Reading Gutterbreakz Guttertech fun n frolics made me pine for my old Windows laptop and the copy of Fruityloops I had before the little fellah imploded and I switched to Macs. It was a seriously underpowered little guy and it could hardly stand the pressure that Fruityloops 3 put upon his circuitry, regularly giving up the ghost and sending my tracks into endlessly repeating frazzles and fissures that nearly always sounded better than the tracks I'd meticulously programmed. Sometimes, if I'd overdone the effects and the delays (i.e. every time) it'd just start looping the last few bars, sending them echoing out for quarter hours, continually morphing the sounds and occasionally even sputtering out samples that I swear I'd never put into the tracks in the first place. One time I remember it crashed and spent a good seven or so minutes making up it's own version of 2001's Hal doing Daisy Daisy... as if the technology itself was attempting some kind of po-mo sleight of hand. If I'd worked out how to record these mutations there could've yet been a genesis of a new genre of (literally) broken beats - spazztech? aspergeronica? hiccuppertronics?
Those Oval boys were pussies compared to my old laptop ( I claim no credit for it's creations).
Now, I've got the bug again, the plate in my head is starting to pick up Radio transmissions - right now, it's Wogan - and I need something to play with. Anyone any idea of any comparable Mac software which I could get for free? I tried to get some from work but the Music Tech guys keep rattling about dongles, which I've taken for a term of abuse and am therefore not talking to them anymore.
There must be a decent free music making software package for the Mac out there somewhere?
And for the Mp3 huggers, here's some tracks from the first Bourbonese Qualk album
God knows what equipment these boys had back in the heady days of 1983 but I'd bet it was from the gutter.
Next week: no puns.
8 comments:
never heard of bourbonese qualk before - quite pleasant in it's own little post-punk / diy way.
http://home.earthlink.net/~arvidtp/Guide.html
macmusic.org
http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/freeware/mac/
http://www.musiconthemac.com/
Two words: "Ross" , "Friends"
Well not completly free - but beep-per-buck makes Garageband a good purchase .... then pop over to http://www.smartelectronix.com/ and grab some effects and synths for free - and off ya go !!
alternativly you can always install something like http://www.acquisitionx.com/ and then do searches for things like "OSX Audio" - quite shocking what you might find out there .....
I've used a freeware, cross-platform, open source package called Audacity for some great fun. Might even work better for folks with talent.
Garage band, eh-hem, sux dead dogz dix. And not in a good way like Fruity Loops. Ableton Live for mac is good. It does everythng fruity loops does and endlessly more. I can frisbee you a burn if you’d like, just post a comment back in the next few days...
Depends what your aims are really - Garageband is a good sequencer and for small-ish projects does what ya need - now including the time-stretching algorithms from Soundtrack it offers very simular functionality to Acid on the PC - I teach have used it for teaching intro-digital-audio and it allows people to instantly start producing stuff - and if you use it with something like the new Korg Vintage synths - it is difficult to see where the problem lies (for small projects that is) ..
Live is great - I use it for stage work as well as in the studio - current experiments have me running an electric guitar into the thing and using real-time effects from Native Instruments Guitar Rig, whilst recording external midi-control synth audio -- CPU hungry as hell - but sure sounds fine over here !!
Your views may of course differ .....!
I've given Ableton Live a sincere try and there's simply something in its logic that doesn't appeal to me.... Garagebandetc are another audience and another concept....
There must be a better choice for the Mac convert melancholic for Fruityloops....
Any other ideas for Looping software???
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