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Turn Wii Rock Band Instruments into Real Instruments with Junxion

( Apple and Electronica and Gear and Logic 8 and Music and New Instruments and audio and diy and drumming and originals and wii )

Today I figured out how to easily turn the rock band drum set for Wii into a MIDI drum controller:

I did this with Junxion, a program that allows you to transform USB and wireless game controller input into MIDI data. I’ve seen demos of other MIDI rock band instruments online, but with the Wii instruments [...]

New Youtube Videos - part 2

( Music and originals and video )

I’m redesigning my front page but meanwhile here are some more videos from the past couple months. These are more orchestrations of Persichetti, Bartók and Faith rescored to a popular film:
Rural Games
 
Night Discovery

Both pieces were performed by members of the Chicago Civic Orchestra and conducted by Cliff Colnot.

New Youtube Videos - part 1

( Music and notation and originals and video and wii )

Here are some new videos of work I’ve done.

I’m trying to think of ways of altering the original videos that I’m rescoring so that they seem fresh again. Here is another original video:

One idea I had was to overlay the video with an inset of the recording session and a scrolling score:

I am interested in [...]

Seun Kuti is going on tour

( Music and virtuosos )

(Warning: Loud)

Seun Kuti is going on tour and coming to the House of Blues in Chicago June 30. You can bet I will be there. I have been a Fela Kuti fan for a long time, and saw a Femi Kuti concert a couple years ago which was one of the best concerts I’ve ever [...]

Musiq’s Girl Next Door and Beck’s Debra use the same bass line sample

( Music and audio and song ripoffs )

Hmm, this is fun, I’ve added a new ’song ripoffs’ category.
Musiq’s “Girl Next Door”:

Beck’s “Debra”:

-edit-
Found the sample, it’s Ramsey Lewis’s My Love For You.

Where’d You Go and Where Is The Love are the same song

( Music and audio and song ripoffs )

I recently heard Fort Minor’s Where’d You Go and thought it was pretty powerful and effective, until I realized it was the exact same song as Where Is The Love by The Black Eyed Peas. Same chord progression, same downtempo well produced beats, same simple female vocal chorus, same good slow rapping that overlaps with [...]

Map .rex loops to the keyboard in Logic 8 - easier method

( Apple and Logic 8 and Music and audio )

My friends Nathaniel, Charlie and I figured out a better way to map rex files into Logic using EXS 24 instead of Ultrabeat:
-Create a new EXS 24 instrument, open EXS 24 and click on edit.
-Click on Instrument > Recycle Convert > Slice Loop and Add [...]

Translations - Newest score on Youtube

( Music and originals and video )

I thought I would also post my newest video here so it would get picked up by my blog feed.
I’m now attending Columbia Chicago’s Music for the Screen graduate program, and am loving it. For our music and drama final project, we were asked to score music that would be performed live along with live [...]

Great Jazz Pianists that moan when they play

( Jazz and Music and audio and virtuosos )

I’m compiling a list of great jazz pianists that moan when they play. I wonder if it’s a stylistic choice, or some artistic savant thing that trips when you hit a certain level of genius. Anyway so far I have:
Erroll Garner
Keith Jarrett
Oscar Peterson
Bud Powell

Hello, Soso, Baidu and Sogou users

( Music and audio )

Soso.com linked to my Bach Remix and it got downloaded 21628 times on December 23rd…It killed my bandwidth. I also get a lot of traffic each month from Baidu and Sogou for Beautiful Dreamer and The DnB Concerto. China must have much better mp3 crawlers than the US, and a larger online music fanbase.
Listeners from [...]