The Kou Chou Ching album that I mixed and mastered, Kou!! It’s Coming Out!!!, is reviewed in the Taipei Times today. I get a kind mention ;^)

I’ll be performing live with guitarist Chris Bailey at Mojo Coffee in Taichung this Saturday (May 3rd) from around 8pm. We have the honor of being the first artists to perform there, since it’s actually a brand new branch: Mojo Coffee RETRO – and located at Wu Chuan Shi Rd. Section 1, no. 116 (click here for a Google map), right near the art museum.

Chris and I last played together in 2005 with Rhythm Clowns at the Taichung Jazz Festival. Chris will jam with me on my set and I’ll be jamming with him on his. It’s going to be a goodie!!

Photos by Chuang Tyng-Ruey.

Em. and I were in Taipei on Saturday. At the invitation of Chuang Tyng-Ruey of the Academia Sinica and Creative Commons Taiwan, I did my “Jamming with Machines” presentation at the OpenTechSummitTaiwan2008 and also did a small performance later with PigHeadSkin, the first musician to release a Creative Commons album here in Taiwan.

The venue was ASUS Headquarters, and being a huge fan of the EeePC, I felt a bit like a kid in a candy store. I’ve been looking at one of these mini-marvels  for a long time now as a super-portable replacement for the current Ben-Q laptop I’ve been doing my live performances on. Essentially, the EeePC will have to be able to run one instance of a combinator in Propellerhead’s Reason, whilst playing a .wmv with my backtrack and backround visuals.

Though the EeePC is not necessarily intended for doing heavy duty multi-media tasks, I somehow feel confident that it will be up to it. Especially since the new EeePC 900‘s processor is capable of running at full 900MHz capacity with no fixed underclocking as was the case with the EeePC 700 / 701. It didn’t want to do too much fishing about future versions of the EeePC and can’t confirm any of the rumours of an Intel Atom based version or 10″ version coming soon.

What I do know for a fact, though, is that there is a later version in the works (ie. later than the just released EeePC 900) and that this version will come bundled with a couple of my tracks. HOW EXCITING IS THAT!!!

Honestly, ASUS have gotten it so right with the EeePC that I’m over the moon to be associated with it even in the smallest way. Deservedly or not, there’s long been this idea (even amongst the locals) that Taiwan is best at making copies of things rather than being innovative. Hopefully the slew of EeePC competitors that have been announced since its release will go some ways towards putting that notion to rest.

On the Amarok blog Seb Ruiz posted this pic of the very cool Mona Lisa in the lobby of ASUS HQ – made entirely of motherboard components.

Some shots of me and the audience at my most recent Mood Lounge performance: Thanks Joy!

I do these every Thursday at 9am SLT so drop by some time ;^)

I was trawling the net the other day for a freeware alternative to something like Apple’s Garageband. Couldn’t find anything similar, but I did find a very cool online sequencer called Splice. It allows you to find free CC licensed loops and sounds, upload your own loops or sounds and then to mix them together in a composition.

As sequencers go, it’s pretty basic; you can time-stretch and trim loops (unfortunately you can’t transpose them), add volume and pan curves, add 4 effects to each track (though you can’t edit any fx parameters), and there are two soft synths available (again no editing of synth parameters). But hey, it’s free and runs in your browser. Once you’re done with your track, you can publish it to the Splice website under a CC license and download your mix as an mp3.

To get some idea of what Splice is capable of, I spent an hour with it yesterday. Below is the result, rather unimaginatively entitled “Hour One”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

On the track’s page over at the Splice website here you have the options of downloading the mp3, opening the track in the online sequencer to look at how it was made, or to remix it.

I don’t see the Splice sequencer replacing Reason or Sonar for me anytime soon, but it’s still fun to play with and a good introduction to sequencing. And did I mention that it’s online and free? You’ve been editing your photos online with Photoshop Express, now welcome to sequencing in the cloud.
***UPDATE***
Sadly, Splice is no more. But here’s a great resource for online audio tools that are currently available. AUDIO SILVER LINING