brakes – Ether Song Bonus Disc (14 clips/second)
12 – Eminem – The Marshall Mathers CD2 (26 clips/second)
13 – Nelly Furtado – Whoa Nelly Uk Special Edition (13 clips/second)
14 – Britney Spears – Baby One More Time (19 clips/second)
15 – Ozzy Osbourne – The Essential & Disc 1 (14 clips/second)
16 – Vitamin C – Last Nite Uk Cd Single (15 clips/second)
17 – Fun Lovin’ Criminals – 100 Colombian (18 clips/second)
18 – Garbage – Version 20 (13 clips/second)
19 – Elastica – Elastica (13 clips/second)
20 – Turin Brakes – Ether Song (6 clips/second)

And that explains why everyone wants to throw the cd player through the window everytime they hear "Let get it started".

The Eigenharp

This new instrument looks like the strange hybrid fruit of random sexual activity between a bassoon, a bass guitar, a keyboard and a drum machine. The most interesting thing is that it looks very playable.

The audio aspect seems rather good for an instrument so versatile. Most of the time we are dissapointed by instruments that do everything at once but sound so terribly General Midi that they should be depicted with four stars at their shoulders.

The Eigenharp sounds rather classy, and the website states it took them eight years to develop. That's a lot.



It seems, however, that due to some amazing flaw of design, this instrument can only perform songs written by Moby.



In any case, it doesn't stop this instrument from being awesome. Now let's wait for the hordes of "real musicians" that will claim that this is not a real musical instrument like their banjos and ukeleles.

Ve have vays of making you talk, Mr. Piano

This is both awesome and downright creepy. In a polstergeist fashion.




What you hear in the following video is a "speaking piano" reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009. Of course we have seen vocoders come and go during the last half century, but in this version the piano "speaks" by pressing down the keys (that means a real piano sound) rather than some complicated electronic ju-ju/wizardy.

It's rather evident (for me at least, who am a geek) that the software created by Berno Polzer and Peter Ablinger simply deconstructs incoming audio into harmonic tones, and then proceeds to press the corresponding keys on the piano in order to mimic the original sound source. A vocoder works in a similar way, filtering a carrier wave (the synth sound) after a modulator (the human voice) - the difference is that a vocoder works with voltages or digital data instead of mechanic actions.

Anyways, we won't be satisfied until we see this wonderful technique applied on kittens.