Designer Yuri Suzuki of Pentagram and killer Japanese electronic kit maker Gakken collaborated on this fantastic-looking Easy Record Maker. The US$81 (!) device enables you to cut and play your own (very) lo-fi 5" albums! Susuki will demo the device on his Instagram tomorrow. From DesignWeek:
The machine comes with ten blank five-inch discs [with more available for purchase]. You can plug in the audio source from any device, such as a computer or phone and then “engrave sound directly from the recording stylus,” Suzuki tells Design Week. You can then instantly playback sound using the tone arm and in-built speaker...
“When I was a high school student, I was in a punk band – my friends and I always dreamed of pressing a record, but we knew how expensive it was,” he explains. “Personally this device is my teenage dream machine!”
You can also design your own label and sleeves, which is another “platform to express yourself”, Suzuki adds.
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The phrase "recorded with a potato" has gone from figurative to literal thanks to a group of curious spud-hackers. Read the rest
Since the birth of audio recording in the 19th century, people have used the technology to capture the ambient sounds of our world for later playback. With the invention of high-quality, portable tape recorders in the 1960s, field recording evolved into its own art form. Now, all of us carry high-quality digital recorders in our pockets and myriad sound artists continue to push the form forward. Good field recordings have the power to transport us and, sometimes, attune our own senses so that we too listen more actively to our own experiences in the world. In this short documentary "Sound Fields," director Sam Campbell introduces us to contemporary field recordists who are masters at active listening and share what they hear with all of us.
(Vinyl Factory)
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Musician Rob Scallon thought it would be cool to one-up the vinyl hipsters and record some metal on century-old Edison wax cylinder recording equipment. And he was right! Read the rest
SpeechBoard is a new "coming soon" Web tool to edit your podcast audio by cutting up the text transcripts. Craig Cannon and Ramon Recuero posted a demo and briefly explain the project in this Medium post:
SpeechBoard... will transcribe your podcasts and allow you to cut anything from the audio by deleting the text from the transcript....
You can import your cuts into Adobe Audition or Audacity to fine-tune the edit.
Try the demo here. (via Waxy) Read the rest
This lapel clip-on microphone is regularly $(removed), but for a limited time you can buy it on Amazon for $(removed) if you use the code 5PLJVX5D. I just bought one. I'll let you know how it works.
The reason I got it is that I sometimes make videos using my phone (using this great smartphone tripod mount) and the phone's built-in mic doesn't do a great job when I'm more than a few feet from the phone. I have a bunch of old iPhones, and I will use one of them with this mic plugged in it to record the audio. Read the rest
