YouTube launches YouTube for Artists, Ableton publish a book on making music, Krystal Klear on club history, and Ultimate Breaks & Beats: An Oral History.
YouTube launches YouTube for Artists. YouTube for Artists is a set of tools to help musicians share their music, build and audience, and make their creative career happen. The tools optimise your videos for YouTube’s discovery algorithms, give you data on your audience to help you keep them engaged, and provide an easy way for fans to buy merchandise or donate via videos. Watch the introduction video above and find out more here.
Ableton publish a book on making music. Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers is a collection of solutions to common roadblocks in the creative process, with a specific emphasis on solving musical problems, making progress, and (most importantly) finishing what you start. You can read some of the strategies taken from the hardback online here, buy the hardback here, and ebook versions are coming to Amazon Kindle Store and Apple iBooks soon.
Hand-made musical reference posters. Attack reader Shirin Delsooz has tipped us off to her recently launched range of hand-made musical reference posters, providing a quick visual reference to basics including scales, chords and compression. Check them out and buy via the Home In A Metronome Etsy store.
Sample Magic release Retro Analogue House. Take a voyage into the deep moods and grooves of 90s house with 430MB of retro machine beats, classic synths and deep bass – all lovingly crafted from a host of legendary hardware, elusive outboard gear and the finest analogue consoles for an authentic old-school sound. You can buy and instantly download each loop category or the full pack of deep, dusty and dirty house grooves here.
Legowelt’s Clapernicus clap synth. House and techno producer Legowelt has created a clap synth device for Ableton Live 9 users that has parameters for the amount of ‘slap’, ‘wallop’ and ‘sogginess’ in the generated sounds, and control over what has been termed the ‘Prince factor’ (for the nasty funk spiceyness). Head over to Legowelt’s website to download it and hear an MP3 demo.
Building the world’s biggest record collection. BBC News meet the Brazilian man with one of the world’s biggest vinyl collections. Zero Freitas has built a collection of more than 5 million records, employs a team to process and catalogue them, and ultimately wants to create a vinyl library accessible to the whole world. Watch the interview above.
Studio 54: The Ultimate Den of Vice. The Guardian‘s article tells the story of infamous New York nightclub Studio 54, where disco and depravity met in seedy 70s Manhattan, and Hasse Persson’s photographs of Calvin Klein, Truman Capote and Andy Warhol take us back to the club at its peak. Check them out here.
Roland: Moving Forward. RA pay the engineers of legendary instrument makers Roland a visit, to find out why they’ve recently returned to the sound of their classic drum machines and synths, which shaped dance music. Read the feature article here.
Ultimate Breaks & Beats: An Oral History. Medium explains how Street Beat Records‘ essential vinyl series of 25 compilation albums released from 1986 to 1991, which featured only tracks from 1966 to 1984 with drum breaks, transformed the sound of music and helped funky beats conquer the world, in their long form piece here.
Krystal Klear on club history. “You Can’t NOT be Romantic!” – Manchester-based DJ Krystal Klear gives his thoughts on modern clubbing for Boiler Room‘s Perspectives series, detailing a deeply personal take on dance music’s relationship to its own past, the joy of discovery and the pleasure and pain of standing on the shoulders of giants. Check it out here.
Sound designer’s music video parodies. BBC News discover the work of Austrian sound designer Mario Wienerroither, who strips videos of their music tracks, skilfully adds in funny effects based on the on-screen action and gets around copyright laws by saying his videos are parodies that he makes no money from. Watch the interview and Mario’s sound design tips above.
Free Soundtoys plugin and Waves DAW. Soundtoys gives away an exciting new plugin named Little AlterBoy for “dramatic voice alteration”. It features pitch and formant shifting, pitch-quantising hard tune effect, pitch-locked robot voice and more. For info on how to download, head to Marc Mozart’s blog. Waves are also introducing their free DAW, which is optimised for live recording. Check it out above and download for free here.