Play this track:

Download MP3

Liz McLean Knight aka Quantazelle catches up with one of our laptopist idols: edIT, the talented solo artist and Glitch Mob member. I won’t insult what he does by giving it a dumb name (”Glitch Hop?”). Suffice to say, edIT is adept at bringing insane musical chops to live laptop performance.

Liz got to geek out with edIT about the details of his live setup, which now drops the M-Audio Trigger Finger for the visual feedback and fluid multi-touch flexibility of a JazzMutant Lemur. (All due love to the Trigger Finger. But I think that would have been like, when I was a child, trading my Knight Rider Big Wheel for the full-sized KITT.)

edIT tells Liz just what this is all about, how he puts together his live set, and what the technical setup means for him musically. He also talks strategy. Sometimes, that means keeping the integrity of the tunes by loading changes into Ableton Live’s pre-composed Arrange View rather than triggering relatively mundane changes of loops manually. At the same time, that frees him up to work with more radical changes with effects and the like – stuff that may actually be interesting. So, no, just glimpsing the Arrange View will not land edIT on deadAct.com — in fact, edIT and Glitch Mob are just the kind of antidote we need.

Interview audio quality is low, but it’s well worth the listen for all the details.

While we’re at it, here’s more insight into edIT’s unique IDM and Hip Hop-inspired world, including the greatest anti-electronic music quotes of all time.

Ever wished you could pack the sonic goodness and programming power of a soft synth into a hardware box? Dreamed of software that lived in a road case and had the stability and power-on capability of your outboard gear? You’re certainly not alone. That meant many of us were intrigued when soft synth emulator house Arturia showed off the Origin, a DSP-based hardware box that put their emulations in a box that wasn’t a PC.

Dave Dri knows touring with gear, as the founder of Seque and a live electronic festival vet. We got his impressions from across the Pacific in Australia. He’s upfront with everything he loves and everything that annoys. To bring a different perspective to Planet CDM here, I’m pleased to welcome Dave as a guest.

An Origin Of Sorts

Founded in France in 1999, Arturia has gained a solid reputation for the quality of its emulations of classic analogue synthesizers. If the soft synth emulations of the classic Moog Minimoog and Yamaha CS-80 have made Arturia a name in the industry, the news of its development of a hardware DSP system made for enjoyable speculation and furious Google searches for videos, news and reviews. While units in Australia are somewhat scarce at present, an Origin was supplied for review by Musiclab in Brisbane, Australia. Where the initial review was for music press print media, there is so much more to this module that we can take a deeper look and share with the CDM community some of the issues and notable features of the Arturia Origin.

How do you make the Moog legacy of instruments accessible — assuming you can’t afford a studio full of vintage gear? One choice is to model the instruments virtually, as developers like Arturia have done. That provides real-time control, but models may not be perfect, and if you want more than one instrument, you really need more than one model. Others have reimagined some of the Moog sound designs on more modern instruments, as Craig Anderton did recently with Cakewalk’s Rapture.

IK Multimedia, working with veteran sample house Sonic Reality in collaboration with Moog Music, have taken the “museum” approach — put samples of everything in a single box. And what an ambitious collection they’ve got, as we noted when the product was announced. But can you win over even someone who owns some of the real gear? We put that question to our own Lee Sherman, who’s been diving deep into the tool. Mindful of the tradeoffs, he’s got some insight into just how useful they were able to make that sampled content.

SampleMoog can’t help but be greeted with some degree of skepticism. Even virtual analog synths like Arturia’s Minimoog V don’t go all of the way in reproducing the Moog experience. How can something based on samples even come close?

After more than a year of relatively trusty service and a country-spanning tour, my BCD2000 has finally become too flaky for performances. I’ve been looking at the various DJ-style midi controller options, and was down to about 5 options when I was asked to play a set on short notice at a relatively big festival this weekend. So I made a snap decision and picked up a Numark Total Control, choosing this over the NuVJ because it has a couple of extra sliders and knobs.

This is a NuVJ, my second choice MIDI controller from Numark

As a class-compliant USB MIDI device it installed fine. I loaded my VJ software of choice, Resolume, mapped the jog wheels to scratch video, and scratched.

The video went bonkers.

Play this track:

Composer turned sample developer Wilbert Roget, II has just released a new ‘indie’ sample library called Impact:Steel. We spoke with him to find out more about how and why he created the library and how creating his own sample libraries plays into his composition.

CDM: First, can you tell us a bit about your background, and how you got into composing and music?

Wilbert Roget, II:Well to keep things short, I’m basically a lifer with music and composition, studying piano early on and doing improvisations almost immediately (if not before). I decided on film and video game composition as a career sometime in high school, and went on to study composition, orchestration, and conducting at Yale University. I’ve been scoring films, games, ads, and various other projects ever since.