ozzmosis.com

Ozzy Osbourne made a new song available online earlier this week as a teaser to his new album 'Soul Sucka' scheduled to be released later in the year. The song is called 'Let Me Hear You Scream'. Guitarist Gus G replaces Zakk Wylde, with Wylde leaving Ozzy's band after having been with Ozzy for more than 20 years.

Unfortunately the song itself is a bit disappointing and follows much the same pattern as on the Down To Earth and Black Rain albums. Musically I feel it's lacking in creativity and leaning too much away from the style of Black Sabbath-esque British metal. The guitar solo is interesting not for the fact that Gus G is doing anything unusual - in fact quite the opposite - if you're familiar with Zakk Wylde's more recent recordings with Ozzy you'd be forgiven for mistaking the solo for something Zakk might play!

For a song called 'Let Me Hear You Scream' you'd expect a lot of anger, but that's about the only raw emotion you'll get from this song. This isn't helped by the fact the song is mastered to be as loud as possible, effectively removing any meaningful dynamic range from the recording, making it very fatiguing to listen to.



Technical notes: The track was ripped from Noisecreep using the Firefox DownloadHelper plugin, with the MP3 extracted using FLV Extract (running under the Linux build of Mono), then loaded into Audacity running under Ubuntu Linux.

category: /music

In 1990 I was given a Korg DDM-110 drum machine as a birthday present. At the time it was probably one of the cheapest programmable drum machines you could buy that had its own digitised drum samples. It quickly became handy when recording my own music (on to a 1970's Teac four track reel-to-reel) as it was very simple to program.



(click on the thumbnails for a larger version)

Specifications

The DDM-110 can hold up to 32 drum patterns (16 patterns with 32 steps and 16 patterns with 16 steps), and 6 songs holding up to 385 bars for the first song or 200 bars for the other 5. The samples themselves are mono and sound like they were recorded at 22 KHz. Unfortunately they don't sound terribly much like a real drum kit but that didn't bother me too much at the time. The DDM-110 could run off 6 AA 1.5V DC batteries (which mostly served as a memory backup) or a 9V DC AC adapter (the one I have was made by Korg). According to the manual there was apparently some way of backing-up the songs and patterns to cassette, but I could never get that to work reliably.

Downloads

Below is a Sound Blaster Live-compatible SoundFont of the Korg DDM-110 available for download. You'll need sfArk to decompress it.

korg-ddm-110.sfArk (117 KB)

Owner's Manual

You can download the Korg DDM-110 Owner's Manual (55 pages) using the links below:

korg-ddm-110-manual.pdf (4.5 MB, PDF format, use Adobe Acrobat Reader)

korg-ddm-110-manual.zip (4.4 MB, GIF format, zipped)

category: /music/korg-ddm-110