OhmNohmNohm’s finally starting to turn its wheels a bit more, and we plan on gaining lots of traction as the year goes on. We have lots of ongoing projects, people on deck for interviewing (some of which are far from the chipscene yet very relevant), as well as many article series planned!
Custom Kits in the Works
This introductory post will serve as a sampler for a short time being, another article will be out on Friday featuring the infamous half clock kit available in our store, designed by our own Scott Griffitts. This is the first of many kits we’ll be offering in the near future, others include a biversion kit and MIDIBOY kit modeled after the original MIDIBOY designed by NeX. The solution Scott is designing is meant to be installed internally in a DMG, allowing for all sorts of possibilities we will cover in future blogposts.
Speaking of Possibilities…
We at ONN plan on doing a lot of extra-chipmusic coverage as we are aimed at lofi music, art, and hardware as a whole. Coverage will range from upcoming synths we think are really cool, as well as other kinds of hardware great for making music. Artists such as SKGB have outstanding knowledge of MIDI from both a music and hardware standpoint, and we hope to have interviews and guest articles with similarly talented folks so we can help share the knowledge. There is also a good bit of interest in publishing a series of articles on different things such as pixel art, glitch art, painting electronics (courtesy of Michael Television), more on that in a bit.
Things You Can Look Forward To Seeing This Month
I have tons of ideas I can’t share, but I do have enough to help fill out the month of January.
We’ll have a feature on installing Scott’s new Half-Clock kits, to be followed by my guide for using LSDJ with live band. After that, I have a few other things in store:
- Weekly Beats Challenge for 2014. “Weekly Beats” is a site where users register and upload one new track per week for a whole year. It is up to the composer to determine what track to produce or upload, and 52 weeks of songwriting can be a bit daunting. My “Weekly Beats Challenge for 2014” is based on Deverahi’s “Complete Guide to Synthesizers”, a book which taught me many things about the fundamentals of synthesis. Each week I’ll post an article (probably on Mondays) covering part of the book’s instruction along with listening samples. I’ll be including all the material from my articles in my Weekly Beats submissions or in exterior tracks I produce outside of Weekly Beats.The goal of this series will be to demonstrate new techniques and sounds that can be applied to various trackers, software, and hardware. Focus here will be more sound design oriented, less music theory oriented.
- MIDI and Its Uses, an exciting series showing the use of LSDJ as a sort of brains for computer programs, producing music on the go, and being used as a “carrier” in various synth setups. Other topics of interest will be MIDI controlling lights, options for on-the-go music and MIDI sequencing, interfacing with synths and MIDI controllers via computer, and designing MIDI controllers for computers.
- Interdisciplinary Practices in Chipmusic, a series covering things such as understanding how LSDJ save files are constructed, photography with the Gameboy Camera, music theory, the fundamentals of hardware design (focused on things like backlights, halfclock kits, and arduinoboys), keyboard and fingerdrumming basics, and the basics of creating a live 2xLSDJ set or a setup with LSDJ and mulitple synchronized devices. Examples will borrow from the “Weekly Beats Challenge” series, the “MIDI and Its Uses” series, as well as various interviews and features here at ONN. The goal is not to force readers to be jack-of-all-trades and harbor knowledge that may not be valuable to them, but to show practical exercises and hobbies that can compliment their chipmusic production. Just like how tennis players do crossfit involving sprinting or swimming to strengthen their arms and legs, it’s handy for composers and musicians to explore other angles of their trade to get a firmer grasp of it.
As you can clearly see, we are gushing with ideas and cannot wait to flesh them out. The order I’ve written the bullet points in is my projected order of creating the series and writing for them. I hope you’re as excited as I am, because what I’ve told you is only a fraction of what OhmNohmNohm has to offer.
Thanks for reading!