Monday 30 May 2011

A young tinkerers first solder!


A proud day for my daughter aged 4 years and 1 week she used her own soldering iron under supervision to construct her first circuit, a yellow led that lights up. She was really pleased and was very sensible with the iron and solder.

I'll get her started on those PCB's I've got that need filling next! :)

Friday 20 May 2011

The 1000 hits of BLARP

BLARP Finished from concretedog on Vimeo.


It's a proud day for me..the video above is the first of my videos to go above the 1000 viewing mark. Many thanks if you have had a look. I reckon its because Getlofi, Matrixsynth and Palm Sounds featured it, thanks guys.

If you want to check out my other video offerings here's the link

Thursday 19 May 2011

Palm Sounds is 5 years old



The mighty mighty Palm Sounds is 5 years old this month and has been celebrating with many promo codes and special offers for mobile music making applications, as well as looking back across the five years of posts. I've been a daily reader of Palm Sounds for most of that five years so as a tribute to Palm Sounds I thought I'd take a picture of just some of my mobile music devices. The majority of these Palm Sounds posts got me interested in. Palm Sounds continues to post all relevant information and reviews etc across the spectrum of mobile sound creation and recording etc, in fact I reckon if you have an old smartphone, pda or an early laptop (let alone a gameboy, iphone, Android, tablet etc) a quick search of Palm Sounds will reveal a way to make music on it.

Palm sounds has been tremendously supportive of myself and has posted many many bits of concretedog news/posts generating loads of traffic for me here for which I thank Palm Sounds heartily.

Happy Birthday Palm Sounds, heres to the next five years!

(PS..many extra geek credits if you can name all the devices in the image correctly!)

Wednesday 18 May 2011

New Warm Data Compilation Albums



Warm Data have released 2 retrospective compilation albums featuring a heady blend from the Warm Data roster of artists...including track on each volume for yours truly.

They are released via the Warm Data bandcamp outlet and are priced at £3.33 per 14 track volume. On the links below you can stream the entire albums for free however and if you haven't checked out any of the Warm Data offerings these compilations give the perfect flavour of the grand selection of sonic treats available.

Check them out if you can

http://warmdata.bandcamp.com/album/data-recovery-vol-i
http://warmdata.bandcamp.com/album/data-recovery-vol-ii

Monday 9 May 2011

Lunchtime workflow



Lunchtime at the office and I am trying to use any free time to do little jobs on some tracks I am working on.....hopefully to release something this year! For a track in progress I wanted to sequence some percussion tracks to add to it. I love the gong/bell type sounds you can get out from bits of wire clipped to a piezo disc. I knew I would get limited time later for sequencing so sample creation in my lunchour seemed a good time. So  I used the micro br to record and then used a portable apps version of the audio editor Audacity running off the pendrive to edit the recording (as they don't like us installing stuff on our work machines).  The edited samples were then saved onto my trusty palm pda for sunvox sequencing later. Luckily no collegues were in today so i didn't need to explain what I was up to!