Thursday 1 October 2009

Featured Music Maker for October:

NeoKitsch is a music studio in the heart of trendy Crouch End, London, which specialises in producing original musical scores, sound design, voiceover and foley for film and TV. Five albums have been released under NeoKitsch, some classical music, and some fusion electronic music, and they can be downloaded from iTunes and other leading stores.

NeoKitsch has been active in composing music for filmmakers worldwide including productions in LA, Milan, Berlin, Zurich, Hamburg and London, collaborating with names such as UK Film Council, The League Of Gentlemen, Arts Council England, Sky One and MTV, with works presented at BAFTA screenings and film festivals.
The NeoKitsch Blog is regularly updated with reviews and articles on unusual musical instruments, films and new music. You can check out all the serious and silly things NeoKitsch gets up to at: www.neokitsch.com

Current projects NeoKitsch is involved in includes the full score for the stage production of Frankenstein which will be performed in March (date and venues TBC). The lead instruments will be the Violin and Etherwave Theremin.

NeoKitsch is a huge collector of unusual and vintage instruments, and the studio often uses acoustic stringed instruments such as the violin, mandolin, and cello. Some of the more far out instruments include the Omnichord, Micro Garden, Theremin, Circuit Bent Synths, and Stylophone. Among the hard to find, vintage gear NeoKitsch collects, are the Moog Rogue, Yamaha CS10, Korg MS2000B, Roland JV1080, and the famous Roland TB-303. NeoKitsch also uses more modern synths, although arguably, they tend to lean towards the nostalgic 70's and 80's sounds. Some of these modern machines include the Elektron Monomachine and Machinedrum, and the Sid Station.

NeoKitsch is familiar with composing music for a wide range of different genres, but the speciality genre seems to lean in the direction of classical music for violin and piano, fused with electronic glitch and experimental music.

The NeoKitsch studio is run by one person, Danny Hahn, but he often collaborates with classical musicians and specialists in fields which help broaden the possibilities of composing music.

When NeoKitsch is composing with computer software such as ProTools, Max MSP, Logic and Sibelius, novelty Midi controllers are often used such as the Monome. Interesting videos of some of the weird instruments NeoKitsch uses, including the Monome, can be found on YouTube. Here are a few examples:






More info can be found here: neokitsch.humtoo.com

Monday 28 September 2009

New HUM system on HUMTOO explained...

The HUM system is a vote-style rating system for music on HUMTOO. There is no number rating (e.g. four out of five), and no negative votes.

Every 24hrs every member of HUMTOO gets one HUM which they can use to show their appreciation of a track. Nobody can HUM their own tracks.

To HUM a track simply press the HUM button on the player for that track.

Tracks with more HUMs go to the top of projects and library searches.

So next time you hear a great track on the site, do the community a favour and HUM it.

You can see the total HUMs a track has on the display above the button and the total of all the HUMs on all your tracks on the HUM display above your profile picture on your profile.

To level the playing field as each new project comes onto the site, tracks have a separate number of HUMs on each project they are pitched for.

These HUMs display in red and add to the total HUMs that a track and music maker has received.

This means that old and new tracks start from the same spot and have the same chance of rising to the top on each new project.

www.humtoo.com