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Kicking Off the New Year

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

Half Clock Kit by Scott Griffitts
Half Clock Kit by Scott Griffitts

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!

Max Dolensky

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Hear the drama get Wiki’d

In an effort to start filling in our Wiki here, I’ve began pasting in details I can scrounge from the internet. The chip and micro music scene is made up of a lot of old mardy men who act like wounded soldiers. We’re just trying to make a factual wiki to make up for the loss of a unified source for these things. If you feel you aren’t getting the credit you deserve, contact us and we will rec-rec-recognise. Also, it allows us to check on the available information and improve it with the help of the original authors. If you’re reading this and you want to help, there are quite a lot of areas we need covering. For the time being, let me list a few areas we need assistance in:

  • Gameboy Carts, types, software (both homebrew and commercially made, released to public)
  • Gameboy Advance series Prosounding
  • GB Pitchbending
  • Screenlighting methods
  • Case and button lighting methods

 

 

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Kano: An educational way to start with Pi

kano-computer

A Kickstarter opened on the 19th of November encourages people to start creating games, play with coding, make a server or just generally goof around with it with Kano. This is entry level stuff, but in terms of putting a Pi in the palms of the public, this is something that there should be more of. Pre-bundled kits for the school, colleges and it’s a toy for seasoned hackers. You can buy into the Kano Keyboard at around 60 dollars and get a full git for just over 100 dollars. It’ll tear your heart out not to grab a hold of one. (We’re told it’s actually named after its creator, Kano Jigoro, a lifelong schoolteacher)

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ProduinoBoy Is Here!

produinoboy

Our team would like to introduce to you, the Produinoboy. What is it you ask? It is a pre-built Arduinoboy, the size of an Arduino ProMini (roughly .7″x1.3″).

The Produinoboy comes with everything you need:

  • Produinoboy module.
  • pushbutton
  • 6 LED’s
  • jacks
  • wire

 

The kit can be purchased HERE for $25 USD.

information on the Arduinoboy project can be found here.

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We’re open! (sort of)

Hi Guys,

This is an initial test post to show how the theme looks. It’s a bit bland and colourless at the moment, but we can fix that with some art, logos etc.

I wanted to make a very slick, professional and modern theme.

I’d like to get rid of the blurb, so it looks less ….bloggy, but this isn’t bad for an hours work.

😀