One of the things that everyone seemed to forget when discussing Peter Bjorn And John’s breakout album Writer’s Block was it’s conciseness. When you boiled down the glockenspiels and whistling that made “Young Folks” such a monstrous, ubiquitous hit, the songs on that record were lean, simple and melodically memorable. The song structures were just [...]

— Updated Below —
Welcome to a new series for hellocomein: Book Club. The first book that we’ll be tackling is Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the new treatise on Global Warming and Globalization from Thomas Friedman.
I’m only a couple of chapters into this thing, so I don’t have much to say yet, except to expand on [...]

Per Mike’s request, here’s some background info on Arduino. Here’s the best intro I’ve seen courtesy of DIY rockstar Bre Pettis. Seriously, this thing is super easy to get started with, even with zero programming or electronics background. Once you run through a few tutorials, it’s pretty easy to get to work on your own [...]

Post one on my latest Arduino project. The goal: get a dot matrix printer and turn it into a step sequenced drum machine using Arduino as the brains….
Last week I acquired the dot matrix printer for free off of a Craigslist posting from Brisbane’s city hall, which is close to my office. This thing weighs [...]

Testing my not-as-cool-as-iPhone iPod touch. Yay future!

Here’s a simple use of the touchOSC app and Pure Date to turn the iPhone/iPod Touch into a Theramin of sorts. Feel free to download the Pure Data patch and try it yourself! Some basic instructions to get it up and running:
-You need to download and install Pure Data (free) and touchOSC (a few bucks) [...]

Wow- it’s been a long while since my last post, but I’m back to present the first post in a new series: hello.build. This is where we’ll track our progress on some hardware projects we have in the pipeline. More on that soon…
I recently picked up an Arduino, which is an open source microcontroller platform [...]

One year (and change) after setting out to complete 12 mini albums in 12 months we’ve come to the end. It’s been an interesting challenge to keep up with, and we think we did pretty well despite not completing a single one by the end of its respective month. It was an exercise to see [...]

Here’s an updated version of this song with some trackings I did this evening. I think it’s an improvement, particularly in the vocal department. I might try toning down the distortedness a bit, but I like them double tracked. Also some empty space left still for a guitar/glock/whistle solo. Anyone? Anyone? Aryn- how would this [...]

Here’s a new song I’ve been working on. I was messing around the other night with some really low, raspy tunings. Listen first to the original scratch track (on nylon) and then the updated one (on steel) with some lyrics. I did fill in the progression a bit from the original, which I do like. [...]