"DIY project" may conjure up images of something hacked-together and rustic, but then you see projects like this one from William "Logo." Cheap-looking, mass-produced controllers, begone — behold the luxury US$400 and some construction talent can produce!

Logo shares the project on EM411:

After being dissatisfied with a dozen or so controllers, and due to the lack of quality affordable DJ mixer style ones on the market, I bit the bullet and went the DIY route. Overall it cost around $400 to make (it would of been about $300 if I didn’t make several ordering mistakes and splurge on super nice faders). It was by far the largest electronics project I’ve taken on and have the scars to prove it (aka I wanted to throw it out the window several times). Painful but worth it. I’ve never felt anything so damn hefty. It consists of 16 knobs, 5 faders, 16 arcade buttons, and 32 MIDI controlled LED buttons.
I plan on using it primarily for "crazy" 4 channel chopped up DJ sets in Live and simple sets in Traktor. I’m also in the midst of making some simple step sequencers for it in Max to take advantage of the fancy led buttons.

And, of course, having a controller no one else does? Priceless.

This project makes use of the popular MIDIBox project, but we’re also expecting solutions soon based on Livid’s MIDI DIY control board. Which you choose comes down to the configuration you want, but we’ll have more details on the MIDI DIY soon.

More photos (including electronics pr0n shots of the innards), including those above, at William’s set on Flickr:

MIDIBox

Previously, also featuring increasingly-popular arcade buttons:

All-Arcade Ableton Live Controller, DIY Hardware by The Prevolt

While we’re having a weekend of Live tutorials, here’s another one for you, this time using your iPhone / iPod touch. Now, I’m not sure I’d want to do a whole set like this, necessarily — but here’s a thought: you could use this to do some sound checks out in the house instead of stuck behind your laptop listening through monitors. I’m sure there are other applications, as well. Enjoy!

The secret ingredient this time is i3L (pronounced “eye thrill”), the MIDI bridge app from VJ superstar group artificial eyes out of Turkey. They note that Mexican audiovisual collective Nortec are also making use of i3L (for video triggering).

See our iPhone/iPod touch music tool round-up from earlier this week for other goodies to load up on your device. To me, the iPod touch is the real bargain here; it’s going for under US$300, with used/refurb models going for a bit less — especially given you don’t need a mobile phone contract. Now if only there were a hard drive model…

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!

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?

Since this week has become Unplanned Unofficial Vinyl Week, I might as well keep going. Vinyl with printed timecode is just one path. Here are two examples (one recent, one upcoming) of products that have found other means of connecting digital sound to the turntable. If a product like Traktor Scratch or Serato Scratch Live represent the maturation of the integrated vinyl + hardware + software solution, these two tools virtualize the turntable experience in other ways. And they demonstrate just how much control technology can change in music, turntable or no.

The Numark X2, above, as pointed out by beatfix in comments, is a hybrid of two approaches. It’s a conventional turntable (meaning you can actually hook it up to an amp and hear something, which isn’t the case with timecode-encoded vinyl). But it also uses the turntable to manipulate an MP3 CD. Now, obviously, Numark has missed the obvious next step: why not transmit control data to a computer instead of a CD? The X2, with a street well below US$1000, isn’t new; it’s been around a couple of years. But I’m still waiting for the concept to be applied to a computer output. (Anyone?)

In the opposite direction, the Stanton Control System, unveiled at NAMM in January and due to ship in June, does away with the turntable. The deck, the SCS.1d, simulates the feel of a turntable with a high-torque motorized platter and even a motorized pitch fader. Personally, I love this — and think it could be a sign of other, non-DJ controllers with tactile feedback. (You heard it here first. Uh … but I do expect that to take a while, as tactile control design is hard.)

Updated: Let me sum this up. Ableton may or may not have a vocoder in the works (signs actually do point to yes on that). The best part of this story is the remixed “no one needs a vocoder” video, which encapsulates electronic music’s current love/hate/cliche relationship with the thing. And other than that, there’s a lot of me talking without really have any idea what I’m talking about — which is why I usually don’t post on Sundays. Doh. Just watch the video / sample it in your next Live set.

I haven’t necessarily been following Live’s forums lately, but apparently one of the hot-button issues lately was a rumored "secret" vocoder in a future build of Ableton Live. The myth goes something like this: a camera crew doing a behind-the-scenes look at Ableton’s Berlin office accidentally captures a brief moment in which an unreleased vocoder appears in the bottom part of the screen. I’ve been hearing buzz about this for weeks, but Garret Collins is the latest.

I actually really recommend the Inside Ableton MusoTalk video (German); it’s a great little feature. But, of course, the hint of something new in Live has now upstaged that original video.

Live fans go even further, so that the Vocoder — hang on, it’d need a simpler Ableton-y name, like … uh … Carrier or Encoder — is part of a massive conspiracy by which Ableton keeps you from getting the bezier-curve envelopes you really want. (Side note: I prefer Catmull splines, myself.) And it turns out David Zicarelli was on the grassy knoll working for the CIA, or something. (Another side note: I just got to link to Geocities! And it’s still running!)

It seems zany, but then this is the week when the mainstream computer tech blogosphere is speculating about the likelihood of Microsoft switching to spherical interfaces. (Look out, Apple "i"! And will that get people high, like the sphere in Woody Allen’s Sleeper?)

No One Needs a Vocoder - Henke

Okay, I digress. The really amazing thing is this comes up today, again, when shortly after the original video was widely debunked earlier this year. Here’s the problem: just a few days after the video, Ableton co-founder Robert Henke had this to say about vocoders — hilariously:

Digital turntablism is nothing new. But Ammobox, debuted at the first-ever CDM Futuristic Music Design Challenge, is unique in a number of ways. What creator Nathan Ramella has done differently:

1. He’s demystified digital vinyl timecode. With no previous DSP programming experience, Nathan created his own custom tool for reading vinyl timecode — and explains how he did it.

2. He’s changed the rules of scratching — it’s now polyphonic scratching. As Nathan puts it, "You get a polyphonic sampler that can layer multiple samples at the same time and scratch them all simultaneously." Yep: no more does digital vinyl simply replicate what records do normally. Here, it actually works as a digital instrument, manipulating layers of samples as you go. Check it out running in Ableton Live as a demo at top, though other hosts could work, as well, if you prefer.

3. He’s giving everything away. You’ll need some vinyl, and because the sonic wonders are all built in Reaktor, you’ll need a copy of NI’s modular mad science lab. But the ensemble itself is released under the GPL v2, which could make it a great way to learn more of the mysteries of Reaktor.

Official Ammobox Page

Download the library, free [ Direct Link ], or head to the rabbit hole that is NI’s User Library

Clarification: I should add that part of what makes Ammobox cool is actually that Nathan’s doing the timecode decoding the "wrong" way. Normally, a timecode system like Ms. Pinky or Traktor Scratch reads speed, direction, and absolute position. Position is the hard part, and the part that’s dependent on sophisticated error correction. What’s clever here is not that AmmoBox is likely to replace those systems (that’s not the point), but that by breaking the rules of how you’re supposed to do digital vinyl, Nathan’s created something different and expressive.

Nathan describes the system in greater detail:

Nathan Ramella has sent us a video of a new project called ammoBox. What is it? Well, I happen to know a bit about it, but Nathan has sworn me to secrecy, so I’ll just point out:

• It claims to be the "world’s first stream scratching, simul scratching, sequ scratching"
• Nathan was a co-creator of the Unofficial Ableton Live API (which now lives on Google Code if you’ve been wondering where to find updates on that) — so we know he’s got the chops for hacking
• Yes, that’s Ableton Live … yes, that’s a turntable … no, this isn’t quite the same as other things you’ve seen using that combination.

Any guesses?

Bay Area folk, come see this at our 2:30pm competition (and at the CDM Booth) at Yuri’s Night … and everyone else, stay tuned here and on that site for more details very soon.

My friend Ilia, aka Tonearm, has released his set of Windows XP-compatible shortcuts for Ableton Live. (Got to play out with Ilia last month and hope to do it again.) Ableton, if you’re listening, here’s another argument for more customization of the program.

Even if you’re not on XP, it’s worth having a look and even downloading the ZIP and readme for some inspiration as far as what could be possible with Live shortcuts.

Install the executable for Windows, and you get:

Adam Dworak aka DJ Destruction writes to let us know he’s finished a video review of the ZERO8:

Via the DJ Destruction blog.

About halfway through, he gets to some hands-on demos with the internal effects and controllers, which demonstrates some of what makes the ZERO8 unique. Thanks for sharing this one, Adam!

Adam’s rig — the mixer, a DJ app (Virtual DJ), and use of the internal mixer and effects — qualify him as what is likely the target audience for the ZERO8. And you can see he’s pretty happy using it in that way.

We have heard some dissent, though, from people who wanted to use the ZERO8 for live laptop performance with Ableton Live, or with DJ sets that push the envelope a bit into the live performance area. In fairness, that may not have been the ZERO’s target audience, but as it is a target audience for CDM, I’ll be interested to see what gear can fit the bill.

Also, I don’t like to bring up anecdotal evidence, but do any ZERO owners out there know if Korg was able to resolve the “hiss problem” we heard readers complaining about?

What about the alternatives?

For various reasons I remain interested in the Ecler line. I don’t think it’s immediately comparable to the ZERO, but its focus on combining MIDI control and mixing features make it very interesting to the Ableton crowd. That’s nothing against the Korg kit, but in this emerging category, it may be closer to what this niche wants. I hope to look more at that soon. See our previous story (which also includes commentary on the Korg, so I’m not the only one making the comparison):

MIDI + Mixing: Ecler EVO4 DJ Mixer Specs, EVO5 Update