The Fab Faux perform the second side of Abbey Road. This live, in-studio staging is a spot-on quality performance of an ambitious project.

Brad Smith is a video game programmer in Ontario. What does he do when he’s not coding modern gaming wonders? He codes for vintage game hardware. Below is an excerpt from his epic note-for-note, 8-bit recreation of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, as one would hear it through a Nintendo Entertainment System circa 1983. Download the whole “album” from Brad’s web site.

The digital release was inevitable. The only remaining question was distribution; Apple, Amazon, EMI web site, or some new online upstart. Who would have guessed that the initial digital release of the Beatles catalog would arrive on physical media; a bulbous green USB memory stick that is as ugly as it is useless.

So the music gets put in silicon, the silicon into metal, the metal into plastic, plastic into boxes, boxes into trucks. The trucks are driven to giant brick and mortar buildings, then more trucks take them to smaller brick buildings. So thanks a bunch EMI. We would have loved to welcome you to the 21st century by cleanly zapping Beatle bits from there to here, but instead you hand us music with a carbon footprint as large as the device we use to listen.

Can this even be considered a true digital release? Technically yes, but it’s delivered in a physical enclosure, just like a CD and we already have those.

I have always been perplexed at the hubbub surrounding the eventual digital release of the Beatles catalog. Most fans have the material on CD and many have vinyl (I have both) and have already ripped them to various iDevices. Digital distribution would only bring a new level of purchasing convenience to those filling out their catalog or newly discovering the band … or so we thought.

Anyway, look for this sickly shiny green apple at a grocer near you on December 7, 2009 (Dec 8 in the states.) You know, this probably would have played out very differently, and year ago, had Steve Jobs just come up with a different name for his computer company.

Music making has involved button pressing since the 3rd century BC. Whether forcing air through tubes, banging hammers on strings or pushing voltage through USB cables, button manipulation is a classic interface between human and sound.

Push button music has evolved and exploded over the past few years. It’s history can be traced back to a number of arguable origins and originators. One of them is Brian Crabtree, who built his first prototype button matrix device in 2002. Inspired by Max, a visual programming language popular among musicians and multimedia artists, he built a “barely functional … constructed from parts found in an electronics salvage depot bin”  device that would eventually become the Monome.

Brian believed that adding visual feedback to a musical instrument would facilitate intuitive interaction. His device first grabbed the attention of musicians and performance artists when a small video clip of his performance virally circulated among music blogs around 2004

In 2006 his fledgling company released a 64 button matrix controller, the 40h. Although only 400 of these “adaptable, minimalist interfaces” were produced, these buttony boxes sent sound waves and shock waves through the music hardware industry. And as popularity grew, so did the number of buttons on the Monome.

Musicians, DJs and technogeeks embraced the concept. Square rubbery buttons would no longer be confined to rows on drum machines. They were now showing up on new instruments and in new forms. Molded silicon replaced the traditional black rubber. Velocity sensitivity was also jettisoned to make way for much more interesting electronics; lights.

The translucent silicon allowed for LED back-lighting. This added a dramatic visual aspect to this new genre of instruments, comically referred to as “blinken lights.” But the lighting was not just for show. A well programmed lighting system turns a matrix of 256 identical buttons into usable, even friendly, device. It also breaks the spacial limits of the device allowing for an unlimited number of virtual buttons and displays.

In the next installment of Welcome to the Button Matrix, we will look at more push button oddities, the Tenori-on, the new Eigenharp, the AKAI APC40, and the soon-to-be-released (and already pre-ordered) Novation Launchpad.

Richard Evans gives us a rare look behind the scenes at a Peter Gabriel tour preparation. The group spent four weeks preparing for the 8 show tour of Mexico and South America. Two weeks of music rehearsal will took place in the “grey and grotty” Millside rehearsal rooms at Real World, followed by two weeks of production rehearsal.

Richard plays a kit consisting of a MIDI MalletKat, a MIDI Parker Fly Guitar, Ableton Live and “various other bits and pieces.” He explains how he recently reworked his rig down from a ProTools HD system with two “huge, great desktop computers,” to a MOTU 896 and a single laptop running Ableton Live.

Richard also takes us on a walking tour through the technology labyrinth that is Gabriel’s Real World Studios, including the impressive, non-grotty Big Room. Many thanks to guys at SonicState for documenting this.

For a more detailed look at Peter Gabriel’s secret world of music production, watch the three-part guided video tour at SonicState.com.

Below is a cool interactive music toy created to promote one of the poorest timed record announcement in recent memory.

Michael Jackson: The Stripped Mixes is an interesting collection of remixed early tunes. It’s worth a listen if you are into Michael or early Motown. Unfortunately, Universal chose to do the press announcement less than an hour after the Jackson memorial service at the Staples Center. Perhaps some Universal executive thought this would be somehow be greeted as a tribute, but fans read it as a morbid cash-in. Once again the music industry shoots itself in the foot.

Cooler than the album itself is the little remix machine below. Click on the “Play With It” button, then the “Mix It” button. This takes you to a sweet interface where you can isolate the various tracks. Check out Michael vocals with only a bass backing on “I Want You Back”. Or the percussion and piano on “ABC”. The combinations aren’t endless, but the nostalgic fun is.

It’s great to see pieces like this becoming available to the public. Sure it’s a way to sell the public music they’ve already bought. But as both Stephen Sondheim and Peter Gabriel have said “All they really like is what they know.” And I know I like this.

In the same vein, there is an iPhone app that was recently released allowing fans to remix David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Kudos to Virgin/EMI for better timing on this one. It was released to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters and I are close. Or at least we were last year at the Pavilion in The Woodlands Texas. My second row seat was only a few feet away. There were cameras aplenty in the pit, and mine was one of them. So below are the snaps from the May 5, 2008 performance.

The sold out performance was one of the best classic rock concerts to roll through Texas in a while. And it doesn’t get much more classic than the shows second half which featured Waters and band doing Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. The smoke, lights and lasers were all accounted for, but the giant video screen backdrop presented a stunning array of visuals that perfectly complemented the performance.

Here is a review of the show from the Houston Press.

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In this first in a series of surreptitious snapshot stories, No Cameras Allowed is pleased to present these photos of one of my favorite live acts, Alice Cooper.

Sorry, on this one all I had with me was my iPhone. The cameras in these first and second generation iPhones are lacking to put it mildly. But I did manage to grab a few sole-stealing snaps of The Coop before and after they hung him for his sins.

Below are photos from the October 2007 performance at the Verizon Wireless (maybe that’s why my ATT phone did poorly) Theater  in Houston Texas. The first photos is of the opening act, Lillian Axe. The second blurry photo is Alice’s set list. It was being passed around the audience before the show. The remaining shots are all pure Alice. Enjoy.

The Houston Chronicle ran this interview with Cooper the day of the show.

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Check out the work of experimental musician Atsuhiro Ito and his invention, the Optron. His handmade instrument is a customized florescent light fixture that uses microphones near the transformer to pick up the “tone”. Since most modern fixtures now use noise-free electronic ballasts in place of transformers, you can also think of this instrument as “vintage”.

Ito manages to get an impressive variety of sounds and rhythms by interacting with his axe through grounding and power cycling, as well as processing through a number of guitar pedals. Ito and a group of improvisational musicians regularly perform their unique “Japanoise” in Japan and the US.

From Ito’s site:

Atsuhiro Ito was born in 1965. He launched his career as a visual artist in the late ’80s, and in ’98 began presenting sound performances at art exhibitions and so on. Ito made use of fluorescent lighting (which is also an element of his art installations) in the creation of an original musical device called the optron. He continues to refine the instrument while approaching sound and music from a contemporary-art-based perspective.