ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.
Episode Synopsis "in the now! feat. metasurface mouse-dance"
hangerACiD, you're left on edge, cliffhanger, you're off the deep end! the next step in settling these jams is to get vox in the mix. but hitting on the basics of acid sound down has been good to me.audiomulch's bassline contraption is great. another thing i can't deal without these days is trancegates . . . or something i've seen called that. step-based audio gates. mostly i use two, here reviewed:scuzzphut lite benefits with it's shuffle. it also has a very slick interface: the steps and ties are laid out straight, big enough to click, plus if you hold the mouse button down you can keep drawing/erasing steps. what's it missing? everything it's competition lacks!tinygate (part of the tiny fx package by tinygod) has "size" which boils down to scale (how many gate steps equal one host-sequencer step), prime for spacing sounds or fluttering them. you can also specify how many steps are in the pattern, starting from step one. it's mutate feature can randomly turn steps off and on. what does it lack? true to it's name tinygate has small buttons, and you have to click them individually to toggle off/on ... no easy drawing here. it also has no ties or shuffle.i use both. i love both. i know, i need to spin southpole soon.in the meantime: i love the metasurface! an acid-jam godsend straight from ross! i was tripping out-of-my-body-excited as i discovered the basics of this feature. the spirit of music begging to be played with, the same ELpH as i found in feedback-modulation systems built from a mixer and stomp boxes. sounds compelling and alive, unpredictable but intuative.the metasurface lets you take snapshots of your entire audiomulch environment. you can then color code these snapshots and place them on on a 2d plane. all the snapshots are related to one other and once they're are planted you can use the cursor to mix between them. as the cursor is draged, straight lines tie it to the snapshots it's gathering impressions from. the colors of the snapshots create gradients across the metasurface, giving you some idea of how the different areas will sound.on top of the colors tripping me out, i've reading a lot of william gibson. he goes on about nodal points points in data mining, which sounds like sci-fi mumbo jumbo ... until you have your mouse-dancing around little points of contrived audio settings, catching cpujazz mixes in their beautiful oddity.that's pretty much the entire hangerAcid track. i took snapshots of different mutes (using just volume knobs would make better gradients), vst, and contraption settings. the metasurface transformed my pc into the responsive improv-composition instrument i'd always dreamed of. now i'm itching to get back in, i've got accccccid fever!but i'm typing. and enough about music. boring hosting talk ensues!there have been some bumps getting the second edition out. to say the least: ourmedia.org isn't kidding about their alpha status, to the point where i've cut them out and am uploading directly to archive.org. please leave a comment if you know a hotter spot to host mp3s (but only if the host provides a direct link to the file). hopefully i'll be rolling these out closer to once a week than once a month.another thing--i'm considering beefing up the podcast with a track or two of influences. never over 20 minutes of sound because all of the podcasts i enjoy most are concise like that. while hosting is at archive.org the influence tracks will have to be netaudio (which is already the meat and potatoes of my library) or there could be some mash-up going on.on that note, there's going to be a lot of overlap between my fm radio show, the material i cast here, and the tracks i'm putting out on net labels like 20kbps. i can't really see any harm, i'm doing a little extra work so people with different hearing habits can check what i'm doing and digging. anyone fanatical enough to be hitting all these sources will want to get into the same thing three times anyway, and will be messageing ,kay,nien,dee, on slsk to discuss the differences between the 40kbps ogg encode and the 64kbps mp3.
In God we trust