Fanatical Art and Music

Inside Great Pyramid Egypt 3D computer ...

The 3D computer animation.”Pyramid Quest”documentary, RTVI.

SMBC Theater – Dating Solutions

Tired of first date stupidity, Sandy decides to bring technology to the table. www.smbc-theater.com Executive Producers James Ashby, Zach Weiner, Marty Weiner Director: James Ashby Producer: Angel Askins Color: Chason Chaffin Guy – JP Nickel Girl – Kelly Smith

Do Copyright Laws Need Updating To Cope ...

Internet search giant Google has been found guilty of copyright infringement by a court in Paris. French publisher, La Martiniere, was awarded 300,000 Euros ($ 430,000) in damages and interest. Google was also ordered to pay the sum of 10,000 Euros ($ 14,000) each day until it withdraws the book extracts from its database. The court hearing was initiated by the French Publishers’ Association, La Martiniere and SGDL – an author’s group – who demanded that Google be forced to pay 15m Euros ($ 21m).

The size of the final settlement is not important for Google. However, the ruling may impact upon Google’s plans to scan, and make available online, as much of the world’s literature as it can. Google is currently in the process of scanning and storing as many books as possible. Books which are out of copyright are made available in their entirety, books still covered by copyright either have “snippets” made available or have the whole book made available under a previously agreed licensing scheme.

Google’s project to establish a worldwide digital library has seen it in court before. In 2001, a class action was filed by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a number of individual publishers and authors who alleged that Google had breached copyright law by failing to seek the copyright holder’s permission in all instances prior to scanning books from university libraries.

At the time, Google claimed that it was operating under the “fair use” principle as only short snippets of books scanned without the permission of copyright holders were made available.

In 2008 an agreement was reached with Google establishing a $ 125 million fund to provide compensation for authors who had their works made available online. However, the deal covered North America only and there were still concerns regarding books which, whilst out of copyright in America, were still bound by copyright law in other parts of the world.

As well as opposition from Europe, including both the German and French governments, Google faces competition from Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon – who all support the “Open Book Alliance” run by the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation which is also in the business of scanning and digitising books. Over half a million books have been scanned and stored by the Internet Archive to date, all of which are available free online. The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, is concerned that Google is attempting to monopolise the library system.

Google points out that their project will make millions of currently out of print books, which otherwise be inaccessible to readers, available. It’s probably also worth noting that Amazon Kindle users can also download out of copyright ebooks for the Kindle direct from Amazon’s website. There are a number of other projects which make out of copyright books available online free. It seems probable that our reading habits are about to undergo a major change. The current methods of book storage and delivery will be brought up to date using the internet. However, in order for this to succeed, it will first be necessary to put a legal framework in place which protects the interests of authors and copyright holders.

Download free Kindle ebooks direct from Amazon and make your Amazon Kindle reader pay for itself in no time.

Know more about Digital Art technology

If you are interested in pursuing a course in digital art from a digital arts engineering college, you need to know more about what digital art school is all about. Digital art school is generally the place where you will be trained in the use of computer to create art in digital form. It is more of contemporary art using the methods of digital media and mass production. The use of digital technology on art has also brought new art forms such as digital installation art, net art, and virtual reality.

Some of the aspects of art have been transformed from traditional art (such as drawing, painting, and sculpture) to modern art due to the incorporation of digital technology. Some new art forms have also been developed. Some new art forms that you expect to find in a digital arts school are:

Digital installation art is the use of three-dimensional works to transform perception of a particular space. Installation artworks have been constructed in galleries and museums and in other places. This style incorporates a wide range of materials like new media (sound, video, performance, virtual reality) and internet. Many of the installations are designed to exist only on the space created.

Net art is the use of the internet as the platform in which to create art. The artists who apply this are called net artists. This form of art is most often participatory, interactive and multimedia based. However, it does not refer to art that has been uploaded to be viewable on the internet. It purely relies on the internet for it to exist.

Virtual reality is a simulation technology that allows interaction between the user and the computer-simulated environment whether real or imaginary. The visual experiences are displayed on computer screen or on stereoscopic displays. It also includes the Additional information such as sound through speakers, etc.

This art field includes digital photography, computer graphics, and computer assisted painting. All these are very interesting field to pursue in a digital art school. You can enroll to the digital arts engineering college for all this and much more. Digital arts engineering college prepares the student to an exciting career as a digital artist.

I am but a person with an intense desire for self-expression that is a true devotee of pure intellect; the dream should at least ensure that place in the intellectual community in which my voice is an influential individual. The passion for the expression of thoughts and thirst for knowledge are the driving forces behind my motivation. The ruling is an inspiration of Julius Caesar, I am proud to own! I came, I saw, I conquered! Presently writing engineering colleges and online education.

Uncompressed Drum Samples – the ...

Using uncompressed drum samples is really the domain of those who can spot the potential in samples. Rarely do thin ears spot this potential, and this is why over-compressed drum samples are peddled by most drum samples websites, and successfully so, I might add. Compression is basically the process of increasing the volume of the quiet parts of a sound sample so that the distance between the highs and lows (in terms of volume!) is lessened.

When considering drum samples, compression can come into the song at a few different stages of the music production process. The earliest stage is probably the sound selection process. A lot of drum sounds (in fact, the vast majority) have already been compressed beyond recognition, mostly to maximize their volume, rarely ever for other purposes, so we end up dealing with sounds that have little room left for subtle sculpting. It can be hard to find uncompressed samples in most editors.

The second point at which compression will play apart is the final mixing process. This is where you would electively apply some compression using software or hardware audio compressors on drum samples or slight applications to soft instruments like the piano. The main creative difference here is that you are not subject to the over-compression used by many sound editors. Your decisions from here are truly coming from you.

Nearly every song that plays on the pop radio stations has a great drum pattern, with all drum samples cutting through the mix. This is very important as a lot of car radios still have speakers that aren’t so great at getting all the frequencies across, so a good mix is essential. While over-compression has had a lot of ’stick’ in the audiophile community, creative uses are not scarce. You just need to look to dance music and analyze the ‘ducking effecting to see how popular some creative compression can become in a genre.

If you have decided on a set of sounds but notice that the compression level is just too high, there is some hope. You certainly don’t have to ditch these samples to look for some drum samples that are a bit more dry; adding color back onto the sample’s canvas is not that hard once you get the creative hang of it. One of the methods that is a bit more common is to mix a dry sample with this over-compressed sample, and you can do this with just about any audio editor out there today, even free ones like Audacity which is very easy to download and use. The second way is to edit the actual wave sample by yourself and make cropping and filtering decision to add some spice back to this drum for your own use.

One of a few compression techniques for drum samples is the NY compression effect. In essence, it’s achieved by combining an original sample with the same sample heavily compressed. Having both allows the volume to be maximized while the dynamics are not totally diminished.

Stop procrastinating, and make rap beats now. Right now. You see, making rap beats isn’t exactly hard, so there are no excuses.

Drum Samples – Effective Cycling

Music producers today are frustrated – more so than ever – with trying to locate useable drum samples. In fact, we have more than ever – drum libraries that come with programs are really coming in numbers. Some programs, like Reason, come with thousands of drum samples, and it can be very hard to go through so many to find some samples that go with a current project. What is there to do for the fed-up beat maker?

The solution in this case is to organize the drum samples to the best of our ability. Sometimes this can be an extremely difficult task, but why? The reason is because some manufacturers make it near-impossible to extract the actual sounds from their databases. This makes it that much harder to converge and organize the bulk of the available sounds. Sometimes the next best thing to do is to get very familiar with the default patches (multiple sounds pre-selected by the sound designers) and keep a cheat-sheet of the genre-specific ones that appeal to you.

If it is possible to extract and save the drum samples from every collection you have access to, you may want to group them into folders that describe the actual sound type. For instance, all the kicks could go into a folder named, you guess it, ‘kicks.’ Snares would go into ’snares’ and so on.

The next level of this sorting system is to make parent folders to these ones. So, for instance, if you had the kick, snare and hi-hat drum samples folders visible, you can create a new folder for Rap or Dance (to illustrate my point), and move the dance-specific kicks into the kick folder within the Dance folder. Do the same for the snares, hats and other percussion.

Soon you will have folders that are specific to genres, and these will contain the different elements sorted into group folders. So if you want to make a Rap beat, head into the Rap Drum Samples folder, and then Dance samples in the Dance folder and so on. This will ensure that your creativity does not die down in the mundane task of finding some sounds to keep the energy flowing.

You don’t just have to stop here, though. Your creativity is the best thing. If you can systemize it, you will be well off. You can also even apply this to instrument files and other sounds. Imagine if you had everything organized correctly and in genre folders. How much easier of a time would you have trying to pick samples up? I bet you’d find it a lot faster, that’s for sure! When you have two sounds or drum samples, you could also create hybrid folders. So if you had a string patch that could work for country music as well as RnB, you would name a folder Rnb-Country, for instance.

There’s more to a beat than rap drum samples. If you want to make hip hop beats, there is music theory and arrangement to be learned. Do you have what it takes to be a music producer?

Snappy Snare and Kick Drum Samples

Why would you want to generate snappy kick and snare drum samples? Well, as we all know, there’s a serious loudness war going on, and what better way to drown out the competition that have the rhythm track in your songs simply cut through any speaker set or car radio and be instantly recognizable and catchy? With the importance placed upon drum samples and their arrangement and sound, budding music producers pay no attention to this topic at their peril!

Making your own drum samples ’snap’ is not very hard with a little practice. You can even use free tools, these days. Just search “free sound editor” on Google to see a list of results; Audacity is a great one! Using compression and equalization are great to begin with. If your work-flow already includes these, good on you – you have a head start now, so use it wisely. Besides using these effects, you can edit sound waves manually, and in this case you would be looking to alter the sound spikes, accentuating the initial attack manually for your drums.

Whether you are using software or hardware solutions to edit and change your drum samples, there are some features you should be aware of. The main feature is the likely inclusion of factory-shipped effect patches. It will be sound editors that have compiled the library of effects settings, so start to use them critically. Listen to the sound before and after applying the effect to gauge the impact, and then relate it to the settings on the device or software. Hopefully you will be able to base creative decisions based on your learning here.

Compression is probably the most useful quick fix to turn drab into ‘fab’ when it comes to snappy samples. Raising the volume everything below a low threshold with a fast release will bring interesting results to start with, but this is certainly no hard and fast rule, and in fact will sound downright ridiculous with certain samples. It’s such an adapted art form, you’ve really got to have your go at it, and write down some of the settings.

When you’re making notes on the settings you change, try to describe them in plain English – by that, I mean all the effects and the way they change the sound. If you can well and truly comprehend the way that a sound is effected by the different switches and level meters, you will be well-equipped to make real decisions in a studio environment. Keep a sheet that includes the different settings, supposed effects (according to the manual) and perceived effects (the stuff you hear).

As a last tip, you should always try to choose the correct drum samples to start with. If your library is big enough, you really won’t have that much of a problem, which is a good thing. The less you need to tweak and alter your current selection of samples, the more time you will have making the actual beat. It will be easier for you to translate the rhythm and sound in your into the sequencer and move on to the other instruments and such, so keep expanding your sounds.

Do you want to know how to make beats? Start with some good hip hop drum samples, then look for a basic tutorial on the topic and get started!

Art:21 | Matthew Ritchie

Matthew Ritchie’s work describes the formation of the universe and deals explicitly with the idea of information being “on the surface.” Although often described as a painter, Ritchie creates works on paper, lenticular prints, large-scale installations, freestanding sculpture, web sites, and short stories which tie his sprawling works together into a narrative structure. Matthew Ritchie is featured in the Season 3 episode “Structures” of the Art21 series “Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First …

Ten Years of Indie Rock

It’s really unbelievable to think about the fact that another decade is coming to an end. There were many defining characteristics of this decade in the world of news, technology, and more. In the music world, it came down to indie rock, and breed of music that’s still in full force.

During the’90s, it was definitely alternative music that ruled the airwaves, album sales, and filled up stadiums with concertgoers. This past decade, however, things changed during the early part of it. Indie rock became a big thing, and it still is almost ten years later.

With so many bands that were strong at the beginning of the decade still producing quality music, it’s clear that the indie genre is far more expansive than nearly any musical movement we’ve seen in quite some time.

Many might define indie rock as the presence of a band that’s not signed to a major label, but the definition has surely evolved. Take, for instance, bands like My Morning Jacket. While currently signed with a major label, people would still refer to them as an indie rock band.

Maybe it just has to do with the creativity and the lack of regard for producing music that was made for radios and top 40 playlists.

If this is the case, indie music might be at the forefront of the music scene for quite some time. Artists continue to expand their sounds, testing limits that have never been tested before.

The digital age has played a major role in making this possible. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of the fact that the Internet has brought about a much more widespread availability of great music. Maybe this music was always here, but we never knew about it. Whatever it is, I won’t be complaining about it.

It seems like a decade is usually defined by a certain genre of music, but it’s very well possibly that the next decade may also be dominated by indie rock.

This writer also blogs about funny wine labels and vintage wine labels.

Right Way to use Drum Samples – ...

The hi-hat drum samples of today are as varied as they are underappreciated. Think about your favorite songs for a moment. You can probably hear the kick and snare working away in memory, but it can be very hard to keep track of the hi-hat. The truth is, most hi-hats (hats for short) are just supporting acts to the snare and kick combinations that dominate our attention, but they are nevertheless an essential part of most music production projects, so underestimate them at your peril!

The two ‘mistakes’ of hi-hat hip hop samples we’re about to look into are no the domain of the beat making novice, but are committed nearly just as much by so-called professionals these days.

The first mistake we need to address is the volume. Hip hop drum samples need to be loud, we all understand that there is a loudness war, but the hi-hat is one exception. It is said by some biology and evolutionary experts that many thousands of years ago aerial predators were attacking us that made noises that have similar frequencies like those in hi-hats and cymbals. We simply have a tendency to hear these sounds more than others, so lowering them a few DB below where you think they should go is a smart move.

You will never really ‘mix out’ hi-hat samples, just lower them a few decibels during the beat making process. So first mix them to where you think they should be and then drop them a few notches further down. This incongruity has let down a lot of budding mixers who must understand that what they hear is not what their audience will hear at all times.

The second mistake is about achieving authenticity with your hip hop drum samples… If you’re trying to establish your song as having a real drum part, do not make the mistakes that many others do. Let me give you an example: a constant closed hi-hat in the left channel plays once every 16th note, 16 times a bar, and on the third beat; we hear an open hi-hat that strikes at the same time. What is wrong with this? Well, just about every real drum set only comes with one set of cymbals to manipulate, and triggering a closed hi-hat so often and consistently demonstrates that the cymbals are firmly closed, and yet you also hit the open cymbal at the same time. This is physically impossible, so don’t do this if you’re trying to set a tone of authenticity in your drum beats. Dance tunes, on the other hand, often have two or three different types of hats playing simultaneously, and if it’s the electronic vibe you want to lay down, go crazy. If it sounds good, it’s all good!

You can also go with the default drum samples patterns in programs like Toontrack EZ Drummer and BFD, as well as others. These programs usually include patterns that were really tapped out by a professional drummer on an electronic drum set and do not include these mistakes. You can learn a great deal using programs like this.

Want to find out more about drum samples? Then visit the web’s number one hip hop samples portal for all your needs.

Drum Samples with Redrum

Propellerheads have had their flagship drum samples manipulator, Redrum, included in the last few versions of Reason, and it’s been a hit in the music production universe. Anybody using Reason will attest to this.

There are ten drum channels in one instance of Redrum, each one with multiple modulation filters and options, such as velocity and panning. Along with panning, another regular is the level rotary knob, which simply controls the level or volume. You can mix and match the volume of all ten drum samples until you have a good internal balance. The master level then controls the volume of every drum sound inside Redrum as it pertains to the global project as a whole. What a great way to mix micro and macro with such ease, huh?

One of the more useful controls in each of the channel strips is the length control. What does the length control do for drum samples, then, you ask? It modified the tail or end of the sample and adjusts its length from the end. You can easily adjust any sample’s length from this one dial, so it’s easy to cut down drums that don’t get to the point as quickly as you might like or expect. It’s very easy to use!

Another option that is instantly useable is the Pan option. You can pan each of the drum samples differently, achieving a great horizontal mix within seconds, regardless of the set of drums you’re working with. This is another great thing about Redrum in general – everything is instantly viewable and modifiable. You don’t need to trudge through a hundred menus. However, people that have not used Reason as an environment before may get confused with the interface to start with.

Picking out sample after sample can be a very boring and mundane task. Wouldn’t it be easier if somebody had already picked out a whole bunch of samples that go great together? Well, set your faces to stunned, because Reason includes more than a hundred different soundsets for Redrum. All the drum samples included in these Refills are chosen for their coherence. So you will rarely venture outside of these sound-packs looking for other samples. You can practically get to work right away! Focusing on the music and not sample selection can be great for creativity. Nothing is worse than spending thirty minutes looking for drum samples!

The last major thing about the Redrum interface is the step sequencer that sits at the bottom of the device in every single view. This is where you can click in drum samples if you’re not recording input with MIDI hardware at this point. While you cannot ever see all patterns at once, it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually good because you’re training your ear to keep an eye out, to see where new drum samples could be injected and so on. In fact, it works so much like real hardware that aspiring audio engineers would do well to look at Reason and Redrum as their learning platform.

Want to find out more about drum samples? Then visit the web’s number one hip hop samples portal for all your needs.

Drum Samples And Reverb Effects

Out of all the effects that can be applied to drum samples, reverb should be up there with the most-used, but it is not, and when it is used, it is often abused by so-called music production professionals and audiophiles. When used correctly, it can help any beat go to that extra level.

When considering using this samples, make sure to specify (at least to yourself) the role that the sound is supposed to fulfill. If it’s for a single sound, you run the risk of making the other drum samples take a backseat to the reverb of this one instance. So if it’s a noise that plays all the time and consistently, you should turn down the bleed/return.

The length of the reverb on any particular cannot really be determined on a global scale, but needs to be adjusted on a project-by-project basis for maximum effect and precision. Some people say that you can use a longer tail on the reverb for samples in a slow-tempo song, and if you’re particularly aiming at one of the drum samples, it will relieve the others from needing to perform for the sake of performing. In a slow tempo song, you can either have many samples triggering all the time, back-and-forth collaboration, or strategic placements with reverb, which fills space effectively.

You can apply a single reverb patch to all of your drum samples, and there are hundreds of ways this can be achieved, and equally as many different programs and plug-ins to use for the task. With environment simulations (called Impulse Responses -or IRs for short), you can make your song sound like it was recorded at any world-famous location you have IR files for, such as the Louvre Museum if you wish. You can also apply the IR sound processing to your instrument tracks so that there is a total coherence between tracks.

Having said all of this, though, just about anything goes with certain types of electronic music. As long as something actually works for the song, nobody can tell you that it’s not worthy of inclusion as an effect.

If you experiment and see what works for you, you’ll be well off to a natural instinct for applying effects like reverb to your drum samples in a way that is unobtrusive and even adds character to your tracks. Start by testing out the effects of it on single sample tracks and then to the drums as a unit, before moving on to the whole song in varying degrees of application. Also make sure to try different types, like plate and room reverb, then hall and open spaces. You’ll find that each adds something else and once you know when to use a specific type of patch, you’ll be ready for any beat making situation.

If you’re a beat maker and want the best-quality hip hop samples to use, go here: drum samples.

Kick Drum Samples

There are many different types of kick drum samples. Beat making is an activity that is so oft-repeated that using the same kick drums in every single beat is going to really drain your creativity. Because the kick especially is so ubiquitous in every type of music from rock to rap and hip hop to RnB, having a varied selection is absolutely essential. Knowing the types of kicks is the beginning, but is definitely essential.

There are a few different sound stages (or phases) in every sample, including the ever-present kick drum. The first, and at the starting line, is called the attack. This first phase really determines the ’shine’ factor of the kick, and whether it can be heard with a whole bunch of other sounds competing for attention. A slow attack (which means a weak starting point) will need to be compensated for by the other phases of the drum sample.

The second phase that we should talk about is the sustain, which is the long part of the kick that the attack introduces. This bulk of the sample can be long and booming or short and pointy, but it does matter as this is the memorable part of the sample. Having a very weak attacking phase can be disastrous if it’s coupled with a very weak sustain phase, too. Either have the best of both worlds or one good phase to get you started and get it heard.

If you want to adjust your kick’s volume in proportion to the other drum samples, there are hundreds of ways available to you. Your main sequencer program probably has a few different places with volume controls, and even if it doesn’t you can just as easily download a free plugin or program to help you achieve this goal. Most drum machines and software on Macs and PCs offers easy volume manipulation on both the main mixers and the additional nested devices, so check them out and read your manual.

If you still don’t want to use an envelope to modify the volume, it’s very easy to do it with an audio editor. Just select the part of the drum sample wave that fades out or stops (the end of it) and trim to your liking. To blend everything in after a crop, use a fade on the last few milliseconds to ensure that the drum samples are free of clipping.

Lastly, you should know that different programs include different drum samples. The libraries that ship with Reason and FL Studio, for example, are vastly different. They are both good, but if you find yourself making beats with the same drum samples over and over, look for some expansion packs or third party sounds to expand your choice, or modify the samples yourself if you have the time and skill.

If you want the best drum samples available, check out My Drum Samples here: http://www.mydrumsamples.com/

Nature Photography: Art or Technology?

Nature photography as an art form has been around for a long time, but recently it has found respect on the walls of up-market galleries. This is a big change from 20 years ago, when nature photography was only considered worthy of second-rate postcards and calendars.

Over the years, postcards and calendars began to improve in quality as nature photographers with real talent entered the industry. High quality posters of whales, wolves, elephants and spectacular landscapes from around the world were suddenly worthy of framing. Finally nature photography galleries began to appear and, more importantly, turn a profit.

When I opened my gallery in 1993, many people still felt that you could not make a living selling photography; that people would only buy paintings to hang on their walls. These days, new galleries are opening everywhere; some good, some not so good, and a few that have really hit the big time.

All this activity in the world of nature photography has inspired new generations of photographers to look at nature photography as a hobby or possible profession. These new nature photographers grew up in a very different world than the one I come from. Technology that was unimagined back then is now commonplace, and new photographers have more power in their hands than ever before. But what implications does all this technology have for nature photography?

Nature photographers must now decide how much they will allow their photography to be influenced by technology. In earlier days, good nature photography required a very simple approach; find a great subject, in the best possible light, and use your skill with a camera to capture what you saw. Today it is quite a different story. A nature photographer can (if they choose) find a decent subject, photograph it in whatever lighting conditions they happen to find, then go home and completely alter the colours, the contrast, and even the detail of the picture. The result can be an image that owes more to the marvels of technology than to the wonders of nature.

Each to his own. It is not for me to judge the creative decisions of another photographer. But the question that is in the back of your mind right now deserves to be asked; is this nature photography?

Every photographer is entitled to pursue their craft any way they choose. Of course skills with computer software are just as creative as traditional nature photography skills. However, the person who views a photograph deserves to know what they are looking at, especially if that person is a customer prepared to part with their hard-earned money.

I know many photographers get quite defensive on this subject. Camera clubs around the world continue to wrestle with the issue of judging natural photos alongside manipulated photos. Some clubs have tried to divide competition into separate categories, only to find people sneaking their digitally altered photos into the unaltered category for equal recognition. Understandably, ’software photographers’ want their talents to be recognised on the same level as the ‘in-camera photographers’. And so they should, but not in a way that ignores the difference between the two disciplines.

This is not an attempt to denigrate the skills of the software photographers. It just seems to me that the viewer, and in particular the paying customer, deserves to know.

Increasingly the public is becoming suspicious of good photography. Anything that is outstanding or unusual is now assumed to have been altered or manipulated using computer software. In many cases, it probably has. Unfortunately, this suspicion gives little credit to the traditional photographer (and there are still plenty of us out there) who prefer to do the creative work in the field, before they press the shutter, and reproduce what was captured on the day.

You can’t imagine, unless it has happened to you, how frustrating it is to proudly display your best nature photography, only to hear people say ‘These days it’s all done with computers.’

For the record, my photography is as traditional as it can be in the digital age. Software is becoming essential to my work, as I go throught the process of scanning thousands of slides from my years of travel. Not to alter a photo, but to balance the colour and contrast to make sure the printed photograph matches the original slide. It is also an enormous benefit to finally be able to restore images that have been scratched or otherwise damaged by age.

I recognise that the trend towards using software to enhance and alter photos is not only inevitable, but just as legitimate as old fashioned nature photography. However, I continue to encourage people to learn true camera skills as well, so that the use of software to manipulate images is a creative choice, not a remedy for lack of ability. Thankfully, the demand for my ebooks suggests that there are plenty of people out there who feel the same way.

To see some Australian Nature Photography that is captured in the field, and reproduced from the original image on film, see Andrew Goodall’s work at http://www.naturesimage.com.au To learn the essential skills of better photography, you can also find Andrew’s ebooks and subscribe to the online newsletter…it’s free!

Buying The Right DJ Equipment For Your ...

If you are a disc jockey, then the DJ equipment will be crucial. Well seriously, even if you are just starting or wishing to get the whole of hardware replaced, you must have an idea of the basic pieces of DJ equipment that helps you to do your best in time of need.

The event might be anything, ranging from a marriage, to a birthday party, to someone’s garden party. No matter what it is, not only do you need the best apparatus you need equipment for each occasion as well as equipment that works very well for YOU.

First of all, you need to decide what kind of DJ you want to be. Are your plans to be a stationary DJ? Setting up a radio station on your own. Would you rather be a bard instead, better known as a mobile DJ?

What kind of DJ kit you will purchase definitely has an effect , as there’s some that can be set up permanently and some can be picked up and moved at will. If you are more of the second, then you need to ensure that you get cartable DJ equipment as well as a carry case for your hardware.

The turntable is the DJ’s first and vital gear. Turntable was used in olden times to play vinyl records. But as the time passed, the meaning of the turntable has been changed. Nowadays olden technologies are gone so we have switched to the new technology like CD’s, DVD’s, flash media and thing like these.

You must even question yourself if you are going to use CD’s or not. You may want to try using a laptop computer with a DJ program. Make sure that Winamp is not going to be your DJ program.

If you will perform any events in anyplace, then ensure that you possess a decent microphone. People are going to require to hear what you are pronouncing, so you need to make sure of 2 things before you purchase a microphone.

First off you want to make sure that your words are clear and sharp so everyone can understand you and you don’t sound like the dispatcher at a drive thru restaurant . The second thing that you are going to need to check is that the microphone doesn’t have too much feedback. A screeching sound would be heard by the people if it happens and nothing else would be audible to them.

You’ll need to remember you’ll be working in the dark a lot of the time, so you’ll need to have work lights. Some kinds of lights are available that will illuminate your board, but will not interfere with the event outside.

There isn’t any doubt that you’ll need to buy lots of other pieces of equipment, but you always want to make sure that the DJ equipment you buy works for you, and is top quality. Make your choice carefully, everyone is unique!

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Drum Samples: Developing Your Own

Anybody with a PC or Macintosh computer can indeed make their own drum samples quite easily. Sometimes to start with, the learning curve can be a bit daunting, but once you get the hang of it, it is quite easy to edit and crop different sounds to make your own unique samples that you will then be able to use for all of your production efforts.

To make your own drum samples, you obviously need some tools. There are a lot of different software solutions to help you edit audio and develop your own sounds, and if you are on a PC, a great free program is called Audacity – you can Google it and hit the first returned website. It installs quite quickly and the download is not that heavy, so get it installed. Once it is on your machine, there are really only a few operations that you need to perform to manipulate audio beyond the original spectrum. You can start by cropping and applying effects like delay and stereo modulation. If you’re on a Mac, there are also some free programs to download, so there is no excuse on either platform!

If you are more comfortable in programs like Reason, FL Studio and Sonar, you can do what you want to the audio and then simply export the wav sound. So if you’ve applied some good effects and want the drum sample as it stands right now, simply export that channel by itself. Chances are, you will probably have some silence at the end of the sample unless your program is smart enough to cut it out. In any case, you will be able to crop this in an audio editor easily.

To find source drum samples, there are a few places you can look. Sampling is still very popular (if not more than it was at any point!) and you can get into the sample game as fast as you want. Get yourself a turntable, some old records and look for drum breaks, where the sounds are not obscured by instrument layers. You just need to cut samples out of here, and if you get some from the 60s and 70s you could have some nice unaltered samples ready for modification.

Now that we’ve discussed sampling, we should probably look at the other extreme, which is to synthesize your own drum samples. Yep, everything from kicks to conga sounds and hi-hats can be replicated on drum machine hardware quite easily. You can get a very inexpensive drum machine from eBay, but if, like some people, you’d like something from the 80s or 70s, be prepared to pay a lot more money than this. Being able to alter a lot of the parameters, you can certainly get some unique sounds.

Now that you know how to source the different drum samples, you need to be able to manipulate and alter to your liking. There are plenty of effects to change the sound of a sample, including equalization and compression techniques, so you’ll need to experiment. You will come across some methods that go well with your workflow, so just keep an open mind and try any and all recommendations until you can make your own judgment.

Want to find out a lot more about drum samples? Then visit the web’s number one hip hop drum sounds website for your fix.

Changing Swing of Drum Samples

Beat makers of all ages and all expertise levels sometimes overlook two of music production’s biggest ’sleeping giants’ – swing and time-sensitive density. Let’s go through some of the things related to the former, as many newbies and veterans still don’t pay enough attention to the swing that applies to drum samples. By the end of this, you should have a better understanding of the topic!

First of all, why use swing? Swing is useful in two situations. It is first of all useful when having used an editor or a click-in interface (like Reason’s Redrum or the FL Studio sequencer), and in this case it serves to humanize the drum samples loop. If it weren’t for the swing, all the samples would be precisely on point, and the human ear likes to perceive variance, not 100% accuracy in everything. This is what makes concerts such an appeal; if your favorite artist sang the exact same notes with the same tones and timing as the CD versions of his or her tracks during every live performance, there wouldn’t be such a demand.

If you’re tapping out drum samples, then using swing is like quantization – it will help you keep on time if you’re not very accurate at the moment. Even if you are spot-on, it will apply your hits to the groove/swing template.

But what exactly is swing? Swing is, again, like quantization, but without the 100% timing. There are various styles of swing templates, with varying degrees of swing. A 50% swing, for instance, is no different than snap quantization, so it’s not really swing at all. But moving beyond this, a 63% swing template, for example, is one which moves midi notes from the nearest quantization point by thirteen percent either way. The percentage is of the timing, so it would be thirteen percent of 1/16th note, if 1/16 was the timing selected.

When composing a beat or music project and using electric synthesizers – it can be neat to apply the swing template to just a few elements of the song. This way, you could, let’s just say, have the drum samples track with swing and the synth without swing and then just introduce one other element. This element on its own could be subject to a swing pattern, which can egt very interesting results depending on the sound device and the sound patch used in MIDI.

When beginning to use this type of technique in music production, you may want to start with template percentages of fifty one to sixty three percent. Try them out on drum samples first and just mute the other tracks. Un-mute and play the track back again. Getting to know the difference in your mind as well as in your ears is an important step, especially true when you’re just starting to do this on your own. Move onto other instruments and try other percentages as you get more comfortable.

Want to find out more about drum samples? Then visit http://www.mydrumsamples.com/ for all your needs.

Snare Drum Samples: Under the Microscope

Snare drums are an essential component in a lot of genres; from dance to hip hop and RnB and all types of metal and rock, snares really have an impact beyond just a monotonous sound. The usage of snare drum samples is dependent on the exact style of music, as well as the tempo of the songs they are featured in.

In urban music like hip hop and RnB, snare drum samples usually dances around beats 2 and 4 in the musical bar measurement. The kick in these songs usually takes place on one of the stronger beats, like the first down beat, and the reason for this is that the kick is more of a rhythmic statement than the snare, although the latter still has its place – and is very important indeed.

There are literally thousands of different snare types out there for use in computer music production. Two of the types seem to dominate the music scene, though, and these are the real snares recorded in professional settings and made available to beat makers, and the snare drum samples that are generated with different programming in devices like drum machines and keyboard workstations. The snare drums made by computers can also be very realistic and not synthetic-sounding.

Effects play a big role in the final sound of the snare drum samples, and one of the most common one is reverb. The reverb effect doesn’t just affect the sample, but can affect the whole song, even if only the snare is subjected to the reverb process. The reverb can be dynamic, as in applied throughout the song with variable parameters, or on a per-sample basis, with it having been applied prior to use and perhaps only affected by an ADSR envelope or similar.

In dance music, the snare drum samples are often combined with the kick drums and ‘teamed up’ for beats 2 and 4 from the bar, with the kick hitting consistently from beats 1 through 4. This technique is used simply to relieve the ear of the persistent bass kick on every beat, and also serves other uses, especially if the snare and kick do not share the same groove template. This sort of an affect can result in a dynamic drum samples groove that is very pleasing to the ear and we can actually spot this in many club hits playing today. The technique has been popular for over 10 years now!

Using snare drum samples as best as you can is an art form, and it is an easy goal to reach consistently if you experiment enough. You need to keep an ear out for new methods and new techniques all the time, and apply what you want to your own tracks, not worrying about the fine things at this point.

If you’re a music producer and want the highest-quality drum samples to use, click on: http://www.mydrumsamples.com/.

How To Buy And Install A Subwoofer

Most of the home theater systems you will find, come with five small speakers called satellites. They also have large speakers, which are called as subwoofer. These serve as a bass.

The three important speaker components that for a home theater systems are mid range speakers, Bass or woofers, and the tweeter or the treble.

When combined altogether, these components provide quality sound that makes up a home theater system.

These speaker components make you experience surround sound, same as in movie theaters, in your living room. You will find a host of subwoofers available in various models and brands. However, you have to choose speakers, which can work as a cohesive unit.

For the same, go for voice matching while choosing your subwoofers. It will ensure that these give harmonic sound for your home theater systems. On the other hand, if the coordination in the sound is missing, then the sound might break up while traveling to one speaker from another.

Note that voice matched speakers are a must to produce harmonic voice quality for your home theater systems.

There are some buyers, who go for the brands they already have. They contact manufacturers and check whether the new series can produce the same sound that their present speakers produce.

Go for the powered ones while assembling your subwoofer. There are various Dolby Digital soundtracks and DTS available in the market. Known as low frequency effect (LFE) speakers, these make the sound larger and clearer.

Moreover, also take care of effects like thunder or explosions.

With more space available in your home entertainment system, you can choose power subwoofers having built-in amp with enough watts to be accommodated in the room. Moreover, in order to have larger driver, ensure that you have deeper bass.

It is advisable to set low-frequency sound waves as these are mono-directional waves and can transfer sounds between speakers with flexibility.

Learn more on subwoofer speakers and see how easy it is to improve your entertainment in your house ten fold. A quality long-lasting product is the best-selling Pioneer subwoofer.

The Complete Digital Photography ...

by Lucas Godfrey

It is true that people who could never take a picture before do reasonably well with the new digital cameras. To these individuals the worse picture possible from a digital camera looks great.

Then there are the individuals who are highly critical of their work. They produce excellent photos with their digital but it still not quite up to the standards they demand from their pics.

Lighting will play an important roll in their pictures just as they do for any of them. Even the novice will find that by paying extra attention to the lighting they will get far superior results. Knowing when to use your flash is an important aspect. It is important to do so when you have heavy backlighting. Although most of the editing features used in editing software do a great job, lighting can create the most problems, and is not as easily fixed if at all with software.

When you are taking pictures you want to utilize as much natural light as possible this means of course sunlight. Which we all know is at its best at sunrise and sunset. There is a natural orange color that appears in the sky when this is happening. This orange color has a unique effect on the quality of the photos taken within this period. It also allows for further enhancement once you transfer them to your computer.

Sunlight is a great natural source of lighting but you need to know how to utilize it to the best effect. You have no control over how bright the sun appears. The sun creates its own shadows and you will not be able to alter these. So now, realizing this where you position yourself and your subject is going to be very important. If you experiment for a while, taking photos in full sun conditions you will soon learn how to manipulate your position to use this natural lighting to your full advantage. One of the sure signs that you are mastering your lighting will be evident by how little editing they require once they are on your computer.

If you are not comfortable with working with sunlight, artificial light or even your flash then do a little research. There is a lot of free information on the internet that will give you hints and techniques to help you along. Practice makes perfect, and if you learn from your photo mistakes you will be all the better. The nice part of digital photography is you can just erase your mistakes and start over again. Imagine if you had development costs and then found those tons of pictures you took just did not look good because of the wrong lighting.

One of the major things to remember in photography is not to get frustrated. Every digital camera comes with its own features. Take you time and learn to use each of them so you will enjoy all that it is capable of doing. Remember though in the end it is you who takes the great pictures, the camera is the means of doing so.

About the Author:

Discover the complete d90 photo editing software that will allow you to create cutting-edge photo enhancements easily. Visit PhotoEditorX now for your computer photo organizing and editing needs.

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