Straight from the horses mouth:

23 Jan 2008We’re pleased to announce that we’ll be releasing our album, titled THIRD. on April 14th 2008.

The album has 11 tracks and is 49 minutes 13 seconds long.

In case you’re wondering, I’m talking about Portishead.

my hedgehog is poppin’…

There is nothing like the G-1000. Not even vaguely. It is arcane and radical. It is 100% vacuum tubes, from input to output. It contains 100% new-old-stock (NOS) tubes. Types never seen in guitar amps.

The G-1000 consists of two totally independent amplifiers, with very different preamp sections. One channel is called the HAPPY channel. The other is called the ANGRY channel.

For damn good reason. One sucks your face, the other gnaws your foreskin off.

Somehow, I’ve managed to almost completely ignore this year’s NAMM show coverage, but when I heard about Snow, I had to see what else was going on with Access. Turns out they’re adding something called Atomizer to the Virus OS.

Access Music shows a technology preview of Atomizer on the winter NAMM show in Anaheim, California. Atomizer allows you slice and dice audio in realtime using a MIDI keyboard. Stutter effects were made famous by artists including Aphex Twin, Trentemoeller, Squarepusher, BT and many others. In order to create those effects they either had to chop audio regions by hand or use semi-automatic plug-ins (which don’t necessarily give you a great deal of control since they are intended to create random results). Atomizer works in a totally different way — once sync’ed to tempo you can play those slices in realtime, so you can virtually chop up your singer’s voice while he’s performing or add unique effects to your DJ set. You can record the slicing process into your sequencer and edit it later along with the rest of your song. You can remix in realtime as well, with the modulation wheel becoming an intelligent cross-fader, while the pitch-wheel lets you change the pitch by approximately 4 octaves.

Read more at Harmony-Central…

European synth makers Access are currently showing their new tabletop virtual analog synth, Snow, at the NAMM show. SomethingAwful forums member Yoozer noted that it looks like an old video game console.

It sure does.

This collaborative sampling project was completed in October 2007, for the UArts class “Information Concepts”. A class of about 25 students each submitted one digital audio file and three digital image files to a shared database. Individual students then used these sources to create a short montage using iMovie. Being a sample nerd, I edited my audio in Ableton Live and Kontakt before importing it to iMovie.