Selecting the most apropriate toys for junior

 

It is very important to set the expectations of the young realistically via play.

iPhone Dev tip - (another) Note To Self

The Quartz core animation methods are easy and simple to use but don't help you if you are are doofus. Setting up a CAKeyframeAnimation to act on the a property of a layer/view whatever will not warn you if that property does not exist.

I just spent 2 hours trying to figure out why this didn't work...

CAKeyframeAnimation *moveLeft = [CAKeyframeAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"postion"];

The answer was - there is no such property as POSTION.
Doh! FacePalm! etc.

A trio of new tracks

A little catch up for those that don't follow me absolutely everywhere I go on the internets (Hi Mum) two new tracks and a quick sketch.

First out a track using a crappy guitar loop as the only sound source, crappy because both my guitar and my playing skills suck. Trust me you wouldn't want to listen to it unprocessed. I fed it into the Ableton Looper device and then dragged some of those loops kicking and squealing into the M4L Buffer Shuffler where it got cut up and mutilated in real time driven by some MIDI from the Tenori-On. The FX chain I am using for this is a bit of a favourite at the minute. It can make nice pad sounds out of pretty much any noise (as you will see in a bit) and the Resonator in the middle of the chain can retune it wherever I like.  I am going to have to be careful not to overuse it as it is just so so easy to throw a noise at it and say "I has made soundscape!"
As If Nothing Happened by Dionysiac

Next up a track I made as a remix of sorts for the Cloudcycle project. They provide some interesting and diverse sound sources as seed and have produced themselves a massive output of different styles. For my part I took a very short cut from some pad like sound and stretched it right out and ran it through some multiband rhythmic gating. Underneath it is a bit of one of their drum loops, and a lovely synth line that I reversed just for good measure. To top it off I added a long sample of air traffic control chatter around JFK airport.
Cloudcycle - Stratus (JFK Approach) by Dionysiac

Finally a quick sketch for the first in a series of pieces I want to do using recordings of cold war numbers stations. I have been a bit fascinated with these strange espionage artefacts for a while now and their resonance (both psychological and auditory) is really quite compelling. This is a recording of the New Star Broadcasting Station from the magnificent conet project. The only sound source is the station recording run into my favourite FX chain with the resonator tuning tweaked every 8 bars or so. I'm using the rhythmic gating again to give it movement and a bit of delayed and clean sample overlain back on top.
Numbers - New Star Broadcasting by Dionysiac