Thetownend.com

Microsoft have come up with a new song writing thin where you sing into it through your microphone and from that it works out the  chords and chucks in some rather silly sounding backing music.

Here's a rather twee advert for it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E

It's all a bit old skool school casio keyboard 1 key chord music fun times.

Being that the internet is a great source of genius funny types, people have come up with the brilliant idea lifting the vocal tracks of classic tunes and putting them through songsmith to see what it comes up with.

Here's my favourite so far. Techno Wonderwall.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=e1e_h1OJfS4

There's loads of other awesomeness ones on the youtube.

I hope this hasn't been posted already, I hadn't noticed.

Here's the rather brilliant rendition of roxanne
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ypycpKQxXR0&feature=related

And Creep
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JM1GUk1SBmY

the microsoft ad makes me want to vomit

it's sickening isn't it.

They sound shit. Sounds to me like the software doesn't allow for offbeat chord changes. You can hear it the worst on the "you don't have to wear that dress tonight" line of Roxanne.

If they fix that it'll be quite a cool program.

I think that's the point. It's shit. That's why I found it funny anyway.

Reminds me of silly old midi versions of tunes you used to get before mp3's came along. Infact that's pretty much what it is.

Oh well.

I've got a new plugin called Digital Ear. It's supposed to hear music and convert it to midi/score. Haven't used it yet, but used to have one and when you gave it a few bars of music it pumped out something that was completely indistinguishable from the original. The only thing that was the same was the timing. It was cool for starting original compositions, of sorts, if  you have as much musical ability as mud. Like me.

That's crap. but it's so crap it's pretty good!!  The software, not the advert, which is awful!