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IK Multimedia Intros Free Editor For iRig Pads

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IK Multimedia has released iRig Pads Editor for Mac/PC, as a free download for all current iRig Pads owners. iRig Pads Editor is a companion application for the iRig Pads MIDI controller that lets you completely edit and customize how the MIDI mappings for each control on the device. iRig Pads Editor features an intuitive single-screen interface, above, that lets you quickly reassign controls and features. You can edit and save global configurations and individual scenes on your computer, and then transfer them to iRig Pads. All of iRig Pads’ surfaces and controllers can be assigned to send specific MIDI messages. iRig Pads Editor lets users assign MIDI messages to any knob, button, pad, slider or an external controller. iRig Pads Editor supports Note, Program Change, Control Change, MIDI System Real Time and MIDI Machine Control messages.

  • Note mode lets you assign the MIDI channel and the actual note to transmit. iRig Pads Editor also provides a choice between Temporary and Toggle mode. These modes determine whether note data will sound only while the pad is held down or whether it will “latch” onto the Note On message of the first press and the Note Off message of the second press. Temporary mode is best used when playing single-note instruments.
  • Toggle mode is useful for triggering loops: You just have to tap the pad once to start a chosen loop. iRig Pads will then continue to play until the pad is pressed again. Toggle mode can also be used to send 2 different messages from a single button or pad. This makes it easy for a musician to switch between two different presets: These presets can be instruments — like 2 different bass, lead or pad sounds — but they can also be 2 different loop sets or effects settings. On the fly beat making has never been easier.
  • iRig Pads Editor’s Program Change mode lets you set up iRig Pads’ knobs, buttons and pads (or slider) to change and transmit fixed or dynamic MIDI Program Change messages — it also lets you employ toggle mode to switch between 2 Program Change numbers with a single control. iRig Pads Editor can also program iRig Pads to send MIDI System Real Time and MIDI Machine Control messages. This means you can start, stop, rewind or scan through a track without taking their fingers off iRig Pads.
  • Similarly, in Control Change mode, you can assign MIDI Continuous Controller messages like volume, pan or expression. This mode can also be used to assign CC numbers to a parameter on a device that iRig Pads is controlling, such as a synthesizer, loop player, effects processor or even a full-featured virtual instrument like SampleTank 3. The values transmitted can be variable and set up so that when users tap a pad it sets the MIDI volume to maximum or pans the receiving instrument to a specific point in the stereo field.

Pricing and Availability iRig Pads Editor for Mac/PC is available now as a complementary download for registered iRig Pads users. iRig Pads is available on the IK online store and from authorized dealers for $149.99 (excluding taxes).

 

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How MIDI Controllers Are Made

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This video, via SoundForce, takes a behind-the-scenes look at how MIDI controllers are made – in this case, the SFC-60 controller.

SoundForce makes custom MIDI controllers for vintage synth plugins such as the TAL U-NO-LX (Juno-60 plugin) and TAL BassLine 101 (SH-101). This video documents the processes that go into the making of these controllers – from laser-cutting the case, to screen printing the panels, to soldering, mechanical assembly and testing.
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Emma Stone’s red carpet at The Cannes

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The Cannes red carpet sometimes attracts elaborate or overwrought looks. But’Emma Stone‘— wearing Christian Dior Couture at the Irrational Man premiere on Friday — exuded just the opposite. “Emma’s look was meant to feel classic and effortless,” says her makeup artist Rachel Goodwin.

Stone, a Revlon ambassador, looked statuesque and graceful in her high-neck, low-back lace gown and Repossi choker. Says Goodwin, “I wanted her makeup to have a timeless quality to it so I focused on fresh skin and strong Audrey Hepburn-inspired brows and barely there lips.”

The makeup artist—who also works with stars like Diane Kruger, January Jones and Hailee Steinfeld—set off her cheekbones with Revlon Cream Blush in Pinched ($13), followed by Revlon PhotoReady Skinlights Face Illuminator in Pink Light ($13) to highlight her cheekbones and brow bones.

Read more The ‘Mad Men’ Wardrobe Department Took Donations

As for the radiant redhead’s bold brows, Goodwin defined them using Revlon Brow Fantasy in Dark Blond ($7.50). (She also used Revlon ColorStay Skinny Liquid Liner in Green Spark ($8) across Stone’s upper lash line to play off the soft pastel of her gown.) The final touch in the delicate, feminine look was a rosy pout thanks to Revlon Ultra HD Lipstick in HD Rose ($9).

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What Role Do You Want to Play?

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A CHARACTER in a book by Flaubert, or perhaps someone even smarter, like La Rochefoucauld, said that most people would never fall in love if they had not first read about it in a book. Like many tasty ideas, it’s an emulsion of true and not-so-true but points us toward an illuminating insight: We can’t be the people we are without drawing on sources outside ourselves.

If you were the only creature in the universe that ever lived — say, an interstellar space octopus that floated through the void eating hydrogen — you couldn’t have a character. You couldn’t be a dad, goofy or otherwise, without children, a wacky next-door neighbor without somebody next door, a quarterback without teammates or a nerd without a QB with a locker to stuff you in.

You might think you could be a go-getter spaceopus, eating a little more hydrogen today than yesterday, but you’d be wrong: Without slacker spaceopi to contrast with, such an increase would have no way to constitute go-getting rather than simple acceleration.

That’s why a recent study by Will Radford and Matthias Gallé at the Xerox Research Center Europe — ” ‘Roles for the Boys?’ Mining Cast Lists for Gender and Role Distributions Over Time” — illuminates the issue of “bildung,” or self-formation. Dr. Radford and Dr. Gallé — who I will assume are a buddy team consisting of a cocky athlete-turned-scientist whose love for the ladies sometimes gets him in trouble and a wisecracking aesthete whose cynicism masks a romantic core — have data-mined the Internet Movie Database for the most popular roles in TV and movies over the past 115 years.

By doing so, they have revealed something about the sort of people our culture gives us the option to be.

According to the study, the number of roles grew to around 180,000 today from around 20,000 in 1920. Looking beyond the data, you can see a society that has transformed from one in which people are either playing it straight or rebelling in preset ways — a barfly or henchman in an early black-and-white Western — to a world with greater possibilities of self-expression. In short, a society that went from cops and robbers to narrators and contestants.

From 1900 to 1920, some of the most popular roles were wife, husband, daughter and policeman. What leaps out is how constricted they were — with the technical limitations of silent film, as down the middle and easy to read as stickers, like a policeman chasing Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp through city streets.

From 1920 to 1940, sound offered more refinement. Justice required a policeman and a detective (as in “The Thin Man,” 1934), and the world associated with Prohibition gave us dancer, barfly and bartender, or Will Stanton’s uncredited role as “curious passer-by at Fu’s Funeral” from “The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu.”

By the mid-20th century, roles became noticeably more varied and self-conscious. Who we are started to be defined by how we present ourselves, often in the media: panelist, sports newsreader and weather forecaster.

The 1960-80 period took us through social upheaval and its aftermath, from the counterculture to the Reagan counter-reformation. The Western “townsman,” peeking out of a saloon door to witness a gunfight, is displaced by a model — like a bra model, as in “The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom” (1968) — or a member of the Short Circus, from “The Electric Company.”

It also took us into the era of daytime dramas. Several new roles in the period were soap opera characters, including Paul Williams, Jack Abbott and Victor Newman from “The Young and the Restless.” Philosophers have wondered whether identity lies in body or memory: The logic of soaps shows us neither must be present, as the same character can be both recast and get amnesia. This Buddhist approach to identity allows a character to remain while his roles shift.

Paul Williams, for example, started his career as an S.T.D.-spreading bad boy, but then became a private investigator, a mental patient and father to a psychotic son. Each identity is a generic role, but the role changes as society does. Like sands through the hourglass.

Once we are aware of the role we play, we can change it, so self-consciousness leads to variety. Thus the 1980-2000 period showed a proliferation of cultural roles like musical director, lexicographer and interviewer. You can understand this cultural shift by comparing the “girl” role in the films “King Kong” (1933 — the good one) and “The Cabin in the Woods” (2012). In each film, the ingénue is pretty, self-assured and engaged in the classic struggle of girl versus giant monster. The heroine of “Kong,” Ann, responds viscerally; while in the paw of a giant ape, she does nothing but scream and faint. But in “Cabin,” Dana is a self-conscious human who reflects on the role society has handed to her and ultimately rejects it. As it happens, neither option — terror or self-reflection — does much good, because the monsters these women fight are so very large. For example, when you hear King Kong is a “giant gorilla,” how big do you imagine he is? Eight feet? Nine feet? Think again. He’s immense.

From 2000 to 2020, the grabbiest new role is that of zombie. This popularity raises a disquieting, not to say humiliating, question: Why should we let TV producers play a role in our self-formation? After all, we know TV shows exist to sell products or subscriptions to Netflix. But if not from television or the movies, where are we supposed to get the roles we play to fill the fleeting days of our lives? Are we expected to be able just to tear them out of our brains, like zombies?

As luck would have it, communication today goes two ways: The Internet combines features of the Gutenberg-to-TV era (it’s massive and global) with those of oral culture (it’s do-it-yourself). On social media sites like Twitter, video distribution sites like YouTube and fan fiction sites like fanfiction.net, we create our own kind of characters and new possibilities for who we want to be and share them with like-minded people.

With that in mind, here are some more roles I’d like to propose: writer of newspaper articles that contain coded messages for the location of a priceless Egyptian sarcophagus, jealous peccary owner and robot gigolo repairwoman.

If you include enough of them in your fan fiction, vines and Twitter posts, maybe they can get into Dr. Radford and Dr. Gallé’s new characters list for 2020-40.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 26, 2015, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: What Role Do You Want to Play?. Order Reprints|Today’s Paper
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40 Years Of Women In Electronic Music

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Avant-garde and outsider arts site UbuWeb has shared a 40+ year audio retrospective of women in electronic music. Women In Electronic Music 1938-1982, features the work of Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Eliane Radique, and many others.

Women In Electronic Music 1938-1982 Part 1

Clara Rockmore – Vocalise (Rachmaninoff) (recorded 1987)
Johanna M. Beyer – Music of the Spheres (1938, recorded 1977)
Bebe and Louis Barron – Forbidden Planet / Main Titles, Overture (1956)
Daphne Oram – Bird of Parallax (1962-1972)
Delia Derbyshire – Dr. Who (1963)
Delia Derbyshire – Blue Veils and Golden Sands (1967)
Delia Derbyshire – Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO (1966)
Else Marie Pade – Faust and Mephisto (1962)
Mirelle Chamass-Kyrou – Etude 1 (1960)
Pauline Oliveros – Mnemonics III (1965)
Ruth White – Evening Harmony (1969)
Ruth White – Sun (1969)
Micheline Colulombe Saint-Marcoux – Arksalalartoq (1970-71)
Pril Smiley – Koloysa (1970)
Alice Shields – Study for Voice and Tape (1968)
Daria Semegen – Spectra (Electronic Composition No. 2) (1979)
Annette Peacock – I’m The One (1972)
Wendy Carlos – Timesteps (1972)
Ruth Anderson – DUMP (1970)
Priscilla McLean – Night Images (1973)
Laurie Spiegel – Sediment (1972)
Eliane Radigue – Adnos III (1980)
Maggi Payne – Spirals (1977)
Maryanne Amacher – Living Sound Patent Pending: Music Gallery, Toronto (1982)

Women In Electronic Music 1938-1982 Part 2:

Monique Rollin — Etude Vocale (1952)
Jean Eichelberger Ivey — Pinball (1967)
Gruppo NPS – Module Four (1967)
Jocy De Oliviera – Estória II (1967)
Tera de Marez Oyens – Safed (1967)
Franca Sacchi – Arpa Eolia (1970)
Sofia Gubaidulina – Viente-non-Vivente (1970)
Beatriz Ferreyra – l’Orvietan (1970)
Suzanne Ciani – Paris 1971 (1971)
Françoise Barrière – Cordes-Ci, Cordes-Ça (1972)
Jacqueline Nova – Creation de la Tierra (1972)
Teresa Rampazzi – Musica Endoscopica (1972)
Lily Greenham – Traffic (1975)
Annea Lockwood – World Rhythms (1975-97)
Megan Roberts – I Could Sit Here All Day (1976)
Laurie Anderson – Is Anybody Home? (1977)
Laetitia de Compiegne Sonami – Migration (1978)
Constance Demby – The Dawning (1980)
Miquette Giraudy (w/Steve Hillage) – Garden of Paradise (1979)
Ann McMillan – Syrinx (1979)
Doris Hays – Celebration of No (from Beyond Violence) (1982)
Brenda Hutchinson – Fashion Show (1983)
Barbara Golden / Melody Sumner Carnahan – My Pleasure (1997)
Joan La Barbara – October Music (1985)

Hosted by Jon Leidecker and Barbara Golden. See the Ubuweb site for more music by these artists and others.

via metrotimes

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Keep Track Of Your Activities On Your PC

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Have you ever switched off your PC after a 4 hour evening session, and wondered what precisely you’ve been doing with it all evening? You probably only sat down to write a letter or pay a bill, but you ended up surfing numerous web sites to distraction. Or maybe you’ve come to the end of a working day at your computer and you’re curious to find out just how much time you spent on “proper” work.

It’s been a couple of years since I wrote on these pages about a program that can help you answer precisely those questions, so I decided it’s about time that I took another look at a rather neat product called RescueTime.

To get started, you’ll need to download the RescueTime installer from www.rescuetime.com and then run it. The download is less than 2 MB and should run on Windows Vista upwards. The program is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust. Once you run it, you’ll need to set up an account with RescueTime, by choosing an email address and password. Then just wait a few minutes for the program to capture some data and upload it to the RescueTime servers.

After a few minutes has passed, click the RescueTime icon on the system tray and go to your web-based dashboard. It will show you how you’ve been using your computer, and you can browse through all your information. To get the most out of the program you’ll want to configure some of the settings, such as which type of activities and web sites tend to distract you most, and which are the programs or web sites or documents that you’re really supposed to be working on. The program can then keep track of all your activity (right down to which document titles you’ve been editing, if you wish), and tell you whether your balance of productive time vs non-essential usage is what you were hoping for.

RescueTime costs $9 per month for the premium package. However, the Lite package still contains most of the features that you’ll need, and is free forever. So just install the program and try it out. If you don’t like it, you can delete the software from your PC and there’s also an option to remove all your dashboard data from the remote servers.

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CNBC and Inc. Media Partner for The iCONIC Tour

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Inc. and CNBC have joined forces to create The iCONIC Tour, a three-part event series designed to bring together the country’s most dynamic businesses for a rare chance to network, overturn conventional thinking and come away inspired.

CNBC and Inc. Media, the publisher of Inc. magazine, are partnering for a three-part event series focusing on entrepreneurship, small business and innovation. The first is set for Tuesday at the landmark Chicago Theater. Tyler Mathisen, co-anchor of CNBC’s Power Lunch and Nightly Business Report and Eric Schurenberg, president and editor-in-chief, Inc., will serve as the hosts for each event.

The second event is scheduled for June 23 at the The Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles with the final conference in Washington, D.C. on November 11 at the Warner Theater.

As part of the agreement, CNBC and Inc. will also share content related to entrepreneurship, growth companies and innovation throughout the year.

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Introduction To Modular Synthesizers

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This series of videos the founder of Synthesizers.com Roger Arrick is featured offering an introduction to modular synthesis.

This series of videos features Roger Arrick offering Arrick is the founder of Synthesizers.com, whichan introduction to modular synthesis. makes 5U modules, inspired by classic Bob Moog designs. Arrick’s discussion is a good introduction to the basics of working with Moog-style modular synths, and many of the concepts will apply to any modular synth.

In the series, Arrick discusses voltage control, pitch and gate controls, envelopes, modulation, waveforms and creating synth patches.

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Tyrese Gibson Misses Megan Fox

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As ‘Transformers 3’ gets ready to destroy the box office, you can’t help but wonder what Megan Fox must be feeling. It was just revealed that Steven Spielberg fired the actress from the monster franchise after calling the director, Michael Bay, Hitler-like. One of the film’s stars, Tyrese Gibson, tells me he missed having her on the set and that he feels bad that she’s having a particularly bad week in the press.

“Of course I miss Megan,” Tyrese told me this week in NYC. “Megan is a sweet girl. I’ve never had an issue with her. It’s always been good. I know people are talking a lot of mess about her, but I just hope she has a strong stomach.”

The former model adds, “Having a franchise that she’s been a part of from the beginning, and not being able to have her on board is probably the most difficult. Sometimes things don’t work out, but I wish her well. In business, her career, her personal life. She’s a sweet girl.”

So, just how difficult is it working for a director like Michael Bay? Tyrese doesn’t hold back in painting Bay as an “aggressive” guy to work under and admits that he’s had a few verbal run-ins with his boss .. but nothing too serious.

“He’s very aggressive with himself. Very demanding of himself. He has very high expectations of not just the cast, but the crew,” he said. “He’s cursed me out a few times. I cursed him out back. I don’t really curse people out in person. I tend to do it through email. He curses me out in person.”

And after a disappointing ‘Transformers 2,’ Tyrese says even without Megan in the mix, this installment is not to be missed.

“It’s the best ‘Transformers’ in the series, hands down. The scope, magnitude, focus, adrenaline. All across the board. Michael Bay and the team, we really hit it out of the park this time, and we did it just for you.”

Tyrese said they knew part deux wasn’t up to snuff and made adjustments so that wouldn’t happen again.

“We heard all of the fans crying out that they felt they got taken advantage of with Transformers 2,” he said. “We came in to T3 focused, and we delivered the best movie we’ve done so far.”

Critics seem to agree already, with the Hollywood Reporter, USA Today and Christian Science Monitor giving it positive-ish reviews. Salon even dubbed it “An American summer-movie masterwork.”

But it’s not just ‘Transformers’ that has been keeping Tyrese busy. He has a book out ‘How to Get Out of Your Own Way’ — PopEater Interview — and is getting ready to release his new album, ‘Open Invitation’ this November.’

“I’m actually an AOL user by the way. I’m not going to give you my email, but I’m on there,” Tyrese tells me. Smart guy!!

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Will Smith’s Deadshot on set of Suicide Squad

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Fans have seen Jared Leto’s Joker from next year’s Suicide Squad, and now Will Smith’s Deadshot look has been revealed on the set of the David Ayer movie. And maybe another familiar face, as well.

The on-set photos show a newly bald Smith looking surprisingly stylish in a long leather jacket and hat – unlike the more traditionally scruffy character in the comic books. In another change from the character’s roots, Deadshot is shown carrying a collection of bags from stores, which seems just a little too … normal for the usually nihilistic, emotionally distant villain – unless, of course, they’re merely a disguise for his many guns.

The comic book Deadshot first appeared on the scene in 1950’s Batman Vol. 1 No. 59, going on to become an assassin for hire before joining up with the Suicide Squad, a group ideally suited to his twin interests: killing people and indulging his nascent death wish by courting death whenever possible.

The Batman connection might be one reason why eagle-eyed fans scoping out the set claimed to have seen Ben Affleck make a surprise appearance, dressed in his Batman costume from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Could the Dark Knight make a cameo in the movie, bringing Deadshot to justice?

Suicide Squad will be released summer 2016.

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