charliehiphop's blog

As everyone who knows me knows, I hate commercial music these days. OK, I've pretty much hated it for a long time, but nowadays it's just pukeworthy. A whole generation of kids have come up without a clue about stickin' it to the Man, without a hint of danger or subversion in their music. A whole generation wasted on sappy shit, a whole generation that doesn't know what it means to rock. A whole generation raised on lip-synched bullshit, fancy dance moves, cutesy-putesy crooners, sensitive dudes with carefully tousled hair, and the ever-profitable flavor-of-the-week teenaged virgin.

I just got an e-mail from MySpace saying I've been banned for violating the TOS. That's funny. I didn't even know that I had an account there. I wonder what somebody else did in my good name, not because I care -- just curious.

The Internet is a funny place.

How to use Seq24 to build a 32-bar song.

Seq24's song editor makes midi sequencing a snap. Sequence your loops into a song. This video shows you how to make a 32-bar song using an example song tentatively called "Credit."

Break 32 bars into parts. Each part is some multiple of 4 bars long. The song "Credit" being created in the tutorial breaks down like this:

8-bar Intro
12-bar verse
8-bar chorus
4-bar bridge

This is about songwriting as much as about slathering on effects. With midi instruments, I like to add the effects before structuring the song for reasons that I explain in the video. Seq24 makes it easy to isolate the sounds for adjustment in Hydrogen and ZynAddSubFX

You might already know that I'm interested in the connection between music and mathematics. The Golden Ratio is sort of the key to everything in the universe, including music.

I don't have much to add, but I totally love the fact that so many things are connected like this, everything from the rings of Saturn to the Parthenon to the musical scale -- amazing. God is nature is math is music.

Vote for Your Favorite Hairstyle

When you're too busy to think about your hair...

I don't even drink now, and I still love this place. It's my favorite bar in New York.

Funky-ass beat? PR? Public service announcement?

Whatever it is, it's dope.

An important social message regarding your credit reports set to "Just Groove" instrumental by Yours Truly.

Not to be too commercial or anything, but when was the last time you checked your credit reports, anyway?

Be amazed as I roll a funky-ass beat before your very eyes using free open-source software.

I'm not going to get too specific since there are so many configurations and I don't want to confuse anyone. This is what I did before the video started rolling:

1) Fired up JACK (for me it was version 0.3.4)
2) Fired up seq24 (version 0.8.7)
3) Made seq24 the master of JACK (and therefore the universe) [file-->options-->jack sync--> "Transport Master"]
4) Fire up Hydrogen (0.9.4). It connects to JACK automatically, but check the JACK settings just to make sure you have both MIDI input from seq and audio output to your sound card (you do, but if you don't, make the connections by connecting the wires).
5) Fire up Zyn (4.7.1). Activate a couple of instruments and throw them on separate MIDI channels.

Then I did this:

Will Godfrey, who is referenced in the tutorial, has a lot of free music on his site -- nice mellow instrumental synth grooves, melody-heavy.

(PS -- Making a beat with seq24 is really a three-step process . This tutorial covers the first part -- getting your timings/loops down and into the matrix. The second step is to tweak the instruments to get the sounds you want. The third step is to put it all together in the song editor. I plan on doing videos for the next two steps with this same beat. I guess what I'm saying is that you should check back.)