Category Archives: Music

A lazy-dog for little piggy tracker

by

Littlepiggytracker is a tracker designed for hand held consoles. It’s awesome and I like it a lot. I use it mainly to create beats when I’m on the go. As cool as this is you sometimes need to look up those abbreviation codes for some serious effect-addition. Also when you are new to the piggy it’s nice to have some sort of cheat-sheet, so I made this lazy-dog for myself. And whilst is probably not perfect it has helped me a lot and I still keep it in my GP2X-F200 case and I occasionally look at it.

I wrote it in NeoOffice, which is a OSX-clone/fork of openoffice. I only tell you this so if you want to edit the lgpt-lazydog.odt but for most reasons it’s probably best to get the PDF version: lgpt-lazydog.pdf

Hope you enjoy.

Cow in a can, my entry in the Renoise-compo.

by

Create Digital Music, a blog about creating digital music, or at least the digital creation of music is co-hosting a music-comp. For more information on the compo please go here or read my short explanation below.

Anyways, you can win a Linux music production studio configured MSI Wind with the music program Renoise on it, and that being the whole mood for the competition you should make a CPU light song in Renoise and apply a license to it that is fairly open.

Me being who I am had to enter. Not that I’m in it to win the computer, nor a Renoise license because I’m perfectly happy with my Mac and I already own a Renoise license. So why then? because it’s fun, and I should really start using Renoise now that I bought it.

The result is “Cow in a can”

cow in a can

As a little disclaimer I want to state that I’m not Australian and I don’t want to mock any Australians. Speaking with an Australian accent seemed to be a good idea at the moment.

Here’s an mp3 of the song: Cow in a can.mp3

And here is the Renoise source file: cow in a can.rns

And if you’re interested in the lyrics, it’s here:

For my 4th birthday I got a cow.
I was very surprised.

First It was small, then it grew.

We had to move her to my uncle’s farm.
There she lived in a barn.

I used to visit her on the holidays.
That was nice.

She really helped me through puberty.
And the occasional breakup.

She became both a mother and a grandmother.

Then one day she had to go.
She had to go where old cows go.

To the slaughterhouse.

I have enjoyed her for many dinners now.

But the freezer broke a while back.

So all I have left of her is in this can of formaldehyde.

This can of cow.

My cow, my friend, I keep you close to my heart.

My cow in a can.

On the green fields in heaven we will be together again.

License:
Creative Commons License
Cow in a can by Johan Larsby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

A few thoughts on the Theremin I bought.

by

I bought a theremin like two months ago or so. After some initial research I ordered a burns theremin, it has two antennas and is resonably priced. It was shipped almost the same day, so that was nice. The package arrived to me a week/ten day’s or so later.

However, the theremin was a lot smaller then I suspected. It was also not very impressed by the power supply that you could not pop out of a connection. It’s stuck inside. The “documentation” consisted of one paper with a warning that you can burn your new theremin if you plugin the theremin directly. very _little_ information about how to change it. A plug would be much better, that way you could just have gone and bought a wall-wart.

So I cut the powercord and replaced the wall-wart with one that should work, and nothing started burning so I guess I did right.

The sound was awful though, nothing like in the videos on the site. Sounded distorted and the pitch was waaaaay of, and uncontrollable. I had it hooked up to a battery-powered speaker. I also tried with another amp, and headphones. It was not until I tried with a guitar amp that I also hooked to the wall that it did not distort. Also touching any of the ground parts of the cable changes the pitch drastically. This makes me suspect that the grounding in the theremin is lousy.

Still it was almost impossible to play, so I looked up all the how-to videos I could on youtube (remember I was on vacation) and I was supries that as a footnote on one of the videos there was info stating that the theremin had to warmup. Why was that information nowhere in the package I got from burns?

After that it was a bit easier to play, and I got the hang of it, but since the theremin is so small your pitch-hand interferes with the volume antenna and vice verse. that sux.

I tried to add a distortion to make the sound more interesting while playing, but since I was barefoot and the little big fuzz is of metal that bad grounding showed it’s ugly face again.

I’m not that impressed with that theremin and I’m going to sell it as soon as I get around taking a few pictures of it. any takers?

At least I managed to make a song with it, because I was scared after watching drag me to hell.

here it is: Mums filibabba lilla Maja (two theremin voices and drums)

Experimentation with shitwave

by

Last week, or if it was the week before I signed up at 8bitcollective, a site for fans of chipmusic and 8bit aesthetics in general. I was doing this while I was having a little Nintendo revival at home, trying to get the Game Boy Advance up and running and trying out LSDJ. In that process I found a little game boy program called Shitwave. it’s written by Nitro2k01 over at http://gameboygenius.8bitcollective.com/wordpress/ .I found this to be really interesting and I’ve wanted to do some noise music for a while, so I had a stab with Shitwave as sound source. I also used a boss betal distortion and a danelectro fab echo that I have previously circuit bent.

here’s a video, enjoy!

also you could go browse it over at 8bit collective: http://8bitcollective.com/music/larsby/Shift+8bit+noize/ There’s also an mp3 for you to download if you need a new ring tone for your mobile!