Last month, I was lucky enough to head to a gathering of music and visual artists at the studio of artist Duncan Laurie in Jamestown, Rhode Island, accompanied by performances in Providence and Boston. Among the cast: Richard Devine, Josh Kay (Phoenicia/Schematic), Steve Nalepa, Todd Thille (Synesthete), Vidvox’s David Lublin, Josh Randall (Robotkid/Harmonix), Aerostatic, Brian Kane (former Emergency Broadcast Network), and Ooah (Glitch Mob).

And then there were the rocks and coconuts. Duncan Laurie and electrical engineer Gordon Salisbury have been sonifying natural signal sources, hooking up vintage radionics equipment and connecting rocks and bananas and such to signals. Richard and Josh brought along part of their formidable collection of modular equipment, and a great crackling, screaming analog racket resulted.

Fans of vintage gear, big knobs, and audiovisual mayhem will surely be jealous. (Photos above courtesy Todd Thille, Arrow.)

mind-meld.org

Flickr set 

Here’s co-organizer Todd Thille (aka Synesthete) describing the full event.

Mind Meld 2008 – Todd Thille

The weekend of Friday the 13th marked the 3rd annual Mind Meld gathering at Duncan Laurie’s Jamestown, Rhode Island studio. An incredible assortment of audio and video artists were assembled, ostensibly to relax, but with so much talent in one place, a show or two is inevitable.

Ableton Live controllers are suddenly everywhere, in commercial products and DIY creations. But an in-progress prototype being designed by Serbia-based creator Sasa Djuric, found on the CDM Flickr pool, goes the extra distance to integrate more effectively with the software. The hardware looks more like the on-screen UI, for starters – an elusive objective for many controllers. And by working with the Mackie Control protocol, Sasa is able to make communication between hardware and software fully bi-directional, so the controller gives you essential feedback. There’s even a facility for scratching. The design is based on the popular MIDIbox platform.

Sasa writes with details of what the creation process is like. It’s all still very much in progress, so we’re really excited to see how it evolves into a finished design.

Sasa explains (with videos to follow):

The middle child of audio technology, neither as hip as vinyl or as modern as the MP3, the cassette lives on in a massive online shrine called the C-90 Project. Odds are, if you’ve ever seen a blank cassette, it’s stored in here or soon will be. We saw its colorful compact novelties back in 2005. Now, the site has grown and added features, including bi-lingual discussions in both English and Russian, plus organization by format (compact cassette, the standard size, as well as microcassette and minicassette) and brand. If you want to add to this collection, they welcome participants. History will thank you.

A couple of the odder selections here. Weirdly, I remember seeing both back in their day. (Hey, I guess TDK decided to add some Latino flair to their tape line.)

Project C-90. An Ultimate Audiotape Guide. (indeed … it’s even bigger than you think)

Building and Using a Reaktor Grain Delay in Kore 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Let’s cut straight to the reason we use this stuff: we want crazy-sounding delays we can play with. Reaktor guru Peter Dines shows just how you’d build such a thing in Reaktor from the ground up for CDM’s Kore site. He also takes it one step further by creating not only the Reaktor ensemble, but also a Kore performance preset to match. The advantage of going this route: Kore provides a way of organizing parameters for control, performance, and automation.

This is another all-free download, so have at it. Now I feel like I’m in a patching race with Peter, because I’ve got some ideas of my own for how you might modify this basic idea; let’s see if I can actually make that happen.

Making sense of Kore

The other side of the minisite is we’re further exploring what Kore is for and how to make it work. We asked readers of the minisite to tell us their thoughts on how Kore is going and how they use it, which has yielded an interesting comment thread:

How Do You Kore?

Our main focus, of course, is simply teaching people how to use the tool effectively – from there, you can decide whether it’s for you and how you want to use it. To that end, I’ve got the first half of a tutorial up that explains what for me was the biggest draw and the most initially confusing, which is the control pages Kore uses to assign automation and physical control. I walk through why you’d want this, how it works, and how you manage different levels of the control pages:

Demystifying Kore Control Pages for Automation and Performance, Pt. I: Different Page Types

We also have some important basics, like Kontakt automation, how to get a normal mixer view, and external MIDI control.

Coming soon: I’m planning some short features on each of NI’s instruments. We’ll have to call it the “get it out of the shrinkwrap” series, especially for people who got the overwhelming set of instruments that comes with Komplete.

Something very funny has happened in the world of music controllers. It started with the rising popularity of Ableton Live, along with the likes of Reaktor and Max/MSP, as musicians started creating more dynamic, rich live performances with computers. Supposedly, this shift should have created new controller designs. If Live was the killer app, where was the killer hardware?

Instead, what we’ve gotten is a sort of primordial soup of controller experimentation, with people hacking together circuits, appropriating Wii remotes, abusing and warping commercial controllers, and generally resisting any standardization. The results have been, in short, fabulously chaotic. And maybe that’s the point – just as, even with relatively standardized music tools, musical variety remains virtually infinite.

Of course, there’s one little problem: working from scratch might (ahem) not leave you any time to make the actual music. (Doh!) So, if there’s not a killer single piece of hardware, what might a platform for experimentation look like. MachineCollective responds to a pretty nice wish list:

• Modular components you can mix and match at will
• Agnostic components that might be picked up by people building instruments, synths, controllers, circuit-bent projects, visual apps, or even non-musical electronics projects
• Easy combination with platforms like Arduino and Wiring and software like Processing, Max, vvvv, Flash, and other programming environments
• Rapid prototyping and manufacturing
• Get stuff shipped, or use your own local tools / local fab facility
• Fully open source licensed (it’s actually not clear which license – the CC non-commercial license would presumably mean you couldn’t build one of these and sell it, which I think builders might want to do)

That sounds great. So what is it, actually? The “platform” for now is just the physical components: a top panel of acrylic, an aluminum base, and a bottom panel. You do get machined holes and connectors, though, which could help you radically speed through the stuff that’s hard to do on your own – that is, machine solid cases. And if this catches on, it’s not hard to imagine people swapping circuits and software patches and such that puts some life into that case.

Looks great on paper; we’ll have to see what the actual platform is like. But in the long run, could locally-manufactured, open platforms someday stand alongside the conventional musical hardware industry? I think it’s very possible.

Thanks to everyone who sent this my way!

machinecollective.org

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the LinnDrum II since it was called the BoomChik. We called the non-functional prototype one of the best products of this January’s NAMM – reasoning being that, based on what we heard from showgoers, a silent LinnDrum still beat more evolutionary blandness from the rest of the industry. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say some of us were getting a wee bit impatient waiting for some kind of news. Now that news appears to be here — a rough estimate on availability and pre-order details. (Updated: Specs had been posted previously, as Cory observes in comments, but let’s savor them one more time.)

Availability: Late 2008 (“our best estimate,” so that’s not set in stone)

Cost: US$1400 for the all-digital LinnDrum II, or $1800 for the LinnDrum II Analog with the addition of four analog voices as seen in the Prophet ‘08 and Evolver, plus 32 dedicated encoders

Pre-order list: No commitment, no money down; just email support@rogerlinndesign.com and you’re in. Will there be a baby shower at some point?

Dave and Roger have also posted updated specs on the two units. Highlights include:

The Monome is small and elegant, but there’s something to be said for traditional instrumental controllers like a keyboard. So why not combine them? David Phipps of the electronic jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9 did just that, and sends CDM this photo of the project in process. He’s off on a five week tour starting Friday, so it’ll be on hold for a bit, but even not-quite-done I had to share it. David writes:

i hope to bring ‘The Peaceblaster’ on tour in the fall. note the unashamed reference to our album available July 8th:)
i picked up a 5-octave fatar keybed and MKE electronics from doepfer via analog haven.  he carries 2-5 octave bare keybeds with simple channel/octave controls, all fatar (the highest quality italian-made keybeds you can get…and doepfer is the ONLY place you can order a
keybed from fatar without being a manufacturer). the 8 knobs and faders are the doepfer PKE, a super simple plug and play solution that could have been a midibox or arduino. add a edirol midi>usb cable, usb hub, and multi-voltage power supply and i’ve got one power plug, one usb
port, and midi out to drive hardware synths.
i’ve left room in the enclosure for a mac mini (or small form factor pc or linux box)…but that’ll be a stretch of my willpower to get it done.

I’d call it a keynome. (For the record, the product name monome rhymes with Ma Gnome, not Ma No May or ole.)

About that new album: it’s available independently through the artists. Their freebie add-ons are really interesting. The CD pre-order includes a coupon to watch a rehearsal online. But the Fan Pack is even better: aside from the CD, which includes fully-recycled packaging, it adds a 1GB STS9-designed flash drive with the digital album, video from DemocracyNow!, photos, screensavers, and the like, an autographed picture of the band, a handmade doll, a download coupon for a live show, a print with a box of crayons to color in your own design, a poster, a 7" vinyl, and other extras. US$99.99. Even if you’re not an STS9 fan, there are some good ideas for artists looking to make music purchases tangible again — especially if they have a fanbase this loyal. See their merch site for all the goods.

I especially like the crayons.

Previously:

Sound Tribe Sector 9 vs. Monome: Video, 8by16

Building a Custom Monome Controller, with STS9’s David Phipps

We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help.

Lifehacker today points to a free Windows utility for the job called CrystalDiskInfo:

CrystalDiskInfo Monitors Hard Drive Health and Uptime [via gHacks]

But that got me thinking about other tools. There’s quite a range of choices for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even some obscure operating systems. The only bad news: generally you’ll only be able to monitor internal drives, unless your external drive is eSATA rather than USB or FireWire. (eSATA is where I’d like to go generally – it’s quite a lot faster, and frees up your USB and FireWire buses for other things — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Create Digital Music Night at ETSY LABS from Etsy on Vimeo.

Handmade marketplace Etsy.com, DIY "mook"/blog Make, and createdigitalmusic.com again team up for another Handmade Music Night at Brooklyn’s Etsy Labs! For an idea of what it’s about (or perhaps inspiration for starting something similar in your corner of the world), see the video above.

On tap:

Chiptune gaming systems for music, strange alternative MIDI controllers and sound-mangling custom software, repurposed vintage synthesizer chips made famous by the Commodore 64, digital visuals, a musical Nintendo Wii balance board, and wireless sensing controllers…

And more.

Where/when:

7/8/08 - 7pm onward (free!)
Etsy Labs
325 Gold St., 3rd floor
Brooklyn, NY (Map)

You can rsvp to rsvp@etsy.com to give us an idea of who’s coming.

Bring your stuff!

As always, we welcome projects in various states of completion! So bring in your DIY software / hardware / circuit bending / chiptune / hacking / patching creations and share them with a friendly, relaxed crowd of fellow geeks!

If you want to give us some advance warning / do a short performance, you can fill out our summer "call for works" form (assuming you haven’t already). (See previous story and scroll down; direct Google Docs link. If you have trouble with the Google Docs form, try our contact form.)

Elsewhere:

Handmade Music Night returns! - 7/8/08 [makezine.com]

Handmade Music Night Featured on Current TV [Etsy's The Storque]