Lorin Tone and Madcow Cosmos have created a band of cute, quirky avatars based on musical instruments. Not only do they look musical, they ARE musical. Get several of these awesome avs together and you can all join together to make music. Drums, Tuba, trombone, cymbals, clarinet, whistle and others round out the band.

Bandbots – Second Life Musical Avatars from Chantal Harvey on Vimeo.

The avs use a series of sampled music loops, each with many variations – some can even loop more than one sample at a time. For instance, the Drummer Av has Drums, Drum n Bass, FX, Bhangra Boxes and Bass lines to mix together.  Each sample is made to work with the other sounds so that whatever you play will be in tune and synchronized.  With a full band of avs there would be a crazy number of variations to work with. Super cute, too. Love these things!

You can get your own Bandbot at Lorin’s Sound Shack or Madcow’s Primordial Soup and Sandwich.  Anyone wanna Jam?

I was out shopping, adding to my avatar collection, and I happened up on the coolest place called Psychosomatic Rebuilders. One word description? Odd.  Four word description? Cool, funny, creepy, DIFFERENT! This is a great example of someone (Olza Koenkamp) thinking and creating without the constraints of real life. From a sign in the shop:

“Bored with Second Life subcultures like Nekos, Furries, Tinies, etc….Become Psychosomatic Rebuilder. You need more fantasy in you avatar’s body experience.”

Saw this great tutorial on the LL forums today. Photo-sourcing a face skin: Start to finish.

Asuka Martin shows you step-by-step how to put your own face on your Second Life avatar using only two reference photos. He does a great job of explaining the steps he’s taking and the results are very nice. Definitely worth a look if you want to create a virtual you.