Merry Christmas!

We here at Sonikmatter wish you a safe and merry Christmas!

YYZ Keep Out: The mystery of the Sonik Prog Forum and what was in there

Our love for progressive rock and the poseurs therein knows no bounds here at Sonikmatter. In fact, we’ve been working all summer long on a tutorial laden forum for all members to participate in, just to advance their Downes / Jobson / Wakeman chops.

Sadly, we’ve run out of funding.

Consider if you will, the first entry of the series.

YYZ School

Comment in our forum here.

Tags: Sonikmatter, prog, rawk, poseur, secrecy

Izotope RX Advanced reviewed

For all you freaks of sterile sound out there: Izotope, home of renowned software, presents RX Advanced, an audio restoration tool. Sonikmatter, home of renowned reviews and articles, presents the Izotope RX Advanced review, a David Mondrup effort.

Enjoy - it’s on the house.

Read the review

Tags: Software, Review, Audio, restoration, Izotope

NYT: The Musical Embassadors

Over @ the NYT:

HALF a century ago, when America was having problems with its image during the cold war, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the United States representative from Harlem, had an idea. Stop sending symphony orchestras and ballet companies on international tours, he told the State Department. Let the world experience what he called “real Americana”: send out jazz bands instead.

Photo: Duke Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. Powell’s insight was that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn’t match — and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late ’50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.

Read more over at the NYTimes.

Tags: current events

ZENDRUM: The Sonik Interview

About 20 miles west of Atlanta, GA, in the bedroom community of Douglasville, is the Mecca of alternative, electronic percussion otherwise known as … Zendrum. The modest, ranch-style house belies the fact that this is the headquarters of a company that, for some 16 years, has been producing one of the world’s most unique MIDI percussion controllers.

Mark McGouirk and Jeff Barnett interview David Haney, the inventor of the ZENDRUM and take us back through the history of the product and some of its more interesting users.

Read the interview.

Hey Hippies! Your Concert Is Killing The World

The Economist Reports:

AS ANY country-music fan knows, Willie Nelson, America’s favourite outlaw-troubadour, can’t wait to get on the road again. Although he often sings about whiskey, since 2004 his tireless touring has been fueled by an entirely different sort of liquid: biofuel (which he has cleverly branded “BioWillie”).

Mr Nelson, one of the founders of the annual Farm Aid concert series, began running his tour bus on biofuel to support American farmers, but musicians and concert promoters have started using the fuel as part of an effort to reduce the environmental impact of their live shows. How effective has the concert industry been in shrinking its carbon footprint?

So to all my hippie friends headed to Bonnaroo in a few weeks or Rothbury next month, be sure to read this article to see how far back you’ve push the global warming movement (by the way, did you realize that every ‘doobie’ you smoke puts an estimated 1.765 metric tons of carbon into the air???).

Read more at The Economist.com.

PS. if any of you dirty hippies are headed to Rothbury (July 3rd through the 6th, hook a Sonik-brotha up with some of those global warming smokes).

Tags: globalwarming, concerts

The Uke Orchestra performs Life On Mars

Bowie, always Bowie, on Sonikmatter.

1958: The Flying V Is Invented

[ via io9 ]

Tags: guitars

OLPC turns DAW

We’ve talked before about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The aim is to facilitate children of the third world with cheap laptops, that will help them develop into the digital world together with the rest of us, thus preventing that the already existing gap between the third world and the rich countries widens even further. All very good and PC, but can it make music?

Now, the answer is “yes”. Due to a collaborative effort of Berklee College, Csound developers and others, the XO laptop now comes with access to no less than 8.5 gbs of audio samples, ready to be turned into music. All of it comes with a Creative Commons license, and all of it is online - so you don’t need to have an actual XO laptop to make use of it. Just point your browser to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples and begin collecting the samples, to take part in the fun.

via Create Digital Music

Tags: Computer, XO, samples