Nike Music Shoe

There’s already plenty of info on a bunch of blogs about this project, particularly in terms of the performance interface itself:

Sound artist Daito Manabe did an awesome job with this piece – both in terms of interface and performance.  But this isn’t just a great example of performance or interface design.  It’s a great example of what can happen when marketers and composers subvert the process of original music production itself – skipping the demo phase and making a true commitment to partner up and build something seamlessly tailored to communicate a specific message.

clean slates

Sometimes, there’s nothing more daunting than a clean slate.  And tools that start as clean slates are a whole other level of daunting – because you have to build something, and then figure out what to do with it.  Like with maxMSP, which I love – it opens with a completely empty page.  When you’re used to seeing a timeline, that can be pretty scary.  I’m no expert and my programming is a little on the messy side:

…but I know how to get it to sound like what I want and that’s all I need.  Cycling ’74 made this great analogy on their site somewhere about how synths and plug-ins and stuff were like frozen pizzas and maxMSP is a kitchen.  I love that.  It’s like building your own toolbox instead of buying a hammer.

Contrary to what posting about a synth plug-in in the previous entry may suggest, I’m a minimalist when it comes to gear.  Even the tweakiest, most left brained music is still about ideas, and I’ve always thought that having as little gear as possible is the best way to focus on those.  Finding the right balance is tough of course, and I tend to rely on hardware for a few particular oddities that can’t be reproduced quite so faithfully in software, but hopefully you know what I mean.  And so much is possible with software these days – and I’m talking way, way beyond hardware emulation and stuff like that.  I’m really interested in the systems you could spend your lifetime learning – that are only limited by your imagination.  I’ve been doing a lot more sound design lately, so I finally have a good reason to get into Kyma as well.  I’m super excited about it.  Sometimes, I wish I had the energy to get past the clean slate and just build stuff with those systems all day.  But then I probably wouldn’t write any music.

ace synth

Even though I love gear as much as the next guy, I try not to get too wrapped up in the acquisition of it for fear that it might draw focus away from the ideas themselves when working on a project.  Because of this, I’ve sort of written off analogue-style subtractive synthesis plugins as being more or less the same, which is another reason why I don’t have very many.  And I basically still think that’s true – except when it comes to this one:

The Ace Synth from Urs Heckmann sounds good enough not only to challenge the notion of plugins versus each other, but plugins versus the real thing.  And from a nice and neat “this should only exist in software / this should only exist in hardware” classification standpoint, it’s sort of rocking my world.  Aside from that, the price is totally a no-brainer.  This has become my go-to synth for basically everything.