Dutch techno legend Jochem Paap - aka Speedy J - has launched an interesting concept: harvesting sound bits and parts of tracks from producers in the Soundcloud community to use for his upcoming album. An interesting way of using your unfinished tracks as a starting point for new material, anyone who is a member of Soundcloud can send in their material. Soundcloud is open for free registration to all which means basically anyone can compete. The Open Collabs website states that it accepts “[…] synth jams or loops you ended up ditching because they didn’t work, or parts of tracks that you got stuck with […]”. The sample material is all in the techno / ambient / electronic style with the main focus on 4/4 techno. The website states that all material sent in will be treated as raw material, so it might end up different than you intended.

If this sounds interesting to you: signing up is free and easy: just follow both links in this post and follow the instructions within each site. I know that I will definitely send in some material and see if it is accepted and turned into something new or exciting. Should your material be used in the final production it is good to know that you will receive a share of the profits that the Open Collabs album generates.

A well known issue for anyone that got DJ mix tapes from a friend of a friend back when audio cassettes were a popular medium: what the **** is the name of that banging track? With the rise of the interwebs there’s a few places that assist anyone who knows how to make a sound clip in finding the track again in digital form or in vinyl / CD. Discogs has its famous Track ID Forum, and TuneID have an entire website up just for the purpose of finding out what the title of a tune is. Both are great places to go when desperate for finding music or to reminisce over the good old days of techno/house - or whatever your poison is - listening to all the sound clips. Sometimes you can even find music without asking because someone else posted their favourite tune that also happens to be one of your beloved oldskool “choons”. Today’s find in the category How on Earth Could You Not Know This One: Code 6 aka Joey Beltram - Quad I. Click the play icon to listen.

Quad I

Today I was sent a link by Lars to an awesome sound comparison test page. The test and comparison is of the original acid machine, the Roland TB-303, and a few of its numerous clones around. The Acidvoice website has sounds clips for no less than nine 303-clones of various riffs and waveforms to study for your pleasure. The in-depth analysis button next to each machine reveals all the extended clips.

This great site has much more info and sounds, including the obligatory but very cool owner’s kit list.

Also recommended is the acid distortion pedal test at the bottom of the page :)

Link: http://www.acidvoice.com/

The Hobnox website is offering a web application written in Flash by the somewhat uninspiring name Audiotool. The app itself is nowhere near uninspiring: consisting of two TB-303 clones and a TR-909 clone it is many tech head’s favourite old-school setup. To make it even better: the web interface makes it easy enough for anyone slightly familiar with these classic machines to create an acid / techno track within a few minutes. Just connect the machines to the mixer by dragging their outputs to it to get going. As an added bonus there are also a couple of effect pedals that can be inserted between the synths and drum machine and the mixer.

Link: Hobnox Audiotool