Author: moshang

Categories
By the ways

Windows 7 Beta

Happy 2009!

Having skipped on Vista, I’ve eagerly signed up for the Windows 7 Beta. It’s been getting good press and I think I see why. I’ve installed it in a dual-boot config. on both Em.’s 5 year old Ben-Q laptop and now on my own dual-core system. It offers a very smooth experience on both machines (the laptop has less than a gig of ram!), especially with aero running on my desktop system.

I’ve yet to experiment with my audio apps, but I think that’s going to have to wait for a Win 7 driver from M-Audio. I installed the Vista 32 driver for my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra in compatibility mode, and although it works (I have sound) I’m noticing a glitch in mp3 playback with the Win 7 Media Player and in Firefox every 10 seconds or so. While it’s good enough to play music with in the background while surfing the net (Win 7/Firefox is performing like a champ in this capacity), actually making music with this driver is another question.

I’ll probably go ahead and install Reason and Sonar soonish. For all I know the glitchy playback affects mp3’s only. Either way, I’ll be booting back into XP to do production work until Windows 7 is officially released and available in retail.

My desktop specs:

Asus P5B-E motherboard, Intel 6420 CPU (2.13 GHz Core2Duo), 2 GB ram

Categories
News

Current projects

Just an update on the projects I’m busy with at the moment.

1. I’ve finished a backbone mix for an EP with guitarist Chris Bailey. This weekend, I’ll be tracking Chris and myself jamming to the backtrack and then embroider on it further. At the moment, the idea is to sell this as a very long (25 – 30 minute) single for a buck. And to make it into a series with regular installments. I guess it all hinges around how the first one turns out. You can hear Chris and me jamming together two posts down…

2. Mixing a new track for Kou Cou Ching. This track is destined for a collaboration album featuring new tracks and remixes by Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, DJ Point and myself. This one will be a physical (CD) release and the release date is tentatively set for the middle of 2009.

Categories
By the ways

Atomic Effect Studios

(click for a larger view)

I ran into Atomic Gaffer at one of my sets in Second Life again today and he reminded me of this photo he sent me a couple of weeks ago – don’t know how I managed to forget about it then, but this is without a doubt the coolest pic of my avatar ever. Stands to reason – Atomic (Gary Davis in RL) tells me that he did most of Paul Mcartney’s stuff online for EMI for almost 12 years. Man, talk about rubbing shoulders… But enough with the name-dropping – head on over to Atomic Effect Studios to see more of Gary/Atomic’s work for clients around the globe.

Categories
MoShang Live

MoShang & Bailey @ RETRO

After an absence of some months, Chris Bailey and I were were up to our old tricks (and some new ones) at Mojo Retro here in Taichung on Saturday. Below is an MP3 of the improvised section of our set, me on Ableton Live and windcontroller, and Chris on the guitar.
[audio: http://moshang.net/audio/MoShang_Bailey_RETRO.mp3]

Thanks to Em. for the photos!

Categories
MoShang Live

The Big Question – update

Thanks to Chuang Tyng-Ruey for the photos (used under CC Attribution license).

Nice! The Big Question performance went pretty much as planned. I was very impressed by the sounds Lee Chun coded up in real-time using Pure Data, and I hope we can do something together in the future. I did a twenty-minute solo set before being joined first by Chang Jui-chuan and then Kou Chou Ching. I love how adding more performers to the mix bumps up the energy levels. People were on their feet and dancing for Freedom Zen, so a nice first live performance there for Jui-chuan and me. And speaking of bumping up the energy levels, Kou Chou Ching really let rip! My big thanks to Jui-chuan, Fan-chiang, Fish Lin, and DJ J-little. We had a small meeting before the show and solidified some plans for a joint album featuring Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, DJ Point and myself to be released around June 2009 – watch this space.

The part I was most nervous about was doing the Ableton Live mix – live in front of people.  Before the show I’d gone around recording random audience members, asking them to give me small sound bites to use in the mix. By the time I got to do the live mix, the audience had shrunk considerably  and remaining audience members had had ample helpings of the Free Beer (ie. brewed according to a CC licensed recipe) – I was very relieved to have the pressure released somewhat. I thought the live mix sounded pretty cool, thank you very much. Keeping in mind how I’ve been at it for less than two weeks. Unfortunately the recording I made didn’t amount to much, so I took some time yesterday to recreate the mix using the same sample-pool. What you hear is 95% the Live mix with about 5% sweetening added because I couldn’t resist. I think it’s pretty cool to zone out to.

You can listen to the whole mix and download a copy from the SoundCloud player below.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.