Big Fish Audio Vintage Big Band

[Ma Layssard]

FunkSoul Productions and Big Fish Audio are proud to present Vintage Big Band, a massive collection of sampled instruments designed for writers, arrangers, and producers of Big Band and small combo Jazz.

Vintage Big Band features over 75 instruments designed and performed to emulate the playing styles of Jazz musicians from the 1930s to the 1970s. This library captures the sound of Jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Rich, Stan Kenton, and Mel Lewis.

This library features a huge selection of brass and woodwinds, a complete set of rhythm section instruments, as well as Multis for small and large ensembles. For quickly creating arrangements, we have included performance loop patches, as well as expression maps for leading scoring software including Finale and Sibelius.

KOMPLETE KONTROL & MASCHINE INTEGRATION

Vintage Big Band has been designed for seamless integration with Komplete Kontrol and Maschine, offering you a unique hands-on experience. Easily manipulate the interface using the controls of all NKS compatible hardware.

Big Fish Audio products require you to register with the manufacturer at www.bigfishaudio.com to activate your license. To use Kontakt Player Libraries you also need to register with www.native-instruments.com.

Update 12/18: Because the world is weird, Amazon now actually sells an Alexa-compatible Big Mouth Billy Bass. The bad news is that it's very limited and the reviews are terrible. The good news is that it's one of the most hackable versions of the fish yet with lots of swappable JST connections inside and optimized for 5v USB power. You can see my teardown of this new fish, if you're curious. The bottom line is that the following guide should still work for this new breed if you want to get it working with any audio source.

Update 06/19: By popular demand, I've written a follow-up guide to this one that addresses many of the shortcoming of this tutorial (expense, tail/head movement, wires, lack of onboard sound). That bad news is, the guide is on another site. Here's the video for it, though, to give you a sense of what's involved.

After seeing a number of Raspberry Pi projects that made use of Alexa, I initially assumed that Brian had created an Alexa-powered Pi project that doubled as a means to animate the existing Billy Bass hardware -- and that may be the case. I even posed this idea on my weekly YouTube show, Maker Update.

With those ordered, I moved on to research. Two Instructables provided me with hope: this 2012 guide from sfool on using an Arduino to make a servo move to sound and this 2013 guide from Dotten on understanding the animatronics of a Billy Bass toy.

Understanding that the Billy Bass (much like a Furby) is essentially driven by two cheap 5v DC toy motors -- the problem then becomes simply how to make these motors twitch in response to sound. With a little trial and error, I found a workable solution. The code is far from perfect and there are a lot of other features I want to build in, but I wanted to get this up so that everyone can help make this better.

For better or worse, by used fish was dead on arrival. At least I had no hesitation about opening it up and hacking it. For my hack, simply undo the screws on the back, open it up, and apply gentle pressure to unseat the cable harnesses so that the back can be removed completely.

What you have left is one 4-wire harness sticking up from the fish. This includes two wires that animate the mouth (you can see them trail into the fish) and two wires that raise either the head or the tail depending which way direction you run the motor.

Let's start with the soldering to get it over with. To create an audio input for your fish, take two equal lengths of different color wire, strip the ends, and solder one to ground, and one to Analog 0. Clip away any excess wire running through the board.

Next, to connect up the fish motor(s) to the shield, run the pair of wires leading to the fish mouth motor (black and orange) into the terminal blocks for motor 1 and screw them down. Optionally, you can run the tail/head motor wires (white and red) to the terminals for motor 2, though the code does not yet do anything with this motor (more on this in the next section). For my fish, the wire coloring on the terminal blocks goes black, orange (yellow in my case) for the mouth motor (M1) and white, red from for the optional tail motor (M2).

Also, be sure to download the Adafruit MotorShield V2 Library, as this code will reference it and it's needed to drive the motor shield. You can find the library here (or install it directly through the Arduino Library Manager): -motor-shield-v2-for-arduino/install-software

To get Alexa (or whatever you want) talking through your fish, connect the free end of the audio cable to the Y-adapter, the rechargeable speaker to the other input of the adapter, and then run the male plug of the adapter into the audio output of the Echo Dot.

The Woodshedders, of Harpers Ferry and Shepherdstown, WV, bring the influence of vintage American music forward in their songwriting. The band is known for fun, danceable shows that swerve between genres to create exciting original sounds. They are a growing musical powerhouse, performing throughout the greater DC region and beyond.

Ona, an Indie-Rock band from Huntington, WV, creates music that pulses and buzzes and echoes and rolls. It feels like standing with sweat in your eyes in grass up to your knees. It feels like getting your tennis shoes wet walking along the banks of the river. Yet, there is an unmistakable buzz surrounding their sound that only the hills of West Virginia could produce.

Since 1973, Terry Leonino and Greg Artzner of Magpie have brought their unique sound and remarkable versatility to audiences everywhere, featuring traditional and vintage Americana to contemporary and stirring original compositions, including many about the unique history of Harpers Ferry.

In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky is a little town called, Paintsville, where the economy is dependent on the dying coal industry and a tradition of music thrives with the US 23 Country Music Highway Museum and Butcher Hollow. Carrying on the music tradition is native son and current Lexington, Kentucky resident, and powerful songwriter, Tyler Childers.

Birthed from the streets of Shepherdstown, WV, A Faster Buffalo brings a mash up of Americana-like sounds that is tough to put a label on. This crew of Appalachian natives will get you dancing and also touch your soul. Get ready for the feels.

Miss Laura Mae Socks brings her well-traveled voice to the stage at this inaugural Confluence Festival. A native of the Hagerstown and Shepherdstown areas, she has played and lived as far as Louisiana, where she worked a rice farm, and Nashville, where she currently calls home. Miss Socks has developed a deep, powerful sound that is ripe with some seriously soulful honky-tonk roots.

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