Market Power gives a firm the ability to employ anti-competitive tactics like predatory pricing without losing customers to competitors. During testimony on H.R. 2382, the Representative of The Merchants Payment Coalition stated that “there is no competitive market for interchange fees – just naked price fixing”. On the other side, the Representative from The Electronic Payments Coalition called interchange an “important element(s) of the successful, competitive banking experience” adding that “interchange reflects a merchant’s fair share of the costs” (sic.) of the system.

Last weeks GAO report found that Merchants’ are in fact paying more to accept credit cards, but also added that “network competition in the credit card market may be contributing to rising interchange rates”.

Two-sided markets exhibit “Network Effects” when two groups of users are attracted to each other, in this case retailers who accept payment and consumers who make payment.  “Cross- Side Network Effects” occur when enough users are attracted to one side that the other side will pay dearly to reach them.  In this case, retailers are the “money side” and they pay to accept cards as a form of payment, while consumers are the “subsidy side” who receive incentives to use the cards as a form of payment. Linking these two groups together is the primary value of the payment platform creating powerful Cross-Side Effects.

Retailers’ accept cards as payment because so many consumers use cards for payment. Competition between card issuing banks to capture consumers, and networks to capture banks is intense as evidenced by the multiple offers for high earning rewards credit and debit products and their users. Retailers ultimately see the cost of this competition reflected in rising interchange fees, particularly the higher rate fees for reward based programs. The question is; does this competition between networks and financial institutions for the consumers’ payment business justify the increasing rates paid by retailers to accept these forms of payment or does it constitute a monopolistic example of a market failure?

http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterguidi

DAMN HE WENT IN

I was blessed enough to catch bay area beat bully egadz about a month back, as he hit up Seattle via the always solid STOP BITING night @ Lo-Fi Lounge. Dude mashed through his set on the mpd with surgical dexterity despite being admittedly sloshed, this video gives you at taste of what homie can do.

His latest and last album is called egadz is dead, and at aforementioned show he said it would be the last night he was performing under said moniker, citing a desire to move on to a new project. So treat your ears,  sample and support egadz music here or here.

New joint from Dipset survivor 40 Cal Warm It Up produced by araabMuzik.

Warm It Up – 40 Cal 

Below new Dipset producer araabMuzik demolishes his MPC

Speaking of just dope, I saw this on Nah Right the other day:

Araabmuzik is best known for producing beats for Dipset.  I’m not a big Dipset fan, but this dude is deadly on the MPC, and this clip is well worth checking out.

No doubt, his beats are filthy in their own right.  But in my opinion, homie should expand his professional repertoire and get out of the crappy commercial rap game.  He’s definitely got the talent.  Shiiiitt… I’d go see him do his live MPC thing if it’s gonna be this good.

Hommie is ill

chico, ace, rois

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before in one of my other posts about the guy, but RJD2 inspired me to start producing.  His work on Deadringer convinced me that an MPC was the ultimate sequencing tool (and it’s still obvious to me).  But it’s been a long time since his debut album dropped on Def Jux (seven and a half years, to be exact), and his sound has progressed since then to the dismay of many fans and critics.  No longer meticulously chopping his samples on the MPC, he’s apparently taken to programming and building his own synths— fuckin gangster.  Those cheeky Brits over at Electric Independence managed to sit down with RJ in his crib and wade through his basement studio.

…which explains the name behind the label he just started, RJ’s Electrical Connections.  The first release from the label is a collection of his entire discography (at least, since Deadringer), along with the limited edition Tin Foil Hat EP which sees RJ getting back to his samplified roots.  It’s certainly not his greatest work, but there’re a couple nice ones for the RJD2 fans.  Enjoy.

Chopping up a breakbeat in the Fruity Slicer or Slicex or Recycle etc. and rearranging it is a lot of fun. You can make the break your own, instead of just looping it. Even better, making one-shot drum samples from breaks and making huge velocity mapped multisample drumkits will let you mix and match between breaks and get relatively more realistic results. I was going to make a video about this, but I can’t be arsed, so I’m just going to put up a crapload of pictures. WordPress is pretty annoying, because it likes to format pictures on the page randomly and never does what you want it to do.

The first step is to find a breakbeat, or any recording of just drums. Load it into an instance of Edison, probably on the master mixer channel, and open another Edison directly below it. The first Edison is going to be used to find each individual drum sound, and then the second is where they’ll be edited, fine tuned and saved. It’s useful to methodically chop out all the kick drums first, and then the snares, or however you want to do it, sometimes it can be hard to remember if you’ve already sampled that tiny snare or not. Before you do anything, right click in the Edison windows and go view- display settings and un-check fancy mode, unless you really like it; fancy mode is less accurate and just looks fancier. Also, right click again and go edit – and at the very bottom, make sure Click-free (smooth) editing is off, this ‘feature’ automatically fades any of your edits, so while you can’t screw anything up, you also can’t do anything useful.

Preparation

So, select the first kick in the first Edison. I’ve found that selecting more than the whole hit is better than trying to get it exact the first time, since it can be trimmed down later very easily. Copy n’ paste it into the second Edison, and trim it down so you’re left with only the stuff you want. Ctrl-Delete will delete everything except what’s selected, which is useful. Now you might think you’re done, but not quite. Since it’s chopped from an actual beat, the drum’s decay was interupted by another sound, like a hihat or something. This sounds bad because the tail of the drum just cuts off abruptly. We could fade out the end of it, but that wouldn’t really fix the problem. Bathing the whole thing in reverb might help, but might sound really bad as well. The best way that I’ve found to remedy this is to copy and paste the whole drum sound next to itself, reverse the second one and fade it out. This can give the illusion of a natural decay, and it’s faded out before you hear the ‘Schhwwwwooop’ sound.

Trimming

Zero Crossing

If you can’t see those buttons, you might have to resize the Edison window. Once that’s done, I hit Ctrl-A to select all,and then Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for the copypaste. The first section of the sound will still be selected, so click and drag near the beginning of the selection to the end of the second section of the sound. You might have to zoom out with your middle mouse button to see it. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any ‘inverse selection’ shortcut, but oh well. Once you have the second section selected, Alt-Left Arrow will reverse it. Zooom in to where the two sections meet, and if it looks weird, right click- tools – reverse polarity might make it look better. Since you faded them out, there won’t be any clicky sounds, and it might make the phase better or something, it probably doesn’t really matter, I guess I’m just OCD about things like that

Fading Out

Now that you have a ‘Pooschhssschwooop’ sound, you’ll have to fade out the ‘wooop’ part. I used to use the volume envelope, but now that I’m lazy, I just use the fade out button a few times, in different places. If it doesn’t sound good, you’ll have to undo and do it over again. When you’re happy with it, trim it down. The waveform view of the sound might be deceiving, so press S to go to the spectrum view and trim it where the sound really ends. Just to be safe, select a little bit of the end of the sound and fade it out again. You can EQ your little sound now, for the most part taking out the extreme low-frequency rumblies is all you’ll do.

Trimming and Eqing

If you’re making a kit in the FPC, which you should be, right click the little grey bar above the waveform/spectrum where it says ‘TITLE’ and give it a title. I would recommend something easy like Mydrums1_kick_1 or something like that, to keep it all organized. Edison doesn’t seem to support saving as 24-bit wave files, so you could change it to 16-bit if you want to by clicking the little ‘32′ box. If you know your sample is mono, clicking the box next to it will change it to mono. If you do this and it sounds weird, your sample wasn’t mono. We’re going to be dragging and dropping sounds, and if the sounds don’t have a title, FL will automatically name them “Dragged_Sample_68″ or something like that, which sucks. All of the sounds we drag will be saved in the Patches/Sliced Beats Folder, but we’re going to save them somewhere else later, so we’ll end up with duplicates, which is okay I guess, you just gotta clean out sliced beats sometimes.

 Open up the FPC, and using the Empty preset, click on the pad you want to be your kick drum (or whatever) and using the drag n’ drop button in Edison which is on the very right, under the ‘O’, drag and drop the sound into the sample zones place of the FPC. If everything worked right, you should see your sound in the FPC with the right filename, yay!

The next step is to do this over and over again for every drum sound you want from the break, dragging each kick to the kick pad in FPC, etc. Once you’ve gleamed pretty much everything you want form the break, it’s time to organize your multisample layers in FPC. Play through each sound by clicking on the waveform display and figure out which sounds are more aggressive and which are softer. The softer sounds will go at the top of window, using the up/down arrows next to the large ‘DELETE’ button, and the harder sounds will go to the bottom. Once you think you’ve got them in order, click the little button next to ’SPREAD EVEN’, and it will spread the layers evenly, as well as not let them cross each other, so only one zone will be triggered at a time. Sometimes, layering sounds together is fun, and if you want to have more than one layer uh, layered on top of each other, make sure that button isn’t glowing. Now we can adjust the velocities that each zone will respond to. Generally, I like to have the harder sounds closer together in velocity, and the softer sounds further apart.With a pad controller, play the pad and see if it feels right, if you don’t have a pad controller, it might be kind of had to know where to put them.

Drag n drop

When everything is completely set up, and you’ve tried playing the kit with your pad controller, and everything is nice, click the dropdown arrow next to the pad selector arrow things in the top left. Choose ‘Save Entire kit as pad presets..’ and give your kit a name. The pad presets should be saved to Image-Line\FL Studio #\Data\Patches\Packs\FPC.. if you put the kick drums in the pad that FPC wants you to, it will save it to the kick drums folder, etc etc.. Down in the corner of this window, make sure you check ‘Save wave files’, it will save the audio files in the same place as each pad preset, for easy portability and generally neater organization.

I could have gone into more detail, but I didn’t. This was pretty badly organized and stuff, but I don’t care that much. Read the Edison help files.

Salve internauta, sei per caso alla ricerca di un buon player per guardare tutti i video che desideri? Sono tanti quelli che puoi usare, Windows Media Player, Divx Player, Real Player e così via. Ma diciamoci la verità, la maggior parte di essi sono pesantucci, soprattutto se non abbiamo un computer molto veloce.

Allora ti consiglio quello che io definisco il riproduttore migliore in assoluto: Media Player Classic abbreviato spesso in MPC, generalmente è un file eseguibile singolo, legge e riproduce i video che è una meraviglia, supporta numerosi formati e codec, anche DVD, può caricare sottotitoli e così via.

E’ totalmente gratuito, clicca qui per scaricarlo.

Se ti mancano dei codec ti consiglio di scaricare il pacco Combined Community Codec Pack che li possiede tutti e contiene al suo interno Media Player Classic Home Cinema (una versione vagamente differente del programma, ma tranquillo è uguale).

In alternativa puoi scaricare VLC Media Player anch’esso leggero.

Spero di esserti stato utile, un saluto, Ivan.

Se lasci un commento mi farebbe piacere!

Last month the House Financial Services Committee took testimony on H.R. 2382 from both the Financial Industry and representatives of the Merchants Payments Coalition which represents NACS. Both parties represented their point of view. On the retailer side, the argument remains that the retailers are unable to negotiate with the card associations for lower prices. Retailers expressed that banks and card associations are monopolistic so, congress should act to legislate and control fees or at least give retailers the ability to negotiate for lower fees and that the payment providers should be subject to Anti-Trust legal action. The key evidence being the “outrageous” swipe fees retailers pay to accept a credit card. On the other hand the Banks cried foul claiming that retailers are simply trying to use their power to gain the valuable credit card payment services without having to pay a fair price. The credit card representatives presented an argument demonstrating that interchange fees are fair, and in fact are undervalued.

This raises the question: Why would Merchants accept payment cards if the fees associated with the card are greater than the benefits? Interchange is a fee for a service that brings value to consumers and retailers and while retailers may have choices about method of payment, or even alternative payments, it turns out that promoting a method of payment is expensive and time consuming. It’s so much easier to put a sticker on the door that says” MasterCard and Visa” accepted here.  Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself” and therein may lay the answer. (http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterguidi)

Fast hätten wir ihn nicht erkannt, doch er ist es: Gesichtet wurde der Akai MPC 2500 LE in winterlichem Weiß. Schick sieht er aus und auch an Funktionen wurde nicht gespart. Doch endgültige Informationen zum Erscheinen und den Features gibt es keine, sicher ist aber, dass er kommt.

Großer oder kleiner Bruder des Akai MPC 2500? Weiterentwicklung? Upgrade? Wir wissen es nicht! Aber er sieht so gut aus, dass uns nichts anderes übrig bleibt, als dran zu bleiben.

Interessantes und Wissenswertes zum MPC 2500 ist bis dahin im Musikshop Leipzig nachzulesen.

Fast hätten wir ihn nicht erkannt, doch er ist es: Gesichtet wurde der Akai MPC 2500 LE in winterlichem Weiß. Schick sieht er aus und auch an Funktionen wurde nicht gespart. Doch endgültige Informationen zum Erscheinen und den Features gibt es keine, sicher ist aber, dass er kommt.

Großer oder kleiner Bruder des Akai MPC 2500? Weiterentwicklung? Upgrade? Wir wissen es nicht! Aber er sieht so gut aus, dass uns nichts anderes übrig bleibt, als dran zu bleiben.

Interessantes und Wissenswertes zum MPC 2500 ist bis dahin im Deejayladen nachzulesen.

Fast hätten wir ihn nicht erkannt, doch er ist es: Gesichtet wurde der Akai MPC 2500 LE in winterlichem Weiß. Schick sieht er aus und auch an Funktionen wurde nicht gespart. Doch endgültige Informationen zum Erscheinen und den Features gibt es keine, sicher ist aber, dass er kommt.

Großer oder kleiner Bruder des Akai MPC 2500? Weiterentwicklung? Upgrade? Wir wissen es nicht! Aber er sieht so gut aus, dass uns nichts anderes übrig bleibt, als dran zu bleiben.

Interessantes und Wissenswertes zum MPC 2500 ist bis dahin im Musikhaus Korn nachzulesen.

Remi/Rough aka Remdog
manie aussi bien l’art du spray (sous l’apparence de Remi/Rough)
que celui de la MPC (sous le pseudo de Remdog).

+ Remdog, Shadow In Your Rearview EP

[roughe.com / remdog space / myuzyk.net / 2600recordings.com]

This is one of my favorite videos. Exile gets down.

chico

One of my favorite songs of all time, in any music genre, is Fuel Injected by Swollen Members. The song sampled a track by DJ Shadow called Organ Donor. The song has one of the greatest Organ / Piano rifts ever! I recently came across this video and thought it was pretty amazing. The first 2 minutes is kind of boring, a lot of setting up (like the original song). But if you fast forward to about 2:15 or so, it starts picking up. The kids hand eye coordination is through the roof, especially since he’s working on such a small screen.

“¿Ya llegaste?”, pregunta tu novia de la manera más simple. “No, sólo me tomé la libertad de mandarte un holograma para avisarte que estoy de borracho con mis amigotes. Y en cinco segundos esta imagen se autodestruirá”, dices con voz mecánica. “No seas payaso”, te mira con frialdad, casi con odio.¿Te mojaste, a poco está lloviendo?, dice tu hermana mientras mira por la ventana. “No, cómo crees, en realidad es la escena número 27, en la que una pipa riega abundante agua sobre la casa esperando que tomemos los paraguas y salgamos a bailar mientras cantamos una canción estúpida”, detallas en tanto que el agua escurre de tu cabeza.

o o o o o o o o o o

“¿Por qué nunca quieres ir a comer a casa de mis papás?”, la cara de molestia es de tu chava. La observas de reojo, tentado a ser sincero y darle alguna de las tres razones más obvias:a) Porque tu madre siempre me saluda con esa actitud que puede interpretarse como mi-hija-merece-alguien-mejor.b) Porque tu padre se empeña en tratarme como a uno de sus empleados y me odia por la simple razón de que piensa que estoy pervirtiendo a su nena, sin imaginar siquiera que perdiste la virginidad mucho antes de conocerme y que estás a un grado de ser ninfómana.c) Porque tu hermano no sólo es americanista sino que lo presume, y lo único que le falta es ser analfabeto para estar al mismo nivel que su ídolo Cuauhtémoc Blanco.Sin embargo, te contienes y aduces una mentira piadosa: “porque los domingos son mejores cuando estoy a solas contigo”.

o o o o o o o o o o
“¿Tú crees que Salinas se robó todo el dinero de la partida secreta?”, te pregunta tu compañero de oficina después de leer el periódico. “Démosle el beneficio de la duda, no creo que sea tan maquiavélico. Seguramente sólo se lo llevó prestado para jinetearse los intereses. Verás que un día lo iluminará Dios y él vendrá arrepentido a decir que ha creado la fundación Carlos Salinas de Gortari para becar a todos los ‘hermanos incómodos’ de México”, argumentas con desgano.

o o o o o o o o o o

“¿No crees que me veo gorda con este vestido… y si mejor me pongo el negro?”, tu vieja lleva una hora arreglándose para la boda de su prima. “Mi reina, cómo crees. No puede verse gorda una mujer que se levanta todos los días a las siete de la mañana para sus rutinas de pilates, que se alimenta sanamente, evita las garnachas y toma dos litros de agua”, checas el reloj con notoria impaciencia. Ella te lanza una mirada asesina y recrimina ‘sabes perfectamente que yo no hago nada de eso, no seas payaso’, y se aleja del espejo. Carajo, estamos perdiendo horas-trago-hombre. Y ella que se arregla como si estuviéramos invitados a una cena de gala con el principado de Villas de Aragón.

o o o o o o o o o o

“¿Te duele?”, se te queda viendo el dentista. Tú sólo cierras los ojos porque es obvio que no puedes hablar. El pinche profesional de la tortura sabe perfectamente que taladrar tu muela no es algo precisamente encantador. El muy sádico todavía aclara “vas a tener que aguantarte un poquito porque no puedo ponerte más anestesia”, así que prosigue. Este cabrón debe morir, empiezas a pensar tonterías. Ay wey, me cae que el carnicero de la esquina es más sentimental frente a una res abierta en canal. Después de media hora un ligero rasgo de piedad asoma en sus ojos. “Listo, por hoy es todo lo que podemos hacer”, te da un vasito y pide que te enjuagues. “Un par de citas más y tu muela quedará como nueva”, amenaza con más torturas. “¿Cuánto me vas a dejar?”, es la mejor parte para él. Adiós a tu billete de 200 pesos. Vale madres, y encima de todo tienes que pagar para que te provoquen dolor. Total no es la primera ni la última vez. Bueno, al menos este tipo te advirtió que no era barato. En cambio hay mujeres que te sacan más varo, nomás en una salida al cine y a cenar cualquier cosa. Y luego se largan sin importar que te sientas peor que un maniquí incompleto.

Beatdigger, producer and DJ RJ Krohn aka RJD2 needs no introduction. With 3 studio albums under his belt and a whole string of productions and remixes for artists such as Massive Attack, The Go! Team, Aesop Rock and Souls of Mischief, RJD2 is certainly a force to be reckoned with.

Right at the calm before the storm of launching his next album, The Colossus, WhoSampled got the man to talk about his musical development, vinyl and sampling, and the making of an RJD2 production from the beats up.

WhoSampled: What is your earliest musical memory?

RJD2: Records. I remember my mom’s record collection: Kraftwerk, The Beatles, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass – things like that. I remember playing NES games and listening to those records. Both things played an important part in my development.

WS: To what extent did older records inspire you in your past productions? Is that still true today? Which artists do you feel have influenced you the most?

RJ: The tones that are found within records are constantly informing what I do. I think that my best foot forward is as a producer, not a DJ or singer or keys player. And obviously, when sampling records, they end up playing a direct role in a new song. Even if I’m not sampling them per se, it’s still true; I am constantly referencing things off records when I’m tracking live instruments.
I think the biggest things I’ve internalized are the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, The Impressions, and then the experience of things like a Meters or De La Soul record on a big system.

WS: When digging for samples, are there any specific genres or eras that you look out for?

RJ: Eras, yes. Genres, no. My roll-off years are around 1961 and 1985 or so. That’s my usual window. Otherwise, I’m just usually looking for the rarest things I can get my hands on; the least visible record I can possibly sample.

WS: What is/was your favorite 2nd hand record store and why?

RJ: The one that was a huge contributor to my first record (Deadringer) was a place called Robert’s Records on the southeast side of Columbus, Ohio. They had been a distributor throughout the 70’s, and then went out of business around 1999 or 2000. It was just an insane goldmine, when they had their going out of business sale. It was massive; about a basketball court sized room for LP’s, and another for 45’s. HUGE. All LP’s were $1, all 45’s were $.25. I spent 5 days going through a storage closet stacked top to bottom with boxes of 45’s; I was pulling things like Lowell Fulsom and J.B.’s 45’s, and thought I was doing well. I didn’t realize the 45 room was open as well at the time; we are talking 8 ft racks, 60ft long rows, and about 8-10 rows. Alvin Cash’s Keep on Dancin’, Incredible Bongo Band 45’s, that caliber of stuff, all for a quarter a pop. I probably clocked 50-60 hours in the store before it closed.

WS: What’s your forecast on the future of vinyl – do you think it will die out and if it does, will it matter?

RJ: No, I think it’s gonna do fine, cause it already is! Records are definitely making a resurgence. People will always love buying vinyl, even if it’s not a huge market.

WS: What rapper(s) would you like to work with if you could choose anyone you want? Whose style and voice do you think would go well together with your beats?

RJ: Ludacris, first and foremost. The Clipse. Freeway.

WS: How different was your approach to the production on The Third Hand from that on Deadringer and Since We Last Spoke? Did you use any samples on The Third Hand at all, or was it all made from live instrumentation?

RJ: There were some very minute samples, and all of the drums were samples, on The Third Hand. I was still going for “vintage” type of sounds, but trying to do it in a different way.

WS: You did a set for the BBC’s Breezeblock radio show, where you deconstructed some of your own beats using some of the original samples. It was interesting to hear you recreate some of the cuts by hand. What’s the initial catalyst or first step in an RJD2 production – beats, samples, instruments, inspiration from DJing or something else? When in the studio, do you often get ideas for sample combinations or tracks from “DJing on top of a beat”?

RJ: When I’m in the studio, it’s really all centered around the MPC, at least if I’m doing something that is inherently “beat oriented”, or if I’m just making a beat. There are things that can be done on an MPC that can’t be done on turntables, so when I’m doing those “redux” versions of tracks using the original records, it’s more reverse engineering a beat, rather than providing the germination point of a beat. On the MPC, I’m working at a more molecular level; DJ’ing is much more broad strokes, if you will.

WS: What can your fans expect to hear on The Colossus, your next album due in 2010?

RJ: BIG SECRET! Nah, I might end up talking about it closer to the release, but I don’t want anyone going into it with a preconceived notion of anything, stylistically speaking. Fresh ears and multiple listens, that’s all I ask of the listener. I always try to be as detail-oriented as possible with my solo records, and this one’s no different in that respect.

WhoSampled manages RJD2’s page on the site in cooperation with the artist. Look out for RJD2’s fourth studio album The Colossus, which will be released on his own label in 2010.

http://rjselectricalconnections.com
http://www.myspace.com/rjd2