Posts by Scott

These days there seems to be a never-ending stream of “next-generation” graphical user interfaces being by trotted out by experts. Unfortunately for us, most seem to be fundamentally flawed in some way or another. They’re usually too expensive, ergonomically unsound, or otherwise impractical for whatever reason. I’ve worked with multi-touch systems before and while novel, they never seem to live up to the promise of “mouse-killer”. Sure, Microsoft’s multi-touch tables might make ordering drinks all super futuristic at some point, but no one wants to use Photoshop for 8 hours on a Ms. Pacman table. It seems the humble mouse — that tired paradigm of human-machine interaction we’ve been shackled to for decades — isn’t going down so easily.

There is hope though. Today I saw a video outlining 10/GUI, a new kind of graphical user interface that “aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way.” Whether or not it can attain that lofty goal is anyone’s guess. What really struck me about this particular system was the pragmatism exhibited by it’s developers. They’ve mixed in a healthy dose of innovation with tried-and-true familiarity to come up with a very compelling compromise that has me wanting to see more. As a musician and graphic designer I wonder if a system like this could ever address all of my needs, but I suppose I’d have to get my hands on it to really know. The main problem with envisioning the potential success of a new interface like this is that the current software we all use was created for the mouse. It’s easy to dismiss 10/GUI when comparing it to how I am accustomed to interacting with my computer, but if the applications I use were rewritten with an interface like this in mind, who knows how powerful it might be.

At any rate, the video is worth a watch, it’s an exciting proposition and perhaps a glimpse of what’s in store down the road. The actual demo beings around the half-way point. Video

What do you think? When, if ever, will we see any of these next-gen interfaces in our workflow? Finally, if something like this was available now, would you use it? Sound off in the comments

Via Ignore The Code | Official 10/GUI site

I’ll be playing a live set as Tycho and doing a workshop as ISO50 next week in Tromsø, Norway as part of Insomnia Festival 2009. I’ve never been to Norway so I’m really excited to check it out. I’m assuming I’ll be needing to dress warm? Norwegians: What should I bring? What should I see while I’m there? Any tips would be appreciated in the comments. Röyksopp and Lindstrøm will also be playing at Insomnia so really looking forward to seeing them live.

Event Info:
ISO50 Workshop – Friday, October 23rd | info
Tycho live set – Saturday, October 24th | info

A full PDF event program for Insomnia 2009 can be downloaded here
Insomnia Festival Website – Link

Hope to see you up there!

Absolutely loving this brilliant work from Berlin/Zurich-based Katja Gretzinger. This is the kind of work that really expresses the core ideals of design to me; it’s efficient, functional, and pleasing to the eye.

You can have a look through the rest of Katja’s excellent portfolio here.

This book caught my eye over at Book Worship and the aluminum slip cover reminded me of Alex’s Set In Stone project (although that cover was in Zinc). Looks like the cover worked, the books are in great shape for their age.

Via Book Worship

This one is for all you analog synth geeks out there (but mostly just Beamer): Tom Oberheim is producing a new line of SEM modules. This is big news for any synth enthusiast as the Oberheim SEM (introduced in 1974) is widely regarded as the best sounding synthesizer ever made. Unfortunately they are very rare, complex, and expensive machines so until now it’s been pretty difficult acquire and maintain a working example.

I have an Oberheim Four Voice (pictured below) and while it’s not the synth I use the most, it’s certainly the prize of my collection. I really do love working with older machines, but for the sake of reliability I prefer using newly manufactured versions of the originals (e.g. the Moog Voyager). That is, of course, as long as they sound like the original and according to Mr. Oberheim — see video above — these new SEM’s are very faithful to their predecessors. Here’s hoping someone will make a faithful recreation of the Korg Mono/Poly because it’s pretty scary knowing my favorite synth is about to turn 30 years old.

And just for good measure, here’s Jan Hammer (who also used an Oberheim Four Voice) freaking out on a Minimoog:

I’d heard of Genuine Fractals — onOne Software’s scaling plugin — from Tim at Blue Moon Printing but I had yet to try it out for myself. It’s basically a plugin for Photoshop which uses a proprietary algorithm (as opposed to Photshop’s built in resizing modes) to enlarge images. I was pretty skeptical but finally decided to try it out tonight when faced with some daunting upscaling projects.

I’m in the process of working through some older posters and sizing them up to the larger formats. For a long time I created all of my prints at 12×18″ (or thereabouts, depending on the format) as my computer just couldn’t handle anything bigger. For many I’ve been able to go back and recreate them, but some elements in the posters are scanned from smaller sources and just couldn’t be scaled up (e.g. the sky background in the above example. It’s made from a photo of a textile which is of a finite size and I don’t have access to anymore). So I figured now would be a good time to give Genuine Fractals a try. To my amazement it handled everything I threw at it beautifully. The interface and workflow are dead simple: you just initiate the Genuine Fractals dialog from the File > Automate menu, resize, click apply, and you’re done. It’s even fast, about the same speed as Photoshop’s resize command. There’s not much more to say as the results really speak for themselves. Simply put: Genuine Fractals can scale your images up to 1000% larger without any noticeable degradation. That’s what it says on their site and from my experience I’d say that’s absolutely true.

Genuine Fractals excels at photographic imagery, but that’s to be expected. With complex raster images it’s easy for imperfections to hide amongst all the shapes and colors. I thought the true test would be it’s ability to scale up flattened vector images. That is, vector shape and text layers flattened into raster images. I am doing this just to better illustrate how clean the scaling is but Genuine Fractals can actually handle multi-layered images (text, raster, and vector shape layers), scaling each layer individually and maintaining the original layer type. Meaning, if you feed it a document with a raster layer, a text layer, and a vector layer, it will use it’s algorithm to scale the raster data but will also scale the text and vector layers without rasterizing them. All the layers will be maintained as they were in the original document, they will just be scaled up. For my purposes, this is what makes Genuine Fractals truly powerful.

Here are some of my results. I know, none of this is very scientific but it’s a small glimpse of how well this program works. See the subtext under each image for a description.

As you can see, the lines are still crisp and defined with the Genuine Fractals enlargements. It’s not exactly perfect when compared to the original, but it’s a greatly improved alternative to Photoshop’s native scaling algorithms. My only question now is: At $700, why doesn’t Photoshop have this kind of power built in? New features like content aware scaling are nice and all, but I’d much rather they spent their R&D money on core functionality like this.

You can download a demo of Genuine Fractals from their site to try it out yourself. At $150, the software is a little too pricey for casual use, I’d say this is more for print shops and professional photographers looking to scale up their work for large format printing.

Tonight I had the pleasure of meeting meeting two great bands; one literally and the other figuratively. I went to see fellow Ghostly artists School of Seven Bells play at Slim’s here in San Francisco and their performance was incredible. But having seen them live before, I pretty much expected that. It was the opening act — Warpaint — that were the big surprise of the night.

Warpaint are a Los Angeles based “psychedelic” band and I’d have to say that description is apt. I spent most of the set mesmerized by them, sort of in a trance. This is one of those bands that I dream of producing a record for someday. Bassist Jenny Lindberg and her Rickenbacker carved out the low end as if from stone and the guitarists were all over it with the kind of stripped down, melodic style I’m a sucker for. I’m not easily moved by live rock music performances but this one had me running over to the merch booth to snag a CD before the set was even half way over. The hilight of the show was an ultra-somber yet perfectly timed rendition of their song “Billie Holiday” which left me in awe (and remionded me of another favorite from Grouper). As soon as I got home I popped the CD in, hoping it would live up to their live energy and was pleasantly surprised to hear that it did. It’s raw, unpolished, and at times sounds like a jam session accidentally caught on tape, and it’s beautiful. The only thing I’d change would be the drums on the album version of Billie holiday; they were absent from the live version and I think it was a little more focused without them.

I hope you enjoy these songs as much as I did, if you want to check Warpaint out they’re on tour and probably coming to your town soon.

Warpaint – Billie Holiday

[audio:billie_holiday.mp3]

Warpaint – Krimson

[audio:krimson.mp3]

Warpaint – Burgundy

[audio:burgundy.mp3]

I usually hesitate to do music production related posts as the focus of this blog is more centered in the visual world (On a side note, I always wonder how many of you produce music as well as design? | Comment). But I’ve really been shifting gears lately into album mode, getting the studio all dialed in so the final stretch is as trouble free as possible. To tell the truth, this past year has been one giant computer headache. Photoshop has been running like a champ on Windows 7 64-bit, but Sonar — the audio software platform I use to record / produce with — has been nothing but trouble. Over the years, I’ve slowly moved to where I do all of my sound generation and most of my processing outside the computer with analog gear but I still use the computer to record and arrange. Sonar is still the central element to the most complex stage of the production process. If it’s not behaving, the whole chain breaks down very quickly. To be fair though, it’s actually the supporting cast of digital hardware that’s been causing all the problems, not Sonar itself. My analog-to-digital digital conversion system was built around a MOTU 828MKII audio interface and a MOTU MIDI timepiece. They worked great in Windows XP but just weren’t making the cut in Windows 7 and Vista. MOTU’s driver support for Windows is pretty bad, they’re more of a Mac-centric company. So I finally ditched them and went with German manufacturer RME’s Fireface 800 as the core of the system. RME were originally a Windows only hardware maker and are very dedicated to stable performance across both platforms. They also make some of the best analog to digital converters in the business so it was nice to get that upgrade included in the deal. I also finally took the time to really tweak the computer and chase down all the little bugs and conflicts so everything is running smoother than ever now. Unfortunately I had to leave the ridiculously fast Windows 7 and go back to Vista Pro x64, but it’s only a minor step down in performance so it’s well worth the added stability. I am betting I’ll be able to move back up to Win7 within the next 6 months. And before anyone says “you should switch to Mac” I must add that most of my go-to plugins and music software are PC-only, I couldn’t really switch to Mac if I wanted to. And believe me, over this past year I have wanted to on several occasions. But I think all that is behind me, the new rig is rock solid and I’ve cloned the drive with Acronis True Image so it will always be fast and clean (I can just flash the drive back to the initial state any time things start to bog down).

So now with everything working properly, all at once, for what seems like the first time in ages, it’s time to get down to the business of producing this album. I have all the material in place, it’s just a matter of arrangement and production at this point. I do enjoy this phase, when I’m in the middle of it, but truthfully I don’t always look forward to it. I just remember all the late nights up at 7am driving back and forth from LA and Sacramento getting stuff mixed and mastered, then mixed and mastered again, and again…. and so on. Sometimes it seems like it never ends. The last song I finished — the forthcoming Coastal Brake 12″ — was one of those very trying experiences. It was just such a dense and complex mix, I hit the wall a few times and really had to reconsider things. Luckily I was able to keep my head and after about two months of pushing and pulling I finally got a version I was happy with.

So here I am coming off that experience with a whole album’s worth of tracks all lined up for the same treatment. I figured it was time to evaluate my work flow and determine what I could do to optimize things and make the process more fun than work. I started by rewiring and reconfiguring the entire studio, from top to bottom, three times. With each pass I took a week to work with things and noted all the little issues and roadblocks that I encountered with the setup. I then incorporated those into the next redesign. I spent years trying to just get things setup quickly so I could get to work, not realizing that if I really took the time to get it all set up and configured properly the first time, in the end I would save a ton of time and energy.

So now I’m sitting in the newly optimized studio and it really feels good. My head is clear and I feel like I have instant access to all the tools I need to get work done. I’ve already written a chunk of new material in the past few days and am starting the process of working back through the existing songs and getting them into their finished forms. One very cool perk of this whole experience was rediscovering something that I had all but forgotten about from my earlier days as a musician. When I first started out in music, my first real piece of gear was an Ensoniq ASR-X, a combination drum machine / synth which used drum pads instead of keys. I sold it years ago and always regretted it (Actually, I sold one, got a new one, then sold that, then got another, then finally sold that again…but that’s a very long story). Anyways, I’ve always missed the physical drum pads and ever since I moved to San Francisco I can’t play my real drum kit very late at night anymore. Over the weekend I was at Guitar Center picking up some cables and noticed Akai’s new little drum trigger pad, the MPD18 (pictured at the top). Only $99 for 18 genuine MPC pads, that’s an insane deal. My ASR-X was always like the poor man’s MPC so I always lusted after them whenever I saw one at a show or something. I was a bit skeptical about whether the $99 MPD18 could live up to the venerable MPC, but once I got it home I was amazed at how sensitive and tactile the pads are. Needless to say, I’ve been loading my drum machine up and triggering it with the MPD for the past two days straight. It’s not even work anymore, I forgot how fun these things are, and I honestly think the results are more fluid and realistic than programming drum patterns by mouse.

I will be posting some pics of the new studio just as soon as I borrow my brother’s wide angle lens. For now, here is some gratuitous gear smut, the original MPC60 (Akai + Roger Linn) in all it’s glory:

I came across some screencaps from John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live over at the excellent I love Hotdogs blog today (you may remember ILHD from the film titles post) and was immediately struck by the “Obey” scenes. Looks pretty familiar right? Cool to see the inspiration for Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant campaign, looks like a terrible movie though. Although Roddy Piper cameos are always welcome.

I talked about the HP Envy a while back as a potential alternative to the Macbook and now it’s finally out. I’ve always been a fan of HP laptops, they’re fast and cheap and I’ve had three which have all served me well. But they were all ugly as hell and covered with useless add-ons and blue LEDs; not exactly objects of desire, just practical alternatives to the pricey Macs. So when I heard about the upcoming Envy line I was pretty excited at the prospect of a PC laptop alternative that didn’t suck. Unfortunately, as hard as HP tried to clone the Macbook experience, the Envy seems to have fallen short of the in almost every way. I guess it comes as no surprise, nobody does it like Mac. Gizmodo has all the details on the Envy, including more pics and a review. I think I’