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I got my Digitech VX400 last night and played around with it this morning, it’s pretty fun and I think it’ll do the trick for the live vocals. The effects are okay, but most of the novelty ones are kinda dopey and I’ll have to see if they wind up having any practical use.

Here’s me jamming like an idiot (1 MB).

Making Me Nervous (MindOverMatter Mix). Barry from wrote about his process on his blog:

I really liked the song already, and I’d been looking for an excuse to sit down and actually learn how to use GarageBand. I decided to see what I could do using only Brad’s source tracks and the loops included with GarageBand. (I’d like to say I wanted to do this for the added challenge but it was really because I was too damn lazy to play in any new parts myself.) BTW, I found that it required approximately zero brain cycles to convert Brad’s tracks to the GarageBand format using the AppleLoops SDK.

I’ve heard a lot about GarageBand but don’t have a Mac so I’ve never gotten a chance to try it. I’ve linked this in the forums for discussion. Thanks Barry!

Making Me Nervous (Mandola Mix). Adam Sampson writes:

I thought it’d be fun to do an acoustic mix of Making Me Nervous, so here’s one. The only instrument’s my no-brand cheap mandola, with the “pickup” (an old tieclip mic and some Blu-Tak) attached to different sides for the two parts. I was originally hoping to do this in one take per part but failed miserably; it actually took a couple of takes and some editing, about three hours in total. Multitracked, edited and mixed down using Audacity on Linux.

This open source music thing is cool. :)

Thanks Adam!

I’m starting to post all these remixes to the forums if people want to discuss them.

Here’s the source for my song Borderline (31 MB). As before, send me your remixes and I’ll be real happy and then I’ll post those suckers. You can also use my totally dead forums if you wanna talk about remix stuff or like, what your favorite smell is.

c. layne sent in this cool Making Me Nervous (accidental mix) and said this about it:

this remix happened completely by accident. this was a song i was working on for the ‘pass/fail’ songfight! a few weeks back, but i never got the motivation to finish it. i stumbled back on it today, and thought to myself, as i do on occasion, “wow, this is sickeningly similar to ‘making me nervous,’ except about 5bpm faster.” so i slowed it down accordingly, and threw the vocals in, and who would’ve guessed? it fit right in.

Very neat, it’s like an original mash-up. Thanks c!

I like the write-up for this SmartMusicKIOSK thing:

SmartMusicKIOSK is a new music-playback interface for trial listening. Traditionally in music stores, customers often search out the chorus or “hook” of a song by repeatedly pressing the fast-forward button, rather than passively listening to the music. This activity is not well-supported by current technology. This research achieves a function for jumping to the chorus section and other key parts of a song, plus a function for visualizing song structure.

and:

While entire songs of no interest to the listener can be skipped on conventional music-playback interfaces, SmartMusicKIOSK is the first interface that allows the user to easily skip sections of no interest even within a song.

I hope it also dispatches robots to kick the songwriter in the nuts too, that’d be swell.