Scratching with cassette tapes

Here's DJ Ramsey, from Scottsdale, Arizona, doing a pretty good job of scratching on two tape decks and a mixer. You may remember Russian DJ Artyom doing the same thing with a custom rig in 2005, and Japanese experimenter-in-chief Tucker (he of the hot ribbon controller action) has also had a go. (Thanks, Chris)

A Music Thing Muxtape

In case you haven't seen it yet, Muxtape is a wonderful, ultra-simple, fairly illegal mixtape-sharing site. Upload 12 mp3s, arrange them, pick a header colour and thy're there for the world to stream. There's no easier way to share you music (or anyone else's.) My 'spring is here, haul the barbecue up from the cellar' mix is at musicthing.muxtape.com. Where's yours?

Music Thing gets a fresh coat of paint*

If you're a regular reader, you probably read Music Thing through the RSS Feed and rarely ever see the site itself. If you do pop in, you'll see a few cosmetic changes - hopefully a lot more space and less clutter. Any feedback is welcome, particularly if you can work out how to get the Google Gadget (bottom of the middle column) to display reliably - it should pull in headlines from other fine music blogs. If you use iGoogle, you can get the music gear blogs gadget yourself. (Thanks to Peter, David & Michael for pre-launch feedback) *Actually, it's mainly css and really crude javascript.

Cute tiny robot plays drums, samples itself, plays again

This is the Yellow Drum Machine, a beautiful little homemade robot which finds surfaces to drum on, records it's own drumming (using one of these little £12 sampler modules) then sets off to find somewhere else to play. The videos are adorable, and strangely reminiscent of KT Tunstall doing a similar thing. (via Make)

Hedge fund looking for £55m to invest in vintage guitars

The FT reports that a small London bank called Anchorage Captial is seeking investment to buy vintage guitars, having noticed that the Vintage Guitar Magazine price index "averaged returns of 31.6 per cent for the past 17 years". Anchorage is run by guitar enthusiast Thomas Byrne, who is also behind BJ & Byrne Guitars, a new company hoping to build guitars in Britain (actually, in a workshop on Denmark Street in London) and sell them for £500-£900. If anyone out there has £55m to spend on vintage guitars, just send me the cheque and I'll pass it on. (Thanks, Fabio)

How Francis Bacon predicted the recording studio in 'New Atlantis' in 1626

If you can get hold of a copy, I recommend the April 2008 issue of Sound on Sound, which includes Steve Marshall's epic 12 page history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which was founded 50 years ago in April 1958.
His piece is full of goodness, but the thing that really amazed me was this "We have also sound-houses" quote from Francis Bacon's 1626 book 'The New Atlantis', which Workshop founder Daphne Oram had pinned on the wall of the Workshop. It's all there: "We represent small sounds as great and
deep" = Waves Ultramaximiser, "We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters" = a circuit-bend Speak'n'Spell, and "divers tremblings and warblings of sounds" pretty well describes my entire musical output.

Celemony Melodyne DNA: Has this man done the impossible?

This is Peter Neubäcker from Celemony. You've probably already seen this promo video of his new product, Direct Note Access. It's a new version of the autotune-type pitch correction software which - it appears - can work with polyphonic sound. Record a chord, and it lets you explode that chord and re-tune individual notes. I thought that this was impossible. Peter Neubäcker says "What doesn't work in theory can still work in reality."

Well, maybe. In May 2005, a startup called Zenph Studios claimed to have cracked the problem of polyphonic transcription. They analyse old piano recordings (i.e. Glenn Gould playing Goldberg Variations in 1955) and produce a high-resolution MIDI-type file with exact pedal movements and note/pressure data. They feed that into a Disklavier MIDI grand piano, and record the results. They've had good reviews (at least in audiophile mags) for the recordings.

The potential of this kind of polyphonic transcription is enormous - it would let you sample a performance, not just the recording of a performance. Zenph may be able to do it in a slow, precise, way - presumably with a considerable amount of human help, and they're just pulling out note data, not separating the actual sounds of the notes. Celemony are claiming a lot more. If it works, it's a revolution. It shouldn't be long before you can separate any mixed recording into unmixed tracks. You'll be able to turn any guitar into a guitar synth with no special hardware.

It's very exciting. Does it actually work? I can't imagine how it could, but I know almost nothing about signal processing or the theory of sound. That's where you come in... (More coverage at Create Digital Music)