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?

Ableton co-founder and general visionary Robert Henke (also known as Monolake) gave a full-length workshop in New Zealand recently. If you’re up for 90 minutes of discussion of musical and sonic techniques in Live, plus a look at his unique Monodeck controller, the whole video is there. But that’s not the main reason the video is making its way around the Interwebs. It’s because there’s a bit of a bombshell right at the beginning of the footage:

He says, outright, you don’t need 64-bit sound to get “audio quality.” You don’t even need 16-bit all the time.

Okay, maybe that’s not such a radical thought in and of itself. Oh, yeah, except for one thing — the 64-bit summing engine he’s talking about happens to be the one in Ableton Live 7.

Video by Tom Cosm, via AudioLemon

Some people are already assuming this means Ableton has somehow betrayed them (well, in fairness, Robert does say the summing engine is just a marketing gimmick). And what about Cakewalk? Robert doesn’t mention them by name, but the only DAW that’s been trumpeting 64-bit mixing and signal processing is SONAR.

In fact, far from conflicting with Robert’s vision of sound, Ableton Live 7 really embodies it. And as for the Cakewalk thing — well, that’s complicated, because the term “64-bit” applies to a number of basically unrelated topics dealing with sound and computing. But none of that matters as much as one thing: if it sounds good, it is good.

Squarely in the “things Ableton Live was not necessarily built to do”: animating visuals, one frame at a time.

Cousin Throckmorton whipped up a retro visual feast of Space Invaders, Pong, and other games classics, using MIDI to step through frames individually.

You can MIDI sequence Live’s locators to jump between frames, thereby giving the effect of animation. Sprites/frames are drawn using blank MIDI clips; unfortunately, the resolution is limited by the Y-axis size, as Live doesn’t allow you to resize that. Live’s skins are somewhat tied to MIDI already, so you can “ride” the skins field to change background colors (it updates on midi notes on(?) Audio track is made of samples of video games, trails effect at end achieved via hacked Live skin. Sets/skins available for you to toy with at my myspace: myspace.com/cousinthrockmorton

Mind you, this is unlikely to shake the visualists on Create Digital Motion from specialized tools for visuals — and you could just as easily (uh, scratch that for far more easily) use MIDI to trigger a visual app. But the work is really incredible, and I think as Live grows in ubiquity, users will increasingly show their Live chops by hacking harder than ever before.

And for the record, this is the same Throckmorton who gave us a ribbon controller made from a drivers’ license, a drum made from a laser, and pennies as drum pads, among others. More MIDI-as-visual-control tips, too:

db3ll Channel

Prescient spam comment: “i am so lonely, i just broke up with my ex” says cutechick90201. Worry not, uh, imaginary cutechick. You’ll be surrounded by boys as you seduce them with the siren song of your drivers’ license.

Thanks, Cousin!

To all of our readers here at Create Digital Music, thank you for 2007. It’s been fantastic to sit at the helm of CDM and get to hear from all of you, from news tips to musical and technological projects, and get to meet you out in the world (at Macworld San Francisco, Maker Faire San Mateo, Handmade Music events here in New York with Etsy and Make, in Chicago at a demo swap, and even in Australia at a coffee shop).

I’m wrapping our own 2007 in review story, but which stories did Webizens choose as the most significant? Here’s 2007 by the numbers, according to our server. First, the most visited stories of the year:

Top Ten Stories By Visit

The top ten start out with Yamaha’s unveiling of the long-awaited TENORI-ON instrument, a tool for mobile recording, a terrific free tool for Windows, and an unusual DJ take on mobile music players. Apple’s Logic Studio manages not to sneak into the top ten, I suspect because it can’t compete with apps that run on two platforms instead of one. But Reason 4 falls just short of matching CDM reader favorite Ableton Live:

Ableton Live 7 was officially announced today. I’m here in an airport on a layover, but that gave me an idea: what does this mean, in plain English, without mentioning any specific features (with a couple of key exceptions), in a way you could explain to a friend in an elevator.

• The core sound engine is improved, including higher-quality effects. Most noticably, the Compressor sounds fantastic.
• Hardware lovers can now insert physical instruments as though they were plug-ins.
• Time signature changes and tempo nudge should please live musicians and DJs.
• A Drum Rack feature consolidates a whole bunch of workflows, from slicing up beats and assigning them to pads to easily creating complex chains of samples, synthesis, and effects on individual pads. This means remix artists, live performers, and DJs will all be able to more flexibly create beats.
• In addition to the standard Live version, there’s now a Suite for a few hundred extra that bundles in more instruments.
• You can also pick up new instruments a la carte, from a synth that models real-world instruments to sampled drums and an orchestral library. Ableton’s innovation here is reworking these instruments with their hallmark minimalist, consistent interface.

In short, Live 7 sounds better, is more flexible about rhythm and tempo, does the usual Ableton yearly release housecleaning, and introduces a simple but deep new method for working with virtual racks of drum pads.

Live Suite does for Abletonland what Logic’s instruments do for Logic Studio, but refined into a common set of interfaces and available a la carte (which could be good news or bad).

That’s the preview; more hands-on coming soon. Now, on to Australia, assuming my ground crew can fix my 747’s brakes. (Hmmm… you know what? I’ll wait rather patiently for that.)

Burning questions list: Okay, like 30 seconds after that was posted, someone already has a really good, technical question. So leave them here, and I’ll try to get to them over the coming weeks.

I expect I’ll be somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on my way to Australia when it happens, but now that Ableton has closed its beta list and sent out a release candidate, you can expect an official Ableton Live 7 release really soon now. (I can share that, as the forums and beta list said as much!) Francis Preve has a good Cliff Notes-style guide to what’s new for Beatportal. I’ve been using it in performance and hope to do that some more on the road, so stay tuned.

You can now go ahead and buy Live 6 and get the upgrade, so no need to wait.