Our friend Gustavo Bravetti is back with more Ableton Live tutorials. Looks like good fodder for working on some music making this weekend — especially if you’re not familiar with some of these techniques.

First up: cascading follow actions can break up endless looping repetition by triggering complex patterns. Gustavo throws in some "dummy clips" or "ghost clips" for adding additional automation.

Next, if you followed Gustavo’s bass drum tutorial with Operator and want to follow it up with some snares (and resonance), have a look at this:

More details at Gustavo’s iproducer column.

By the way, to anyone who wanted more "advanced" tutorials (or more beginning, for that matter — it’s all relative) — feel free to send us requests. Now I’m sort of intrigued by synthesizing drums; I’ve been chatting with a couple of our contributors here about Native Instruments’ FM8. The whole beauty of Operator is its simplicity, but maybe we should see if we can make an FM8 kit, as well. (And you’re not restricted to using Ableton’s own instruments in the Live Drum Rack, either.)

If you make stuff this weekend, or find tips of your own, let us know!

Apple’s "point" releases — those seemingly-harmless updates you get automatically in Software Update — do sometimes break stuff. I tend to ignore the updates until I’ve had a chance to confirm they’re okay. Case in point: it looks like 10.5.2 can result in glitchy audio on laptops.

Native Instruments has an official statement out on the problem, but according to them, this issue can affect software from other vendors, as well:

User feedback and internal testing indicates that recent changes introduced by Apple in Mac OS X 10.5.2 can cause audio dropouts and similar problems on Macbook/Macbook Pro computers. This issue is not limited to NI software in particular, but applies to performance-criticial music software in general.
Therefore, Native Instruments currently cannot guarantee the proper operation of its products under Mac OS X 10.5.2. If possible, users should refrain from upgrading beyond Mac OS X 10.5.1 until further information about this issue becomes available.

Now, I will say this: I am frustrated with Apple’s OS upgrade approach — and I think on any OS, media support is the most vulnerable area.

Brad Sucks, the (despite the name) well-loved Internet musician, has been blogging and releasing tools he’s building to make his online music life better. This one is especially nice: it’s a simple, open source script that connects mailing list sign-ups to Google Maps. Armed with this information, it’s easier to see where your fans are. (Image at right seems to suggest at least a one-person gig offshore of Nigeria, but you get the idea.)

Brad’s Mappy Email Signup Release

Early data is really interesting already. Of course, you need to have more than, say, five fans, but now’s a good time to start. I’m revamping some sign-ups around CDM, so I hope to try this here soon.

Previously from Brad: the brad sucks digital download store, which hooks you up with your own Amazon S3 and PayPal-powered online music store.

Brad also has a tool for asking for donations:

http://www.bradsucks.net/gimme/
http://www.bradsucks.net/projects/gimme/

Slicing, remixing, looping, "live performance-oriented features" … this is Digidesign we’re talking about, right? Digi’s Advanced Instrument Research (A.I.R.) unit, the fruits of the acquisition of Wizoo, may have a pretentious name, but they’ve been doing some pretty great work on new instruments. The new project, Transfuser, will have to enter some crowded waters. Loop slicing and handling already works pretty nicely in Ableton Live (especially with Live 7’s drum racks), in instrument form in FL Studio 8’s awesome Edison and Slicex, and in tools like fxpansion’s GURU. (Superficially, at least, Transfuser bears more than a passing resemblance to the latter in its overall UI layout. And then there’s the fact that the knobs look like they were lifted directly from Live.)

Of course, Transfuser isn’t for FL Studio users. As with previous AIR releases, the Digi-owned Wizoo now make plug-ins for Pro Tools only. And if you are a Pro Tools user, you don’t have to listen to me or try to squint at the screenshots: you can take Transfuser for a test drive free. Download the plug-in for Pro Tools (LE/HD/M-Powered) before June 25, and it’ll operate for three months, no restrictions.

Transfuser Preview [Digidesign]

I can already see from these shots that this isn’t quite the way I’d want to work, personally, let alone enticing enough to make me deal with Pro Tools as a host. But "groove-making" is different for different people, so I’d be very eager to hear what someone else thinks. If you’d like to write up a mini-review for CDM, let us know.

Ableton announced that they’d be doing an orchestral sample library — called, logically enough, the Orchestral Instrument Collection — way back when Live Suite came out last year. But Orchestral Instruments actually didn’t ship then. As of this week, it is shipping.

You can buy the whole library for US$599, or you can pick up sections a la carte for $189 (or, oddly, $159 for Orchestral Percussion). Like the Essential Instruments Collection, the samples come from SONiVOX, with high-fidelity and low-fidelity (read: lightweight for performance) versions. There’s also something new called "SmartPriming" for system resources. I haven’t yet gotten my hands on this, so I can’t comment yet; obviously, it comes down to how important Live integration is to you, or whether you’d prefer a third-party orchestral library.

The a la carte sections, though, makes me think of Garrison Keillor’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra skit. (It’s Classical Music humor. My apologies.) One way to choose sections: think about which God would want you to buy. Excerpt:

But for a Lutheran who feels led to play in an orchestra, the first question must be: are you kidding? An orchestra? Are you sure this is what you want? Do you know what you are getting into? Opera. Is that anyplace for a Christian? Don Juan and Mephistopheles and Wagner and all his pagan goddesses hooting and hollering, and the immorality — I mean, is anybody in opera married?

Not to give away the punchline, but not surprisingly harps and percussion (think about the patience required to be an orchestral percussionist) win out, so that could theoretically guide your purchase decision here. Just remember:

The French Horn takes too much of a person’s life. French horn players hardly have time to marry and have children. The French horn is practically a religion all by itself.

Software is different, of course. A Young Lutheran’s Guide to Music Software, anyone?

Native Instruments is releasing some cheaper ways of getting at their software guitar modeler, Guitar Rig, in the form of a cheaper software version and a hardware bundle:

• Guitar Rig 3 XE is a "lite" version of Guitar Rig, focused on the basics — 5 guitar/bass amps, 12 cabinets, and 21 effects. It also some of the "helper" modules from Guitar Rig, including a metronome, tapedeck, and tuner — but no looping module, which is one of my favorites. (See the full list.) US$99 on its own.
• Guitar Session bundles the XE software with Cubase 4 LE, some pop drums for KORE player via a soundpack, and the Session I/O audio hardware. US$250 for the bundle, available June 1 worldwide.

If we’ve learned one thing on this site, it’s this: if it’s a computer, big or small, someone’s going to find a way to make music. The iPod / iPhone, with their Mac OS-derived software guts and a multi-touch interface, are no exception — with or without Apple’s blessing. Here’s a look at what people are doing, including some apps you can download right now, and where this might go musically, whether it’s just a couple of fun toys or trying to make that pretty pocket device an instrument.

Background

There’s no question what makes the iPod Touch and iPhone significant: they are tiny, palm-sized Macs, running all the stuff that makes a Mac a Mac — Cocoa, of course, but even music-specific stuff like Core Audio and Audio Units. (For more details, have a look at the WWDC session highlights spotted by Palm Sounds, all of interest to audio specifically. It could easily be mistaken for desktop development. The Unity 3D game engine is on its way, too.) And even if you’re not planning on picking up mobile Apple hardware, this says something about the rapidly-advancing direction of mobile computing. There was a lot of talk about mobile convergence in the 90s and early years of this decade, but now it’s here.

Of course, there are strings attached. Apple was in no rush to get an official SDK and firmware out to developers, relenting only this year. And it strikes me as I see iPhones on the go that the coolest stuff is happening using "jailbreaked" phones — phones specifically hacked to get around Apple’s requirements. Even when Apple goes official, that’s likely to continue: Apple has placed some arguably onerous restrictions on development. Software has to be Apple-approved and sold via iTunes, and basic capabilities like multitasking are a no-no. Someone’s just called? Great. Your app just quit. (Bizarrely, even extremely low-end phones are willing to multitask, but not Apple’s far-superior hardware.) Whatever arguments you may make for Apple’s approach, my guess is the hard-core iPhone/Touch owner will remain outlaws to get the full capability out of their device.

Also, despite some common elements, the implementations of APIs on the mobile devices are not as complete as on desktop Mac OS. Chad from miniMusic tells PalmSounds that some features currently available in Core Audio on the desktop are missing on mobile — at least for now.

Then there’s the fact that the major Apple strength is Cocoa and Mac-based development — meaning I remain curious about what the Windows and Linux camps will do in this space, particularly Linux. Those folks do have a major, uphill battle to match Apple’s achievement here in terms of software. One would think, though, that Linux should have a bit of an edge because its comparative modularity, whereas Mac OS X was designed solely as a desktop OS — though mobile development is hard, either way.

For Mac-based development, though, iPhone and iPod Touch are here now (always a major advantage in technology). Its full-fledged Mac roots have led to the fanciful image at right and some heated discussion on CDM’s forums earlier this spring. But let’s have a look and what’s here now for the iThings, like MooCowMusic’s Band app (pictured, top).

Andrew Turley writes to share his microfiche-to-MIDI music maker, which he shared at the Maker Faire. The idea: take the humble library microfiche, and translate light and dark values into MIDI, fed to a Casio keyboard. Sound like a random idea? Well, it would be — except Andrew happens to be in a band called Microfiche. (Check them out on MySpace.) None other than IEEE Spectrum — yes, from the IEEE standards body that brings us stuff like FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) — got hands-on with his project; IEEE Spectrum’s Josh Romero named it one of his favorite musical projects at the faire.

Maker Faire Highlights: Making Music the Hard Way [IEEE Spectrum]

Andrew has more impressions of the Faire on his blog Pillowsopher:

I’ve been there for the last two days presenting some of my projects, such as:

• Unicorn Vs. Dolphin
• my stomp pad
• $2 multitouch instrument (based on the water-in-a-bag design by Erling Ellingsen)
• Rock Band Keynote
• the Microfiche Machine (light to MIDI converter for the band Microfiche)
• the LED VU Meter

Cool, but I’d love to do this with microfilm — especially with the film cranked up to full speed. Wheeeee— click, click … crap. Film came off the spool. (What, am I the only person who’s done old-fashioned library research?)

More Maker Faire Videos

Make: Blog’s resident musicologist Collin Cunningham has a video with more of the music projects at Maker Faire:
Musical interfaces @ Maker Faire from Collin Cunningham on Vimeo.

Anyone else with fun Maker Faire reports, do send them our way. Sorry I couldn’t make it this year — but I’ll take this opportunity to finally edit all this footage I have from Yuri’s Night Bay Area, for more Greater San Francisco DIY Musical Goodness!