For all of us ‘without pipes’ we now have the answer … the Beauty Voice Trainer. This is going to be so so easy. Just think, all those years of voice training are now wasted because we’ve got this simple tool (dummy) that’s put an end to pesky ‘session singers’ sounding too wonderful for their own good! We just need to stick the dummy in our mouths and dulcet tones, beautiful strong timbres, spot on tuning, awesome melody lines and harmonies instantly sprout forth! Can’t wait. [Source]

The Beauty Voice Trainer helps give you the dulcet voice you know you've always wanted, in just five minutes a day. The system works in three ways: without training, the human throat is restricted. The specially designed mouthpiece positions the tongue to open the voice passage, allowing a much stronger sound.

Secondly, it helps with abdominal breathing, a necessity for proper singing. Finally, the included tuning fork guides you to the notes you want, and trains you to hear the proper intervals between pitches. In just five minutes a day, the Beauty Voice Trainer will teach you to maximize your vocal potential while singing.

Beauty Voice Trainer Specifications

I should have known when she started playing ‘Stairway To Heaven’, but I was half asleep!

This Phantasmagoric Lucite Organ and Speakers by Wersi at Modern One puts my studio to shame. There were only two ever made and they were for display!

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If my grandfather gave me this, I’d be very pleased with myself.

When macrame and crocheted plant holders were fashionable, this guy got a gig in a print ad. Could make ‘muff diving’ joke, but that would be obvious. In today’s world of advertising and obsession with metrosexual good grooming what kind of casting would this guy be up for? Long live Frank Zappa, Borat and all guys who sport the ‘handle-bar’! I wonder if these “Hear Muffs’ actually worked?

Here’s a spooky little tune i wrote last year…just to test the Soundcloud player.

When I first started using computers & samplers to create music I always felt very frustrated by how I was treated by salesmen when they either treated me like I was incapable of using the technology I was about to buy, ignore me, or speak to my partner (also ignoring me). It speaks volumes about attitudes towards women being tech-savvy in Australia with the underlying assumption that women are uninformed and ignorant of technology. What a shame!

Wired magazine has reported on a recent study by the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, of 750 of British women age 24 to 45 has found that only 9% of women want “more feminine” looking products and that the remaining 91% wants more “boardroom” and less “teenage bedroom”. This study has found that British women own only 11% less tech items than men and that “lady geeks”, 37% of the study, own an average of six devices, including a digital camera, desktop or laptop, multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player, digital TV and a hand held game console. It would be very interesting to see a similar study in Australia, as more than half the women in the British study reported that they left tech stores without buying anything as they couldn’t find what they wanted. My question here is how many Australian men know how to program the DVD recorder, program the microwave or understand instruction manuals? Dr. Genevieve Bell, a resident anthropologist at Intel said,”What’s fascinating to me about this research is the index of just how much technology women own, yet we still have these ideas about women and technology that are clearly out of step with the realities of the marketplace.” Bell, who is part of Intel’s digital home team, collected data that demonstrates that women are the “original early adopters” thanks to domestic tech, and it also showed that women adopt technologies, such as Wi-Fi, faster than men. Girly Geek Blog author Sarah Blow, says, “If you wanted to design technology that would appeal to women, it needs to work flawlessly the first time out of the box and every time thereafter. They don’t have time to faff around.” This could be said for both women and men, as the attitude in Australia is a definite “user error” when you’re approaching a store with a faulty product AFTER you’ve bought it! Women are definitely competent and willing to embrace technology without being encumbered by stereotypes, not always wanting the Hello Kitty keyboards …. as long as we don’t have to deal with returning something that doesn’t work! Tech-savvy chicks are the “new feminists”!

A large part of future posts here will most likely be focussed on Propellerhead’s wonderful Reason (in particular I plan to offer ReCycle tutorials and files) but i was trawling through my hard drive yesterday and found these custom patches i made for Linplug’s cool little virtual instrument, Alpha. What’s nice is that they also make a freeware version which is available here in pretty much every useful Macintosh format and as a Windows PC VST.

Sometimes when you experiment with a synthesizer you’ll get hooked on something cute or unique about its character. In this case i noticed a little sonic similarity to Roland’s SH-101 (we have one here) so I spent an hour or so exploring Alpha. There’s some fun noises here, the names of the patches hint at what possible uses I had in mind. Browsing through them again, I think I’ll find some more use for them myself! The zip contains a VST .fxb bank file (most useful to Cubase users) as well a folder of individual patches which all versions of the plugin should support.

Download here.

Installation : place the groove-quantize.com folder into the Alpha folder created by the Alpha installer

PS : Make sure you use your keyboard’s modulation wheel for maximum effect