Welcome back to the ongoing series that began with Frequency Fundamentals. I trust and hope it has been as helpful for you as it was fun for me to write.

Moving along, this is the start of a new series that will dovetail with the frequency series. Consider it the second suite of a broader work. These new articles will continue our discussion and build on top of the foundation we laid down previously. This time we will focus on audio effects.

“Relevance?”, you ask.

Find me a musician, audio professional, or recording/mixing/mastering engineer that doesn’t use audio effects – and I will be the one to question if they have red blood coursing through their veins!

A more pertinent question would be this: “Effects… OK. But why now?”

If you are familiar with the previous frequency series, you should know the answer by now:
Click to read the rest…

What if Axl and Slash had hung out with Fats Domino? Or Metallica met Miles Davis? A new music processor called The Swinger is looking to find out, by adding a swing to any song you throw at it. Get ready to hear those classics in a whole new way – and as the Duke once put it: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”

Music Hack Day

At the cutting edge of digital music research, young developers get together periodically for a ‘Music Hack Day‘ – an intense 24 hour hackathon to create a new, cool music technology project, and show it off to everyone. There are always some incredible and fascinating demos which emerge, and last week’s hack day in San Francisco was no exception.

This blog post over at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog gives a great overview of several of the projects. One which stood out for me was The Swinger – simple concept, fantastic demonstration of how far music tech has come in the last 10 years, and a wonderful way to illustrate the concept of swung beats to all you ear trainers out there!

First a quick reminder of what it means to have that swing… Click to read the rest…