The future is here people. Autonomous musical robots with built in samplers are roaming the Earth creating drum tracks by hitting nearby objects that they find, sampling the sounds, and looping them! The first bit of this video is a bit of a non event, but once the little robot musician gets under way it's well worth checking out!

Below is a video of the "Yellow Drum Machine" robot in action!

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization has made 8.5GB of free samples available, from a range of sources such as the Berklee College of Music sample archives, music synthesis Majors, and many others. The samples include Sound Effects, Loops, Grooves, Drums, Voices and Instruments, and are 16bit 44.1khz mono WAV files, all normalized.

Most of you will be familiar with FL Studio, and I know many of you swear by it. Well the latest addition, FL Studio 8, has been made available, the culmination of 10 years of FLstudio development, and it looks to have a whole bunch of useful new features.

Pitbull has setup an old school hiphop competition, so ya better check yo self before yo wreck yo self ;)

He's put up a bunch of samples to work into your old school hip hop track, and the entries are starting to be submitted already. So what are you waiting for?! Check out the announcement.

So what's up?

As this tight-knit community has grown, it's been a real treat to meet all these great inspiring musicians from around the globe, and hear the non stop new tunes uploaded by everybody. I'm sure most of you here feel the same way about what we've got here. I regularly get a lot of emails thanking me for creating MakeTunes, and as I tell people, you're more than welcome - I'm happy to have enabled this to come about, and I'm in for the long run. I'm not about to stop now (or anytime in the foreseeable future for that matter)!

However, hosting many thousands of songs is not cheap. I don't want to swamp you guys in advertising, so while that can offset my expenses a little, I'm still putting more than USD$1100 a year into keeping this site running.

I've been trying to conserve storage space for as long as possible, but as you know, the music uploads never stop coming. This is a good thing of course - it's what MakeTunes is all about. But naturally storage space requirements keep going up, and now the time has come to buy a whole bunch more music hosting space to allow MakeTunes to continue to have songs added to the site.

This will cost me an *additional* USD$500 per year for this upgrade. Taking my MakeTunes expenses to a rather daunting USD$1600 per year. I just don't have that available in my current situation.

How can one person help?

I thought long and hard about whether to post this or not, but I decided in the end that you guys, the MakeTunes community, would understand if I explained the situation and put forward the suggestion of donations to go directly to purchasing the required extra music storage space.

So, I've added the "ChipIn" donations widget to the sidebar. If anyone is able to donate $5 or more, it would be hugely appreciated, and if you'd like, I will list all of the contributing members and ensure that you get the props you deserve for helping MakeTunes in it's hour of need!!

Here's the ChipIn widget - it should be showing on the sidebar of each page as well.

When you click the ChipIn! button, you'll be taken to my PayPal donations page. Paypal take a flat-fee of $0.30 + 2.9% of amount from every payment, which is why I mention the $5 or more amount. If you were to donate $1, MakeTunes would only receive $0.67, so it makes sense to donate a few dollars more, less regularly if need be, if you can - as a much higher percentage of your donation will get to MakeTunes.

I'm certainly not asking for stacks of cash here - even if you can only spare $5, it will help MakeTunes keep growing. Just wanted to pass the hat around and see if you guys are willing to help out with some loose change :)

Thanks,
Matt

MakeTunes Donations Progress

The chipin progress bar wasn't updating at the outset (though it seems to be working now), so heres my own donations progress bar! (There is a difference between the two progress bars because ChipIn is *not* counting uncleared checks, whereas I *am* in the progress bar below)
Progress : 54% ($270 donated)

Please join me in thanking those who have donated to the MakeTunes cause so far!

Amittai

Ed

Audiohead

Julian Angel

Giechi Dan Productions

Mike_S

Bill

JonnyLightning

Illusive Mind

maoribeats

IngridTornado

Geomatic

Almighty Pattern

m1ch431

Over the past decade there has been a massive surge in emerging musician numbers. This has been particularly evident in the arena of musical collaboration, largely brought about by the rise and rise of our good friend the Internet.

Now anybody with a computer and an Internet connection can learn how to record or create their own song, and not only that - but also collaborate on musical projects with any number of willing musicians, singers, MCs around the World. This is a beautiful thing - think back only 15 years, and this would have been virtually impossible to do without massive amounts of traveling and/or expenses.

One very cool thing which has emerged out of this Internet driven musicial revolution is the Creative Commons license based remix community. For those who aren't already aware of these sites, or if you'd just interested in some more background info, read on.

Celemony have announced that their upcoming release of their Melodyne v2 Plugin will include Direct Note Access, which allows for MIDI-like complex alteration of audio data, even when those notes are buried in chords, and even other instruments. It's pretty amazing stuff.

You can take a single audio recording or sample, and break it into its component notes - and then adjust those notes accordingly, whether it be pitch shifting, moving the notes position, or the length of a particular note within a chord being played. The list goes on.

Here is one of the examples from the video, showing a single audio recording full of chords, expanded out into all its individual notes. Each of these single notes can then be altered independantly of the rest of the notes.

The best way to see what this new Direct Note Access is capable of, is to check out their announcement video below, which contains several examples of it in action.

Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know what's happening. I've finally had to remove the ability for anonymous visitors to download the MP3 files. I tried to keep this available for as long as possible, but it's no longer an option for me.

Logged in users abilities are not changing of course.

Guests can naturally still Play the tunes using the Flash Player, and simply need to login if they'd like to download a copy. This is the way most sites work, and I've had to join them due to issues with automated computer "bots" from other websites coming along and trying to download every one of the 7000 songs here.

Again, it's not something I wanted to have to do, but unfortunately my hand has been forced due to the behavior of these companies and others who ignore the webs standards, in order to keep MakeTunes running smoothly. I know you guys will understand.

For those of you wanting to learn more about the complexities of harmony and counterpoint, from the basics of melodies and harmonies, through to much more advanced harmonic theory, you might like to check this out.

The MIT is offering a full undergraduate level course on Harmony and Counterpoint theory for free. The course is dated Spring 2005, and naturally many of these sort of musical fundamentals date back to the days of yore! (You'll notice the course home page features a picture of Ludwig van Beethoven - a man ever so slightly skilled in this particular field!)

It's not widely known, but several pretty heavy weight Universities actually give away a lot of full courses online for free once they've been running for a while. Naturally some of these are a few years old, but I've seen some dated up to 2007.

I'm currently going through many of these lists and finding courses which I think might interest some of you, as musicians.

The first of these that I thought I would post about here is the Undergraduate level course, Composing with Computers, offered by MIT. It's dated Spring 2003, so I would imagine will still be of real value to those of you wanting to study the use of Mac-based studio environments running Pro Tools, MAX/MSP, Peak, and Digital Performer - as well as some outboard hardware.