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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.

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.

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.

The MPC line have long been what Akai has been known for, and rightly so many would say. These machines essentially pack a small studio into a solid shiny portable unit. Hardware sampling, MIDI Sequencing, MIDI control of external equipment, and a whole array of nifty drumming and percussion effects that have helped craft some of the worlds most popular hiphop and electronic tracks, as well as finding a place in the hearts of producers of other genres.

It's once again time to welcome the next level of MPC shiny gadgetry to the production scene... the MPC5000.

This is a common question, so I thought I'd post a tutorial video on how to setup your MIDI controller to work with FLstudio.

While the majority of home musicians and small studios use either Macs or Windows based PCs, there are a growing number of Linux users wanting to setup audio sequencing and editing software on their chosen operating system.

One of the leading audio and MIDI sequencers for Linux is, the rather oddly named, Rosegarden.

The main sequencer view of Rosegarden - similar to many sequencer layouts on other operating systems:

The notation view of Rosegarden:

In the 80's a lot of strange things were thought up, not the least of which was the Casio Digital Guitar.

The Casio DG-20 is a stringed guitar, but every time you play those strings, corresponding MIDI data is sent to the onboard computer, which plays the sounds of whichever instrument you've selected! Naturally the sounds are not mind-blowingly awesome, but some are actually pretty usable. You can either play the DG-20 as a standalone guitar via its built-in speakers, or for better quality sound you can plug it into your stereo.

Add to this the fact that it can output MIDI to whatever synths/VSTs you want, and its a pretty fun wee addition to any home studio!

I first actually heard about this piece of strange 80's musical gadgetry in an episode of The Flight of the Conchords! Around 25 years after it was released by Casio. The Conchords say that they bought their Casio DG-20 from a pawn shop in the future.

If anyone actually owns a Casio DG-20, let me know - I'd love to hear some first hand accounts of what it's like to use!