The largest guitar pedalboard in the world (video)
Boomtown Chapter 11: The Radical City 2019 (video)
It’s been few weeks since Boomtown laid the country bare for it’s 11th year with an unbeatable weekend of music and festivities. We’re still totally stuck in Boomtown mode so take a dive inside the party of the year with out video taking you on a tour through all the wonder and delights on offer.
Major Lazer remixes Fortnite with new skins and emotes launched
The world’s most popular game has teamed up with Major Lazer to bring some EDM into the game in a variety of ways.
One of the biggest electronic music groups has teamed up with the biggest game in the world right now – mostly thanks to kids – because why the hell not this is the 21st century, this is just what happens now.
The EDM group led by Diplo have remixed two of Fortnite’s lobby tracks: ‘Default Vibe’ and ‘Default Fire’. To launch the songs Major Lazer streamed a live game of Fortnite with pro gamer Dubs from the FaZe Clan eSports group.
To celebrate the collaboration Fortnite has also launched a ‘Lazerism’ pack of items for the game. The pack comes with a dedicated outfit skin, weapon skins and a dancing emote that can be used by the character as well as the two remixes.
The pack costs 2,475 V-Bucks for the whole thing but each item can be bought differently. That’s roughly $25 worth of ‘V-Bucks’ so if you’re looking for ways to throw away your money, enjoy Major Lazer, and are partial to a game of Fortnite then head over to the game now.
Meet the eco, backyard music studio we all wish we had
This gorgeous studio is the dream of every musician, producer and beyond to have their own quiet, personal studio in the backyard.
Oh to have the space and money to build your dream studio in the garden. An enclosed space where you can escape to let the creativity flow from you. Somewhere that distractions are left outside the door so that everything is focused on the process.
Prepare to get green as this music composer’s new garden studio is the stuff of the most enviable dreams. In his beautiful new countryside cottage he recruited JCPCDR Architecture to build a cosy and stylish cabin out of local recycled materials.
Sourcing the ingredients for the studio locally meant they could reduce the project’s carbon footprint. Their target was to build the studio 100% ecologically so they took glass panels and steel from a destroyed factory nearby and took scraps from the closest sawmill for the wooden panels.
Looking at it you would never tell that this meticulously designed garden studio was made almost entirely from scraps. The design is simple but stylish with glassed walls on two side and a pyramidal glass corner window above the desk for an abundance of natural light and a view of the beautiful house and its gardens.
We hope you had a napkin for this because we were definitely drooling over the idea of having this recording space.
What would your dream recording space look like? Tell us in the comments below.
Here’s what 600 year old butt music from hell sounds like
‘Early Netherlandish painting butt music from hell’ is a genre we never thought we’d get to hear but here we are and there it is.
In the 1490s and all the way up until 1510, extraordinary artist and leading painter of the Early Netherlandish period Hieronymus Bosch created a masterpiece of art with his incredible painting: The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The painting is filled with intricate detail and surrealism ahead of it’s time. It’s an astonishing feat that took up around 20 years of Bosch’s life.
Hidden within the painting is an ass more notable than the any of the hundred other booties depicted. This particular ass, found in the hellish landscape of the right panel, has musical notation tattooed across both cheeks.
Resist thine earthly urges that lead a man towards sin. For once ye hath sinned, your buttocks shall be used as a demon’s sheet music.
Oklahoma Christian University student Amelia Hamrick went through the rigorous process of studying this particular butt and transcribing the music depicted on those pale cheeks. She then recorded what she aptly described as “LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell”.
She says of her work: “I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.”
YouTube user Jim Spalink has taken Amelia’s transcription and, with a little personal embellishment, created an enchanting recording of the piece using a lute, harp and hurdy-gurdy. The perfect trio of instruments transports you back 600 years and makes you feel like you’re hearing the music from the butt itself.
Paint a masterpiece with MIDI on Dr. Dot
MIDI devices open up millions of possibilities in the world of music creation, maybe it’s time to explore their possibilities in other arts.
Dr. Dot is a fascinating piece of painting software that, using the power of a MIDI controller, allows you to experiment with dot painting for incredible results. It’s basically next level spiral art.
Created by Jeffrey Alan Scudder, the program works with MIDI Fighter Twister controllers to paint and select colours and the movement of your paintbrush. See it in action and you’ll see just how crazy and beautiful the possibilities are with Dr. Dot.
Open up the MIDI Fighter Utility app and download Scudder’s linked configuration file. Then painting away with your controller is as simple as heading to this link: dr.dot.justanothersystem.org
Speaking on DJ Tech Tools, Scudder says: “I built Dr. Dot to demonstrate my own theory of picture resolution and to build an animated painting called Tumpin, but quickly realized that it was also an impressively expressive instrument for live painting and spiral art.”
Find out more about why and how Scudder created this unique software in his article for DJ Tech Tools.
Watch 324 Gibson guitars crushed by a crane (video)
WARNING! The following content is not for the faint of heart or for lovers of guitar.
Gibson just broke the hearts of thousands of aspiring guitar players with one horrific video. In the vid you can see a row containing hundreds of their divisive but gorgeous Firebird guitars crushed and mangled by a hydraulic crane crawling over the poor, innocent instruments.
Unfortunately this was probably the only feasible outcome for these guitars. The range was deemed unsalvageable, reportedly having been “damaged with unsafe components”. Gibson say: “This isolated group of Firebird X models were unable to be donated for any purpose and were destroyed accordingly.”
Last year Gibson were facing bankruptcy but they’ve been taking steps to go back to their roots with a new business approach. It’s not clear whether the destruction of one of their range is part of these plans.
Regardless of whether they could have given the guitars away or not, its a distressing video for anyone who loves guitars. Although, there is something strangely satisfying about seeing them all get crunched…
This Hip-Hop beatboxing medley is astonishing (video)
Watch these guys beatbox (and play) their way through a bunch of hip hop classics like Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, Dr Dre’s Still Dre, Eminem’s Lose Yourself and the unbeatable piano sample from Wu Tang Clan’s C.R.E.A.M. + more.
Poolside FM is the coolest time machine on the internet
It may be hard to believe that there is a website made for going poolside, but there definitely is and it’s awesome.
Let’s take a trip back to the 80s (with some ambiguous 90s vibes) and groove out in the sun. Poolside FM is the hottest new site looking stepping out valiantly from a time machine brandishing its pastel colours and retro dance music with pride.
Poolside FM has a history of delivering the vibe, launching in 2014 to present visitors with a playlist of retro-sounding music accompanied by short video clips that make for the best 80s throwback since Stranger Things. They’ve redesigned their site for an even fuller time-capsule experience.
The new site emulates a classic, old Mac OS home screen for navigating through the music player, video player and more. It takes you back instantly with its retro design accompanied by video clips so 80s they look like they’re snatched straight from Baywatch.
For audio Poolside FM take a SoundCloud stream from a playlist of about 250 songs. They are hoping to build that up to 500 different tracks so that visitors can stream all day by the pool without hearing any repeats.
The creators say of the site: “Poolside FM was conceived one awfully rainy summer in the Highlands of Scotland – a virtual vacation, if you will. The audio and video streams are curated to inject a healthy dose of serotonin into your brain.”
There’s even a merch store so if you love the aesthetic you can put that classic wavey look on your head with a cap or don the Poolside FM tops for the journey to the pool.
So whether the sun’s shining and you want to complement it, or if you’re inside in the dark wishing you were in your boardies ready for a dip; Get poolside on Poolside FM.
Eric Prydz is DJing in a giant glowing sphere
DJ sets are a bit different to other musicians sets, you have to think outside the box to keep the stage lively. Maybe massive spheres full of light are the answer.
In just over a week Belgium will be taken over once again for the Tomorrowland festival. Known for it’s incredible pyrotechnics, giant moving structures and general overwhelming scale, they’ve got some big plans for when Eric Prydz takes to the stage to DJ his set.
Prydz is no stranger to impressive live shows, his famous DJ set being dubbed ‘Eric Prydz In Concert (EPIC)’. He promises that every EPIC concert combines music and tech to interact in innovative and interesting new ways. There have been holograms, laser beams, and even digital screens bigger than jumbo jets.
Prydz says: “Ever since we started doing EPIC our goal has always been to try and blow people away, but in a way that they haven’t been blown away before at an electronic dance music event.”
Along with his team Prydz has been working on creating the ‘Holosphere’, an eight meter wide sphere that Prydz will DJ from inside when he plays Tomorrowland. They sphere is reportedly so large that the festival had to re-design their grounds to fit it in. As he plays the Holosphere will flash and shoot light out and over the crowds.
The EPIC shows are so grand and the technology often so expensive that Prydz has actually lost money from doing them. Whilst it’s expensive and the venues that can host them are very limited, Pyrdz isn’t worried. “Huge confetti cannons and flamethrowers are very primitive. I thought, we can do better than this. We can do something different and more exciting.”