It’s just a teaser, but for once, the idea is simple, straightforward, and clear. Native Instruments have taken their DJ software, Traktor, and combined it with a grid of pads for sample triggering and loops. The upcoming hardware/software combination we expect later this spring.
At the risk of stating the obvious, what’s significant about adding loop triggering to any DJ set is that you can more easily move beyond playing and mixing tracks. Even without drum machines, this kind of manipulation is part of the grand tradition of DJing, made all the more impressive when ground-breaking DJs were able to accomplish it using only a turntables. (It’s perhaps a triumph over the linearity of recorded music in the 20th Century that, at last, artists found a way to subvert recorded music’s permanently-frozen state and reclaim the playback device as an instrument.)
What the upcoming product does is to take the virtual deck metaphor of Traktor and makes each deck a sampling machine. Each deck can trigger one-shots and loops, coupled with the mixing, cueing, and effects possibilities of Traktor as a DJ tool.
The obvious comparison will be to Ableton Live, but here, it’s as significant what is different as what is not. This wording from NI’s description will admittedly sound a lot like Ableton Live and colored renditions of the monome: “Stylish multi-color pads trigger loops and samples, allowing for on-the-fly remixing.” There’s definitely some influence there.
But the grand-daddy of all these things is sampling drum machines, the first instruments to popularize triggering one-off or looped audio content from a grid. (Tip of the hat here to Roger Linn and his designs.) Ableton’s breakthrough was taking that sample-triggering grid metaphor and cross-breeding it with the DAW, the all-purpose studio workstation with its channel strips, tracks, and arrangements. In Live, the track is king. Continue reading »
We welcome new CDM contributor Matt Earp (Kid Kameleon) with a look back at tracks of 2011 you can queue up now, in 2012. Photo (CC-BY-SA) – and shot at – The Global Lives Project.
Make a New Year’s Resolution you can keep: listen to great music every day. After all, providing creative input to yourself is a big part of your role as an artist.
We’re joined by San Francisco’s Kid Kameleon, who’s both one of our favorite artists and one of our favorite music journalists, for a look back at music from 2011 with not one but two mixes. Here, Kid Kameleon, aka Matt Earp, shares his top picks alongside some of the reasons he selected it. We’re at a New Year’s Eve of a different kind – this time in mid-January is always a time at which we’re inundated with new gear.
Amidst that tidal wave of gear lust, it’s worth taking a step back to remind ourselves of the real goal, music making. From the shores of California to music makers all around the globe, this Kid covers all the bases of electronic sound production. Enjoy.
Now, as many of us return to the work grind, it’s a chance to give our ears some fresh inspiration.
2011 Albums
Shigeto – Full Circle Remixes (Ghostly)
Stellar remixes from the best of the best of the beats.
They Live – Cancel Standard (Exit)
Spooky abstract drumstep from Consequence and Joe Seven. Best DnB album in years.
Guess who’s gotten really bad at keeping a lid on upcoming product announcements? The manufacturers.
We’re suddenly utterly awash with teasers. Yes, it seems from intentional leaks to advance campaigns, we’re now destined to see every significant new piece of music gear before we see it, cast in shadows and partial photos and more. Apparently, the folks doing publicity think that this will cause people on the Internet to talk about them. They’re … right, in fact. And with the biggest American trade show for music gear landing next week, we’re in a flood of stuff.
I would willfully ignore such things, but I think it’s worth a quick round-up just to remind ourselves which booths we should visit next week in Anaheim at NAMM. And amidst more predictable teasers, the other good news is, the synths just keep on coming and coming. Who would have thought it? 2012 could be the year of the synth – again. (Even with MIDI DIN, no less!)
CDM is proud to bring you all this news, last. (I made the coffee and everything, but then seemed not to actually post this stuff when it arrived.)
Metasonix, the maker celebrating the mad science of tubes for making wonderfully-terrible noises, reveals to CDM that next week they’ll unveil a new Voltage Controlled Oscillator. Behold, videos! From top:
“A prototype R-55 thyratron VCO is controlled with a Makenoise Rene sequencer, with an R-54 VCO tuned to track along.”
“A prototype R-55 thyratron VCO tunes along with an R-54 VCO, both driven with the same CV.”
Analog: you can scare small children with it. In a good way.
And as if you needed another reason to visit their booth at NAMM – or follow along as we visit them virtually here on CDM – Metasonix will have this prototype at the Big City booth. Big City Music, a California treasure trove of boutique music hardware and analog goodies, is a place I’m always willing to evangelize. Metasonix writes CDM:
“This is a prototype, the finished ones will be slightly different.
If people want to see more, the R-55 will be on display at NAMM, at the
Big City Music booth (6735). I won’t be there but Josh can demo it.
They are expected to ship May 2012.
BCM is getting an exclusive distribution on these and the quantities will be limited. ”
For years, since the launch of Ableton Live, many have waited for a worthy rival, something that combines production and live performance for music users. Live isn’t without alternatives – Renoise, for instance, has earned some fans, though it isn’t necessarily built for live performance. But few provide the same real-time workflows.
Bitwig, based in Berlin as is Ableton and featuring some Abletronic veterans, today took the wraps off its own Bitwig Studio. The good news is, it’s looking as though it might shape up to be a viable tool for DJing, performing, and making music. The bad news is, in a market already crowded with lots of similar tools vying for your attention, the first release will look more familiar than radical. That is, it looks and works a whole lot like Live. There’s an Arranger view, a clip launching view with scenes, a tray on the bottom with effects and instruments (they’re even called Devices, like in Live). The screen layout, and even specific interface widgets and channel strip arrangements are all straight out of Live.
It’s not just a little like Ableton Live, either – it’s in some cases a direct clone. Nested drum machine Devices, for instance, work in a way that I’ve never seen out of Ableton Live. A channel strip similarity or two is almost inevitable; here, though, lots of little details add up to something that feels like Ableton, but didn’t come from Ableton.
What that means to you may depend on what you want: whether you just want an improved Ableton alternative that works like Live, or whether you want something more fundamentally different from Live as an alternative.
If you want “Ableton Plus,” Bitwig does take on features Ableton is missing. For instance:
1. Linux support. In fact, right out of the gate, this could quickly be the answer for Linux users waiting for something they could use without booting to Mac or Windows.
2. Proper multiple document support. You can share content between projects in Ableton, but here you can actually open and freely exchange media with multiple files at once.
3. Mix audio and MIDI on the same track. Tracks are content-agnostic.
4. Per-note automation, with the mixed MIDI and audio, promises more detail-oriented editing. Continue reading »
Touchable tablets may be all the rage at the CES trade show, showcase to consumer-friendly gadgetry. But quietly, developer Sensomusic has accomplished multi-touch control of an open-ended music system on standard-issue PCs and accessories. They’ve pointed the way to just what this mechanism could be.
The latest video isn’t terribly easy to see, but it realizes something that has been the dream of fans of the music control protocol OSC (OpenSoundControl). “Learn” functionality lets you touch a control, then assign that control to something in your music software. But because these functions have relied on MIDI, they’ve generally been a bit arbitrary – touch one thing at a time, get a number for that thing, then assign that number to a controller. It works well enough, provided you step through each control. OSC promises to do more, though: an arbitrary touch controller on, say, your iPhone (or anything else) can have a plain-English name. And you can see multiple parameters appear on the screen at once, so that a sensor or multi-touch pad could have all its messages pop up at the same time.
Finally, Usine does OSC Learn correctly, with messages that pop up with names and get connected to whatever you like. I still think there’s more potential here to be plumbed, but it’s a great step.
If you don’t follow why that’s cool, check out another mapping notion from last year – here using a touch panel to make any graphic playable. And at the end of this story, check out the clever multitouch gesture recognition they’ve added.
Again, all of this you can do with standard-issue hardware – Apple iOS hardware, if you like, controlling a PC, or non-Apple hardware displays with touch or Android devices and the like. (Unlike the Emulator we saw earlier today or the original Lemur device, it’s a software solution that works with your hardware of choice.) More to watch:
Answering the question on everyone’s mind, “how could we form a band using nothing but Stylophones, and what timbres would result?”, the Los Angeles-based troupe LA Stylophonic here plays original music for the stylus-controlled electronic instrument. Adding that many Stylophones together produces a sound that can best be described as … well, unique, certainly. Composer Paul Fraser does actually give them some musical meat into which the ensemble can sink their teeth, with a minimal music-inflected, rhythmic composition that lets that buzzy, edgy sound fly. I love it.
If you think this group is alone, though, you’re sorely mistaken. Stylophone seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts, as tracked by the superb: http://www.stylophonica.com/
Synth legend Vince Clarke bought a new stylophone for his tour. Celeb Mark Ronson jams on one on a national British talk show. Electronics lovers are building their own, using Arduino and kits. There’s a boutique retailer online that caters to those who believe only the original Rolf Harris model has the authentic sound. (An admirable philosophy, if a bit akin to searching out only high-end kazoos.) And a relaunched model is regularly out of stock, thanks to surging popularity. Not bad for an electronic instrument invented before humans traveled out of Earth’s orbit.
What I do enjoy about the hipster (nerdster?) troupe wielding their Stylophones above is that there’s some compositional intent – ultimately, that’s what lets any instrument shine. Thanks, Paul! (Directed by Nick Flessa – a moving portrait, indeed.)
Peter Kirn
Jaymis Loveday
James Grahame
Primus Luta
michaeluna
Kim Cascone
Ben Long
Tom Whitwell
John Jacobus
Chris Stack
Marsha Vdovin
Markus Schroeder
Matt Earp
Kristin Trethewey