Quick! What do you do in an emergency when you need to re-authorize software for a gig?

Good news: Ableton will not be “evil.” (see photo at right; thanks, Amanda.)

It happens: a hard drive dies, or you lose an entire computer and switch machines. Now, in an ideal world with no copy protection, this wouldn’t be such an issue, but most of us are fairly resigned to some kind of copy protection being a necessary evil. There’s software we rely on that requires some kind of authorization or unlock, if not a hardware dongle. That means you need to get a functioning copy of your software of choice up on your machine – fast.

Ableton Live, for one, has always had a relatively generous demo. It runs unlimited, with only saving and bouncing disabled. I have known Live users to, in a pinch, use that demo to save a live gig – just load your set into a backup machine and play. (For the same reason, I keep a fully bounced version of my sets, in case there’s some problem with third-party instruments.)

Gustavo Bravetti has put together a free, exclusive FM8 drum kit in Ableton Live for CDM readers. More on the kit, FM8, and how to make the most of it, plus our download, at the Kore@CDM NI minisite:

Free Exclusive Download: FM8 Drum Kit for Ableton Live from Gustavo Bravetti

Here’s what the kit sounds like, using the demo clips included with the package (naturally, you’ll want to make your own patterns):

fm8kit.mp3

I love that it’s a synth kit rather than a sampled kit, as you can do things like this — just a quick demo I whipped up, same clips, modified only using synth and effects parameters in FM8, to "mess up" Gustavo’s pristine kit:

fm8kit_2.mp3

A quick survey revealed quite a few Live users I know who use both Operator and FM7 or FM8 from Native Instruments, proof positive that you can never have too much synthesis or too much FM. I know I regularly swap between the two, plus Image-Line’s Sytrus.

The kit is calling out for a Koresound and a full Live Drum Rack, so I’ll see what I can do. But I really do enjoy fabricating drum kits with synths. Whether I do it terribly well or not, I always feel closer to the resulting sounds. (Previously, Gustavo made bass drums and snares with Operator in video tutorials, though I prefer the FM8 sounds he’s done, personally!)

We asked to see inside the Ableton Live sets you use in live performance, and you’ve responded with an overwhelming variety of responses. There are plenty of very practical submissions, from beginners and advanced users alike, which should give us a real sense of the ways in which people are playing Live as an instrument. Naturally, there are also some more unusual entries.

At top: Mark Gutierrez has used the Live arrangement grid as a palette for animated pixel art, with 8-bit game characters from Space Invaders and Super Mario Brothers dancing across the screen. At bottom: Manuel Palenque has connected Live to the patching environment and 3D visual tool vvvv for live, animated visuals. (Manuel, maybe you can tell us – do you output those visuals to a screen, or use them as feedback during your set?)

Insane examples, yes, but they do illustrate what’s possible. Videos after the jump.

Keep your Live sets coming. Grab a screenshot or video and send to:

• our Live set Flickr group or
• email to pictures (at) createdigitalmusic.com

It’s amazing that, even today, relatively few artists release stems when they want to encourage remixes. A new remix contest with The Martin Brothers’ new track “Dum,” on the Dirtybird label, goes further, by providing not only individual stems, but a full-blown Ableton Live set, completely with warping parameters and even some plug-in inserts. That should mean just about anyone can pick up the track and start remixing – and, of course, Live is a big hit with the remix scene. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this, but coming from Dancetracks Digital, which has made a big impact with its Live-ready downloads, you can expect a friendly set to get you started.

Of course, this is likely to create some truly awful remixes, since it’s actually so easy to do it’s even easier to do something terrible. (That includes me, having fiddled with the set for a few minutes. I’ll have to get back to it to do something not bad.) On the other hand, by taking some of the drudge work out of the task and making it really easy to do a mediocre mix, I think this could – ironically – make it even more clear when a remix is done right and stands out above the crowd.

Interestingly, roughly the same week Ableton are backing DTD and Martin Bros., Digidesign is pushing its new Transfuser product – an electronica and remix-friendly instrument for Pro Tools – with The Crystal Method and Remix Magazine. They are offering stems, but they’re not pre-loading a Transfuser set as DTD is doing with Ableton Live:

Remixing Pro Tools: The Crystal Method Contest

You know who Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method are. But the cast of characters in the “Dum” contest is worth watching.

Lots of people play violins. If you pick up a violin for the first time – whether it was an expensive instrument or not – it’ll sound really awful. So, given that music played on laptops is still music, it seems reasonable to assume that it’ll take practice, and that not everyone will do things the same way. There are technicalities to learn, of course – just as with a violin. But there’s also a combination of repetitive effort with originality. Your computer software may not be nearly as elegant a design as a centuries-old acoustic instrument, but some of this surely still applies.

Go out to clubs or concert halls now, and you’ll find musicians and DJs from a broad variety of genres playing live with software. Often, they’ll use Ableton Live, the one product that suggests live performance right in its name. Live is a good place to start, because its Session View is a kind of meta-view of music itself, with patterns, scenes, and interaction. Those clip slots can be played like a “sampling instrument,” and additional instruments can be added to channels. Playing the software requires a combination of performance and composition, even for DJs.

But the one elusive thing about Live is just how to deal with that Session View. There’s plenty of talk in the manual about how everything works, but not what that means musically. You can store clips in channels, but you can only play one clip per channel at once. How do you keep the number of resulting channels manageable? How do you control different musical changes? How do you avoid touching the mouse or squinting at the screen? And, at the simplest level, how do you manage the complexity of clips and channels so that you can perform a set from beginning to end and have a good time?

The Aurora 224 is a DJ-style controller geared for software like Ableton Live. The design is, as you can see, gorgeous: not only is it at the high end of aesthetics in open gear, but it celebrates its DIY nature by exposing the circuit board. It’s USB powered, and offers easy mixing control functions in a 2-channel, DJ-oriented layout. And it lights up and makes pretty colors.

Hack a Day broke the story –

Aurora open source hardware mixer

– but to be clear, it’s not actually a mixer; that is, it doesn’t mix audio signal. It’s just a controller in a mixer layout; any mixing and DJ functions are provided by your software. But it is freely-licensed from the ground up, under a Creative Commons license. (We’ve been seeing CC more and more in music projects, as opposed to the narrower and more programmer-oriented GPL and other licenses. There’s no word yet on which CC license applies to this project, whether it has non-commercial or ShareAlike restrictions, etc.; I’ll post an update soon. See discussion on the Virtual Turntable blog.)

A video with Ableton Live, plus CDM chats with the creators about more details:

Ben Rogerson and the blokes at Future Publishing / musicradar.com in the UK got a nice piece of swag: a Pilsner, to be specific. Thank UK distributor Focusrite for this one (which I assume means the brew has not yet graced Ableton’s office here in NYC.)

They did miss the obvious opportunity to offer an Ableton Live Lite. Or perhaps a liqueur called Ableton Evil (that t-shirt remaining the best Ableton swag ever). “Lively up yourself” I guess appeals to UK audiences. I would have called it Live Lager.

That got me thinking – what other music technology beverages can we make up here? Reaktor already sounds a bit like some kind of energy drink. FL Studio aka Fruity Loops could clearly be a sweet, bubbly soda. Someone could stake out organic tea – maybe MetaSynth. Thoughts?

Ableton Live beer: the ultimate live performance tool [musicradar.com]

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):

Omer Yosha has created a beautiful, elegant interface that uses infrared sensors to control music applications. Touch-free interfaces, of course, date back to the Theremin, but Omer is trying some new things here, creating an invisible matrix of controls in the air. And I love the way the physical object looks. He writes to tell us about the details:

I’m an Interface Design student from the FH Potsdam (near Berlin), i have a musical background, and the idea to create an AirPiano developed as i was playing around with the Arduino board, Processing and some IR sensors in my free time. It was fun controlling MIDI through moving my hands in the air, so i eventually found a way to set it all up in a way that makes sense and that is easy to control.
The concept behind the AirPiano is having a matrix in the air, with virtual keys & faders. The location of each key must be very clear for the user and easily learnt. The AirPiano is therefore only one example of an application that could adopt this concept. Since it is only the first prototype i built, it features at the moment a matrix with 3 layers, 8 keys for each layer. As long as a key is triggered, a note plays and an LED underneath the virtual key turns on (unfortunately it is hard to see it on the videos). The LEDs give the user additional feedback. The device is connected through USB and communicates with the AirPiano Software, which allows the user to assign each key/fader with a Note/Controller number, Channel and Velocity as well as transpose and save/load presets. The AirPiano Software can communicate with any MIDI instrument/sequencer. It is of course a polyphonic controller.
The AirPiano is not only fun to play, it also invites to experiment, to explore endless arrangements and develop new playing techniques. It might be useful for DJ performance, as a music therapy instrument or as a toy.
I’m at the moment trying to look for investors and people that could help me take this idea further. I presented the prototype two months ago in the Hannover Messe and received very good feedback. The concept is protected as a Provisional U.S. Patent Application.

If you can help him, chime in! I’d love to see what develops.

Here it is controlling Ableton Live:

More photos and another video to give you a sense of how this works (it’s particularly clear once you see the software interface):

The world this week lost one of its great musical innovators, Bo Diddley. DIY instrument builders and anyone who enjoys abusing their guitar (or, perhaps, any instrument), you owe a great deal to "the originator." In the service of his unique and powerful expressive imagination, Bo Diddly hacked and attacked guitars, producing for the first time many of the effects we take for granted as part of the guitar language.

And, of course, there was also his signature, rectangular "Twang Machine" guitar, which is just plain brilliant.

I believe the instinct to experiment with sound is the same, whether it’s with acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, DIY creations, or software. So it’s comforting to know that people continue to look for sometimes-bizarre ways of pushing the envelope of what guitars can do. Here’s a sampling.

Virtual Guitar Sounds

One of the wonderful things about software is that it can be used to create combinations that are impossible or difficult in the real world. I talk a little bit this week on our Kore/Komplete minisite about how I like to add simulated Guitar Rig effects to synth sounds, then continue to modify them in the digital space:

Sound Design for Imaginary Instruments: Kore, Guitar Rig [kore.noisepages.com]

As it happens, none other than Keyboard Magazine just did a feature on the relevance of guitar effects to keyboardists and synthesists. Craig Anderton has some terrific tips, plus a spot-on survey of the relative strengths of available packages for different applications. There are some great bargains in there if you’re looking for cheap sets of multi-effects for computer use. You can read the whole article online, free:

Guitar Amp Simulators In Keyboard? [Keyboard Magazine]

Guitar as 8-Bit Instrument

Philadelphia-based artist Animal Style (Joey Mariano) has developed a unique way of making his guitar into an 8-bit, Nintendo-style instrument. Using a custom foot controller and 8-bit fuzz pedal, he feeds his guitar into 8-bit land and triggers pre-programmed chiptune loops programmed in homebrew Game Boy music system Nanoloop, running on a Game Boy Color. That means unlike many Game Boy artists, you’ll never see Joey hunched over the buttons of his game machine; everything is at his feet.

Meta-Harp Guitar + Computer A/V

Derek Bell (known on YouTube for his Ableton Live driver’s license controller and other projects) has been hard at work building the ultimate meta-guitar. Here, his MIDI harp guitar is controlling:

Different patches tuning using touch sensors

Ableton Live’s Sampler as sound source, with Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig 3 for effects

Quartz Composer for visuals, as sequenced in Ableton Live

This is an early demo — he’s now combining this with additional projects for a massive meta-guitar. We should see the results at the music evening we’re hosting at the HOPE hacker conference.

For more on the Guitar Rig 3 hacks, here he is working his way through Guitar Rig presets using onboard MIDI controls on a hacked electric:

Custom Guitar Controls Guitar Rig Directly [kore.noisepages.com]

I think there’s no better way to honor the history of guitar innovation and the memory of the greats than to keep on plugging on whatever it is you’re doing.

Bo Diddly photo (CC) Diego’s sideburns.