Charlie McDonnell, This Is Me album review

Hello, and welcome again to tip of the hat music reviews. For our second review we're looking at Charlie McDonnell's "This Is Me", an album which came out in December 2010 and we only just discovered ourselves about a month ago.
Anybody who follows Charlie Macdonnell's youtube channel and knows about his Dr Who Based band Chameleon Circuit will be completely aware of the man's talents and already have a respect for what he does, but if you've never heard of the guy, (as we hadn't), he's been uploading science related, funilly delivered videos for a few years with the occasional original song either science related in some way or comedy-esque songs on other subjects, (like acne, self talk and imaginary girlfriends).

This album is a collection of said songs and I have to say, I bought it on the strength of the videos and was pleasantly suprised that I got a little more than I'd anticipated, on top of the funny there's also a nice bit of personal song writing in here about being sensible and not rushing into relationships, about a girl named Melody, ("Melody for Melody" I have to admit is a bit of a stupid title for a song but the song itself is killer), and also the title track "This is me", which sort of reminds me of Kate Nash's Mouth Wash as far as lyrical content goes, although that song's more about independance and self respect and this one's a little less self assured.
The comedy is strong too, as it's what the man seems to be most interested in, (or atleast most prolific in), there's a couple of story-like tracks about betrayal among bakers and Father Christmas going mad at Haloween which I think would be fantastic twisted children's books if they were given life in some gothic-y cartoon-ish artwork, and there's "Rhymezone.com",which is a great tongue twistery sing along once you hear it a few times. "Chemical Love" starts out as a typical love song but obviously typical and you know the funny is coming, and it's somewhat science related when it does. "A song about monkeys" has a couple funny lines but it sort of treads that interesting line between being funny and being just an expression of an idea through music, it's a good listen anyway."Hayley G Hoover" is about another frequent you-tube poster whose working in the same vein as Charlie, and about how he likes to imagine she's his girlfriend, "A Song About A Song" is a self confessed filler track, but it's got a nice energy to it, and some kazoo. The final track, "The Birthday Song" is another straight comedy song about a generic birthday song involving the line "happy birthday insert name here", it's just plain funny, but it had re-listen value, as does the entire album because of the afore mentioned sing-alongy nature and nice energy in the songs.

This album is a solid peice of work from start to finish, especially for a first album and I hope to hear more from Charlie in the future. You can have a listen to some of it in the little music player below and also go get it from iTunes with the little iTunes button below that.

Sketchbook Mobile Demo & Review

Welcome to the second tip of the hat app review. Today we're looking at Sketch Book Mobile for the ipod touch and iphone.This is an app I've used daily since I got it about a year and a bit ago and I love it, I'm a fan of drawing via digital means in any context but this app would have to be my favourite, (even prefered), way of doing that.

It does take a while to get used to drawing with your finger but once you do it's almost like second nature, like riding a bike so to speak. What this app offers up to you is basically the equivalent of what Adobe offers you in the way of drawing tools in Photoshop, which is crazy, but great.
There's a colour picker, (just hold your finger down over a colour for a bit and the colour picker activates), a colour wheel, (which is super easy to use, very similiar to the one in Corel Painter if you've ever used that), colour swatches, opacity and brush size adjuster,the ability to zoom to 2500% for insane levels of detail,3 pages of different brushes which imitate real life brushes, pens, pencils etc...,a paint bucket, some patterned brushes and a smudge brush, (gotta love a bit of smudging).There's an auto circle/oval drawing tool and a square/rectangle drawing tool, a line tool, the ability to add text to an image, twelve layers to work with, (with the ability to change their opacity and also to merge selected layers so you can have many more than twelve), and an eraser and 10 undo/redo's available to you so your mistakes are not a big deal even if you made them a little while ago,(you can also adjust the opacity of the eraser for interesting effects like creating sections of a drawing that are slightly transparent and layering things underneath).

All of these tools are accessed from a wheel which is bought up by touching a very unobtrusive little wheel symbol at the bottom of the screen so nothing gets in the way of your drawing when you've picked what you want to use. The resulting images once exported, (to the iCloud, to your photo library, to iTunes as a layered photo shop file or PNG, Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, posted to your Twitter account, to an email adress again as a layered PSD file, or even a PDF, or even wirelessly to a printer if your printer can do that),are suprisingly high res, you can print them on an A4 page and they look super swish.So much so that I use mine on T-shirts printed nice and big, and sell them here;http://cattrainfeetbrain.wordans.com.au/my/boutique.

I've tried alot of other drawing apps, and some are alright, but none are as great as this, aside from possibly Adobe Ideas, which came out later than Sketchbook, and only has 10 layers, which you have to pay an extra dollar for the privelege of using, (ontop of the $7 you paid because of the Adobe name, as opposed to the $2 you pay for Sketchbook, or the no dollars you pay for the slightly less comprehensive free version. Adobe ideas is also vector based too, it's a whole other kettle of fish, a good one, but completely different).
I find that other drawing apps do alot of the work for you, with fake effects added to what you're drawing without your say or control, either that or they just drop the ball when it comes to clarity and options, but Sketchbook hits the nail on the head, what you draw is yours, with complete control and clarity that's a little miraculous considering you're drawing on a tiny screen.

I can't recommend Sketchbook enough, Autodesk are the people behind AUTOCAD, that mystical 3D program that architects know how to use.It doesn't make sense that the skills needed to make that super serious software are transferable to this very much more user friendly, almost earthy is the word I want to use, but not exactly, piece of portable software, but apparently they do, it has to be seen to be believed.
Use the button below to have a look at Sketchbook on iTunes, you won't regret it.

Sosnowski Synthesizer demo and review

The demo above was created in Cubase, using five layered loops and one layer that was being played live with a midi controller, each layer using only sounds from the Sosnowski Synth, (all presets with very little tweaking involved).
As far as VSTi's, (virtual studio technology instruments),go this one is pretty decent, and for a paid virtual synth it's fairly cheap, ($21 here in Australia), in comparison to what other VSTi creators are charging this is a bargain for sure, and it's fairly comprehensive, (below are some examples of the usual kind of pricing you'd come across for these kind of things).

I've done alot of free VSTi scavenging in the past and found some great wierd little instruments that people have made and are giving away but going down the payed route is far less time consuming and you get something more well rounded and also garaunteed to actually work.The Sosnowski Synth wascreated by David Sosnowski, a "veteran programmer and contemporary composer", there's a link to his site from the ssynth site with some of his music up for you to have a listen.A couple of Google searches back up the fact that the guy exists, and his music is an interesting listen, the synth itself has a bit of a bias towards classical sounding presets, midi-classical anyway, which seems to be what this Sosnowski guy is interested in and from what I heard, uses really well. I was especially impressed with the percussion presets, really nice bassy heavy sounds, lovely stuff.

Don't be put off by the classical presets if you're more of a standard synth sounds person, or a glitch lover, the tweakability of this synth, (creating sounds with 4 oscillators, each able to be tweaked to your liking, a couple of filter envelopes and some effects; chorus, reverd, echo, pan and transpose and your standard attack, decay, sustain and release knobs for the whole thing), means you can make your own sounds pretty easily and there's quite a bit of a scope for doing that.

There are 128 presets all up, organised logically into groups of instruments that relate to each other, ontop of this you can create your own sounds, (as I said),  and you have three banks to save them in, which is pretty generous. If your using this thing as a standalone instrument in a live setting there's also four little preset storage buttons under the preset select button top left,  these days you'd probably be running the thing through a DAW live or at home but the fact that you can use the thing as a standalone is nice anyway, certainly doesn't hurt to have the option.

Probably the coolest thing about this synth is the little sound wave window which shows you what your sounds look like and also the little visual EQ panel with draw bars and four draggable points to EQ your sound visually rather than through more knobs or sliders, this impressed me because it mirrors what you can do in Cubase in the effects tab, and Cubase sets a pretty high standard, (Steinberg invented VSTi's, they know what they're doing). I know these are not the only two peices of software to use this technique but I'd say Steinberg were atleast early adopters and any followers are welcome in my eyes because it works.

I recommend atleast trying out the free version, (which has all of what the paid version has, except that the sound will cut out  for two seconds once a minute),just to see if it's for you.This is a decent little synth that does alot for not alot of money, and, as with all good synths, has it's own character to some extent, with plenty of room for tweaking and shaping your sounds.

Click Here! to do so, or use the button below.

BeatMaker 2 review and demo

Welcome to the innaugural Tip Of The Hat App review. A quick note, we know Steve Jobs has just died, and I was considering removing his cartoon likeness from the tip of the hat banner above, but I'm leaving it there, because we mean no disrespect, and personally, I'm quite sad he's gone, as are alot of folk, because he was the brain behind technology that I use every day and appreciate the genius of. So we cartoonize Steve with utmost respect, may his legacy live on forever.

Anyway, here we go. Beat Maker 2 came out a couple of weeks ago, you can still get a hold of the original Beat Maker if you're that way inclined, but this version is far superior. I owned the original for a long while before this version came out and the advances between the two are obvious. First of all the interface is far more user friendly, and in my oppinion just looks alot neater and makes more sense. If you've used apps like Nano Studio, FL Studio, Music Studio, (used to be called Xewton Music Studio, but they very wisely changed the name), or to a lesser extent Sun Vox, (which I only mention because I think it competes with these others as far as quality is concerened, but really Sun Vox is a bit of musical madness all it's own), then you'll know your way around already, and also notice that what those apps do well, (i.e. pads, sequencing, looping etc..), this app does equally well if not in some cases better, (especially as far as the pads are concerned, making a beat with beat maker 2 is super user friendly, as it should be, considering it's name). The original beat maker basically was all about the pads, and editing what you created with them, to a fairly extrodinary level of depth you'd have to say, but since then alot of other apps have done the same and extended on the idea of making music production a portable experience, (without the need for a Ukulele, arguably the best portable instrument in the world), and now Beat Maker has caught up and trumped them.

Almost all of these music apps make enormous claims that they sometimes can't live up to but I have to say I'm genuinely impressed with this one. It's not perfect, and it still won't beat a physical music making machine like say  Native Instruments MASCHINE, or KORG's lesser but still pretty great Kaossilator Pro , but for a tiny piece of software running on a phone or an ipod it's pretty incredible.

Where the original Beat Maker basically offered you pads and a whole lot of tweaking, Beat Maker 2 offers you pads, synthesizers, (aplenty), and FX busses, (three stackable effects with either traditional slider type tweaking or XY pad controls). The pads are similiar to the original but easier to use, you can load sample banks into eight sections of each set of pads you create, (there's plenty to choose from too, all nicely categorised and ready to go), or you can record or import your own samples and tweak them to your hearts content to create any kind of sound set that you like, (I've only played with this a little, but it was fun, stretching and changing recorded sounds and chopping them to make beats or strange loopable noise is heaven to me, and I wasn't dissapointed).

You can also assign specific effects such as pitch shifting, reversing samples, selective muting of specific pads, specific volume levels assigned to specific pads, selecting whether a pad is triggered as a one shot event or looped when held down, having specific samples fade in and out when triggered by a pad and selecting the velocity of a sample triggered by a specific pad. The detail you can go to is insane really, but all very easy to navigate around and fairly straight forward to play with. Below is an example of just one set of pads and a couple of synths used to create a fairly beat focussed little loopable thing, just so you can hear what I'm talking about.



BEAT by Keenly
Onto the synths, again; tons of sounds to choose from, and 4 pages of settings to play with to change your sound, as well as the ability to load and/or record samples to be played through the synth and the ability edit them at will. You've got all your typical faux analogue settings to play with like what kind of wave your dealing with, (saw, sine,sqaure, triangle), and settings for attack, decay, sustain, release, cutoff, resonance, etc, and low and high pass filtering, and there's a mod wheel, which is always good, (although external midi control would be the way to go if this is an option for you, the touch screen keyboard provided isn't too bad, I've got an irig midi on pre-order myself, or there's the midi-mobiliser two, or the Akai SYNTHSTATION25 ).

The effects busses can be used to effect either pads or synths, or both, you assign which effects bus effects what instrument through the mixing page, shown below

Each channel can be assigned a specific effects bus and the effects busses themselves are individual channels so you can increase or decrease the levels at which your effects are being applied. There are 10 effects to choose from, (autopan, bitcrusher, chorus, compressor, delay, overdrive, equalizer, flanger, filter and reverb), and these are all tweakable as stated earlier through the use of sliders or an XY pad with assignable effects for both the X and Y axis. The coolest thing about the FX busses is that you can record changes made to effects, I especially like the fact that recording effects changes using the XY pads results in effects sliders that move around by themselves, I think the fact that the developers went to the trouble of adding this is pretty cool, and recording effects changes brings alot of scope to what you can get out of any recorded sounds, either from outside of or inside the app itself. Tweaking is key to any electronic music making device or software and for me personally I think they've got it absolutely spot on here. If you go a little too crazy you can get a nice crackle to your sound unintentionally because the iphone/ipod is not a full blown computer, and you may be freaking it out a little, but the app does warn you when your pushing the hardware too far and you can monitor how things are going through the little info button in the top right hand corner.

The pattern editor in this app is pretty much exactly the same as the Nano studio pattern editor, so much so that it seems a little like concept theft, but Nano studio got their pattern editing spot on so I'm not complaining,(I also think Nano studio stands apart because of the Eden synth, and that if you can get a hold of both of these apps you definitely should).

You can move your notes and beats up and down, stretch them, cut them shorter, copy and past them, all the things you'd expect from a midi editor, and you can do these things fairly intuitively. There's a bit of a fiddly factor with such a small screen but you get used to it, and learn to love the zoom function because without it you'd have no chance of doing any editing at all.

Once you've created some music, (by the way, you can also import and mess with songs on your ipod/iphone in this app, which is great, just like sampling records, well, purists would say nothing like, but I it's close enough), you can export it via wifi file transfer, I had a bit of trouble getting this to work though, however you can also chuck your song on your devices paste board and paste it into other apps, one of which is bound to be good at file transfer, (although for such a high class app the difficulty in transfering your music out of it over wifi, as it promises you can do, is a bit of a let down). You can export to sound cloud however and download from there, I encourage you to sign up to sound cloud if you ever need to transfer music files for any reason because it's a great free service, you can pay for "premium" mode, but I don't see why you'd need to. Sound cloud transfer works fine and the resulting exported wav files sound clear as a bell, which is good, the audio from your ipod or iphone, even plugged into some other speaker or amp is not going to do justice to what this app can put out, I would however use it in a live setting without hesitation, but there's a definite higher clarity to your exported files, which you'd expect.
From my experience of music making apps, (and I'm a bit obsessed with them, so I have quite alot), I'd say this one is probably number one at the moment, they all have their indiviual charm but beatmaker 2 has more depth with less confusion, there's other apps out there that do the same things to some extent, or do one of the things that this app does really well, but this is probably the most comprehensive one. For slightly more user friendliness I'd go for iMaschine, but you couldn't use this live because of the unswitchoffable metronome and count in to recording, and you wouldn't get the same depth as you get here. The price is admittedly pretty steep, here in Australia this app is $20, but when you consider what you're getting for the price, the fact that it's almost the equivalent of what it's simulating, (i.e multiple midi and sample based instruments plugged into a mixer, with a laptop attached for pattern editing), $20 is not so bad.



Wordans custom T-shirt printing and selling

I just came across these guys a couple days ago. Alot of my friends have told me, over and over again, that I should put some of my drawings/artwork onto t-shirts to sell, but I had no idea where to start or what the outlay would be, and also there was no garauntee of success. But these Wordans folk are great because they give you the opportunity to set up a t-shirt store online, using your own designs, risk free, because there's no outlay on your part at all, aside from time to make the designs and upload them, and they deal with taking orders and printing and posting them and you set your own commissions for items sold from your store, which they will also sell from their general site. It's good business on their part because they only print what they'll actually sell, there's no excess, and anybody can submit their designs so there's an abundance of interesting t-shirts for you to have a look at. You can also just upload one design and have that printed and posted if you only want to make a t-shirt for yourself or somebody else and aren't interested in runnning a t-shirt store so to speak. If you do run a store, (here's mine by the way: http://cattrainfeetbrain.wordans.com.au/my/boutique), they make it really easy to promote it by giving you automatic links to twitter and facebook accounts so that everytime you put up a design it's posted to these sites also, and they give you a HTML t-shirt selling app that you can embed into any other website, (see below for the one they gave me, it's a little awkward fitting it in a blog post admittedly, but you get the idea, it's also here: http://pantsdownproductreviews.yolasite.com/wordans-custom-t-shirts.php if you want to see how it works on an actual web page, which is fairly well I think), with enough options to make it a personalised thing, but not so many that you're scratching your head.

They're not limited to t-shirts either, you can also make custom ipad cases, bags, hoodies, aprons, tons of things, have alook in the "create" products tab above, (again),  for the clothing related items, or click on the banner below to go straight to the site and check out what else they do. It's crazy the scope you have, lovely stuff.