Cyrille Martraire

We did it again! On May 15 we had our third jam session at home on a Sunday afternoon. What? As usual, total improvisation: switch the machines on, start the recording, then everyone plays whatever he/she likes! Nothing was prepared in any way, except the sounds loaded in the MPC. We had no lyrics prepared, [...]

On a Sunday afternoon, fifteen friends, all non musicians but two amateur musicians, joined the machines set in turn, around 8 at a time, to improvise electro or hip-hop rhythmic grooves. Of course there were food and drinks as well. The goal was to introduce music making in an attractive way: no pressure, no constraint, [...]

Last week-end I have bought five noise-making plastic toys at a yard sale in Paris; I then ordered knobs and switches from ebay and from a local electronic store. What for? For the purpose of circuit bending of course! First failure Out of the four toys, one was already non working when trying with new [...]

Instead of creating music note by note (micro level), we can now create music phrase by phrase (macro level). This is mostly because technology has changed the way we do art in the last century, leading to increasingly obvious appropriation of past work, as collage has done with painting. Below is an overview of this [...]

Here is a collection of tips and tricks to produce current popular genres (Hip-Hop, House and Electro in particular) found freely on the Internet, and presented into the pattern form. The pattern form This means each trick or set of related tricks is given an expressive name along with a short description of its intent. [...]

In this last part, we put ideas into practice to build an instrument dedicated to play solo for electronic music genres. We will use light sensors, buttons and an Arduino board to control MIDI synthesizers in a way that is attractive to both musicians and non musicians.