steve cooley presents

Improvisation is something that many electronic dance music musicians strive to be able to do. Steve Cooley has achieved this ability with the help of the device he built called Beatseqr, and he puts it to the test for this 4-tracker release. Created essentially from scratch with almost no preparation, you actually hear him build each one up beat by beat. A good set of sounds and an knack for box-bangin’ is all Steve had to go on. I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s got a technique that’s definitely doing good things. Download and enjoy!

And just so you know, that circuit board on the artwork was used to build version 3 of Beatseqr.

Artwork by Steve Cooley

waitingformynewpcbs
doihaveyourattention
organicsolventvapor
buyapluginelectriccar

Complete release in a .zip

I just went to reorder sliders I had *very* expensively and carefully vetted out of a small crowd of contenders only to discover that mouser.com had run out of their on-hand stock of over 1200 pieces. I think it would be totally insane to try to keep vetting new hardware and redesigning my circuit boards based around an inconsistent supply of components. So, I’m thinking about moving to a modular “sled” kind of design for sliders so that I can keep my circuit board in a static configuration and be able to plug and play whatever sliders I’m able to get my hands on when I need to replicate my project. Here’s a preliminary sketch:

Just like the Rhodes piano, the Hammond organ and the Stratocaster guitar left their mark forever in the world of musicmakers, so did the Roland TR-909 drum machine. The successor to the also classic TR-808, the TR-909 can be heard in a large number of electronic dance music tracks created over the last 25 years. Its sound is unique, classic and often imitated by many other hardware devices and sound-generating software. On this appropriate day in history…09.09.09 (September 9th, 2009), we commemorate this legendary machine by presenting to you these seven tracks laden with 909 sounds or very inspired by them. Celebrate with us by downloading this release, loading it into your favorite player, and as we like to say….BANG IT!!

The Rhythmist – ‘Darling’
Qorser – ‘Carbonated 909′
Lucas Rodenbush – ‘789′
El Gato #9 – ‘The Number 9′
Lucas Rodenbush – ‘Timing Is Everything’
Qorser – ‘bdsdltmthtrshcchohcr’
The Rhythmist – ‘Percussion Storm’

Complete release in a .zip

a quick update to let you know that midi note number changes are preliminarily functional from the beatseqr version 3 hardware! Hitting the slider mode select buttons to go from midi “velocity” to “midi note num” will let you explore different notes in your midi instrument… this is great if you’re using an instrument like Ultrabeat in Logic Studio or Logic Express, because this will let you set any of the voices to any of the drum sounds. This should in theory work for any instrument too.. it’s just really cool in ultrabeat to be able to set a pattern up and then use the sliders to change what sounds are being used for each of the pattern voices. Still some rough edges to work out, but this is another huge step in the right direction of letting you spend less time looking at your screen with your hand on a mouse, and more time with your hands on the beat.