You’re not, in fact, a lonely bedroom musician with no friends. You’ve got friends. You’ve got collaborators. You’ve got audio and visual artists who want to play with your laptop with sync piped between you, and yet wireless synchronization for laptop performance has often been an elusive ideal. Here, in spectacular fashion, you can see it all come together over WiFi with Ableton Live, a projection-mapped coffeemaker, and everything from percolation sounds to the keypad sound effect from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This just in from Barcelona – a new Max for Live plug-in is making laptops and coffee pots jam in harmony. A proper review is in order from CDM. (Well, once we find a few friends… by astounding coincidence, I’ll be surrounded by Ableton users – visual and audio – next week in Rome. I’ll make it happen.) But that’s no reason to deny you the pleasure of the video now. It’s the best part of waking up.

More: http://www.ooeevv.com/

Some of you are probably already sitting on top of a Max for Live license for your copy of Ableton Live. It’s there, just waiting to do … something. Maybe you’ve loaded one of the many extraordinary patches out there – good move. But as for building your own patches, you may easily have become overwhelmed by choice. Max is a blank slate, and a blank slate that can do everything can make it hard to start with anything.

It’s easy to overlook simple first steps. Max was originally built just to do simple math on messages, before it even had audio capabilities. So that means simple message processing is a great place to start. The Ableton Cookbook’s Anthony Arroyo introduces Max for Live in just that fashion, by starting you out building an arpeggiator. No fancy granular audio processing, no mind-bending processing of the event engine in Live – just some simple, old-fashioned arithmetic. You’ll learn MIDI in, MIDI out, monitoring what’s going on, basic math, and sliders. You can always go deeper after that.

This is the first of more videos to come, all promising to focus on simple devices; I’m curious to see where they go.

Not quite your speed? Here are two more intro tutorials – and one advanced tutorial – to get you going.

Ready to get a little advanced? It’s an older video, but still relevant to new versions of Live – don’t let the date stop you. Here, a serious Max for Live guru goes deep into spectral mixing. It’s not at all the simple, step-by-step approach I’ve just endorsed, but … hey, you’re still with me, and this is fun. Description:

In this video new addition to the Dubspot team Dave Linnenbank, creator of Puremagnetik’s Max Fuel collection of patches for Ableton and Cycling 74′s Max For Live walks us through his Spectral Mixer patch. It allows you to adjust the volume of the loud, medium and quiet parts of a sound and create some very interesting sounds.

Blog post and downloads: Max for Live Tutorial :: ‘Spectral Mixer’ [Dubspot Blog]

Get a whole new Live, for free. Smart users can make it happen.

Sure, just a mere mention of Ableton can bring out angry hordes of Live users waiting for whatever they imagine they want out of Live 9. We can’t comment on Ableton’s internal development process. So, why not instead make Ableton new for yourself – no need to pay for anything, all with free downloads, free tips, and more musical power? (Hint: I do expect an upgrade from Ableton – I, uh, don’t think they’ve abandoned their development efforts – but when you can upgrade your own music making, it’s even better.)

Our friend AfroDJMac, NYC-based producer and musician, has been producing amazing Live Packs over the past year. (In fact, while I expect I frightened away any non-Live-users with this headline, the audio is perfectly usable in any software you like.) Setting himself the ambitious goal of producing one Live pack every single week, he’s done the unthinkable. One year later, he has 52 Live Packs, all free giveaways on his site, all wonderful and unique. Everything conceivable and inconceivable is there: Commodore 64 drums, a Casio MT-68, Justin Bieber (third-ever mention of Justin on this site), water bottles turned into synths, Christmas Trees, Game Boys, glitches and resampling and bizarre sounds, Melodicas and Fenders, the works.

Grab #52 – built with the Korg iMS-20 app for the iPad as a starting point – then lose hours perusing all the other entries.

1 YEAR OF ABLETON LIVE PACKS! AFRODJRACK #52 “KORG-ASBORD”

(I read that initially as SAT word “abscond,” as in “I absconded with your MS-20; I’m very sorry.” If someone can make that pack, let me know.)

So, when you’ve pulled off those 52 packs, how do you one-up yourself? How about by starting all over again with a weekly series – this time, with two-minute video tips. (Seriously, man, can you let us know what you’re having for breakfast?) Episode #1: having learned the lesson the hard way, our hero AfroDJMac remaps the “stop” button on his APC to avoid utterly destroying a live set. (Doh!) Video:

2 MINUTE ABLETON TIP #1: REMAP DANGEROUS CONTROLS

Still hungry for more? We turn, then, to another friend, Austin, Texas-based Francis Prève. When we last joined Fran (who I hear turned 23 yesterday, making him one year older than me), we got to download via Vulcan Mind Meld and the Internet a wealth of tips, sounds, and Live Packs:

A World of Sounds: Academik’s Francis Preve Shares Label’s Music, Studio Advice, Samples for Live

Well, Fran didn’t stop there. His latest addition is a really cool patch, not so much because it manages to steal a sound design trick from Sweden’s OP-1 synth and Sweden’s Swedish House Mafia (though that is nice), as much as because the resulting use of Racks to morph from kicks to leads could help you find all sorts of new instrumental effects. Go. Download. Enjoy:

Free Ableton Instrument: One Trick Pwnage [Francis Prève blóg]

I do look forward to what’s coming in software upgrades – but I can’t wait to upgrade my own music-making first. Go forth. May your set not coming to a screeching halt as you play, may the white noise generator always be at your back.

Quietly, steadily, software has been making SoundCloud upload a standard feature. In some mobile applications, it’s second only to “save” as a feature. That makes getting your music online and shared uncommonly easy. Below, we’ve got the running list for mobile and desktop – and it looks very impressive, indeed, so we can at least get your attention with our own list.

But apparently Berlin-based neighbors Ableton and SoundCloud didn’t want their collaboration to be so quiet. To herald the inclusion of SoundCloud integration in Ableton Live, they’re giving away their products.

• If you’re a SoundCloud user, you get a copy of Ableton Live Lite for free. It’s not the full version, but it is a reasonably capable version for remixes, production, and DJing. (In fact, it does more than the early versions of Live 1.x on which I started using the platform.) That’s a copy of Ableton to some 11+ million users – a very big deal, as SoundCloud’s explosive growth has attracted a lot of users outside our normal music producer community.
• If you’re an Ableton Live 8 owner, you get five months of free SoundCloud Pro service.
• If you don’t yet own Ableton Live – or you own a version prior to v8 – you can get SoundCloud Pro free for 5 months when you purchase a new copy of Live or Live Suite 8 or upgrade your existing copy.
• You can now upload to SoundCloud inside Ableton Live.
• Make a track in 24 hours. From May 14-28, Live users will be able to download a free Live Pack of sounds by M83, Junior Boys, and Nosaj Thing – and once the download starts, they have 24 hours to finish a track. You can win prizes like lifetime software upgrades and SoundCloud service or a trip to Berlin. (This is different from the trip to Berlin I’m giving away, which can be yours if you send in your entry written on the back of a complete Buchla modular.)

Sweden and Germany haven’t gone together this nicely since I was eating meatballs and lingonberry at IKEA in Lichtenberg. (Hmmm… that’s a terrible line. I’ll let you know if I come up with a better one. I’m taking that one out of my pay for today.)

So, okay, the promotion is obviously designed to get people hooked on SoundCloud and Ableton. But it will be really interesting to see whether a free copy of Live helps attract SoundCloud’s non-specialized audience to get hooked on making music. As popular as Live is – and I’m told it continues to grow, even as we wait on the next major release – there are still plenty of people who use sound who don’t use Live or even a similar tool. Apple’s GarageBand helped bridge that audience, for one, by being included free on Macs. On Macs and PCs, as people start using SoundCloud for audio of all kinds (podcasts and spoken word joining music), we’ll see if more music tools can appeal.

SoundCloud and Ableton [SoundCloud blog]
5 free months of SoundCloud Pro for all Live 8 users [Ableton]

That’s the story with Ableton. But if you haven’t watched closely, a lot of software has been adding SoundCloud integration. Mobile apps are especially common, since the idea of uploading to the “cloud” and being mobile with a tablet or phone naturally go together. But desktop apps have been adding integration.

I was curious just to keep up with that list, so I spoke to Henrik Lenberg, VP of Platform for SoundCloud. He gave us just a few highlights. (If you’re a developer and left out, feel free to give us a shout in comments – there are too many apps to be comprehensive.)

Major mobile integrations:

- Apple GarageBand
- Korg iMS-20, iElectribe and iKaossilator
- Retronyms Tabletop
- Native Instruments iMaschine
- FL Studio Mobile
- NanoStudio
- BeatMaker 2
- AmpKit
- Yamaha TNR-i
- Music Studio
- iRig Recorder
and more…

Major desktop integrations:
- Ableton Live
- PreSonus Studio One
- Avid Pro Tools
- Steinberg Cubase and WaveLab
- Cakewalk Sonar and Music Creator
- Magix Samplitude and Music Maker
- OpenLabs Music OS
and more…

FL Studio is another important one – thanks to reader Brandon Adkins for the reminder! It’s especially interesting, as Image-Line briefly had a tool called Collab which was intended to encourage its users to share their work. Now, they get more features – and easier collaboration across different tools and platforms – on SoundCloud. (I will say, there were a couple of nice things about Collab. It opened actual FL files, and had a live chat; I even wrote the thing up for Keyboard, but it didn’t last. Still, SoundCloud and FL could go together nicely.)

I have to ask the obvious question. Does having SoundCloud integration right in an application matter to you? Or would you rather take your time, export normally, and upload separately? And is it as important to you on a desktop as on mobile?

Which of these tools matter most – is any bigger for you than Ableton?

Beyond that, how do you use SoundCloud with your music software – if at all?

Let us know what your online/sharing workflow looks like; I’m very eager to hear.

http://soundcloud.com/peterkirn
http://soundcloud.com/cdm

The abundance of music, and the preceived ease of producing it, comes to some as bad news – or even harbinger of apocalypse. But load up a craft with quantity, and quality is what stands out.

Francis Prève is a perfect Renaissance producer. With years of experience as a music technology journalist and sound designer, his own, signature flavor of tech-house is uniquely focused on timbre. His label, Academik Records, debuted last year at Austin’s South by Southwest, but it’s just now kicking into high gear. (If you are in Austin for the world’s best known week of music, be sure to check in on the second party, running downtown from afternoon past midnight, for free.) Sure, a city like Berlin is associated with such things, but in the Internet age, Texas works just as well – minus the vitamin D deficiency.

Academik Contest giveaway
Lanai Rooftop Party, Saturday March 17 3p – 2a

Francis has rounded up a gang of emerging and known artists for Academik, and while age range and style are loose – sometimes dubstep, sometimes tech-house – what those signees have in common is attention to detail. They’re a veritable faculty in how to use Ableton Live and Massive so that you don’t sound like everyone else who’s using Ableton Live and Massive just because everybody else happens to be using Ableton Live and Massive.

The output is nicely represented in a podcast, mixed by Francis, that very much embodies his style:

Alternatively, check out the SxSW 2012 Chart Francis put together for Beatport.

Anyway, party – if you’re in Texas, go there, dance, have a good time.

But if you’re not from Texas, or you’re avoiding it because all your exes are there (okay, darnit, I’ll stop quoting song lyrics), through The Power of The Internet, we have a bunch of music to hear and tips and techniques and samples and loops and Ableton Live Instrument Racks and Sets to download – all free.

That’s because Francis has been as sharing music and techniques for how to produce it as he has the usual label activities (remix, release). Now, disclosure: I’ve known Francis for a long time, as a colleague at Keyboard. But it’s partly because I know him that I have a sense of that quality of attention to detail – because we’ve spent countless hours discussing the fine points of synth design and production technique, because he’ll call me up to talk about some particular I happened to mention writing, because he even spent hours with me and James Grahame talking about the exact organization of knobs and switches on the MeeBlip. I figure part of my responsibility in this world is to get to know people like that really well. (It happens to be a lot of fun, too.)

As it happens, you can be in on the same conversations.

Analog+Digital, Hardware+Software

One ongoing discussion has been ways of bringing in a few, select pieces of beloved hardware into a software studio. Even before talking about sound, the motivation is clear: it can make music making a lot more rewarding. And we’re not talking wildly-expensive modular setups, either – even inexpensive offerings like the KORG MonoTribe can get in on the action.

A lot of people working with software aren’t clear on just how to make hardware and software integrate nicely. Francis wrote a really comprehensive article on that subject, using his own rig as the subject, for Keyboard recently.

He writes about the process of using Live’s brilliant – and sometimes underused – External Instrument and External Effect devices:

The first order of business was to create custom devices in Live for sending MIDI to a specific synth—for example, the Phatty—then routing its audio output back into that same device via the MOTU [UltraLite Mk. 3 audio] interface. I then saved the results as presets. Thus, when the laptop is docked, all I have to do is drag the device I’d created for the Phatty into a track, and the Phatty comes online…

The next thing I did was create an External Audio Effect device that sent audio to a device but didn’t receive any audio back … by setting it up to send audio but not receive, I can drop it at the end of an instrument chain within an Instrument Rack and send any soft synth into the Moog, SEM, Dark Energy, or Monotribe. From there, the combined analog-plus-soft-synth audio runs from the analog synth back into a free input on the MOTU, to be recorded in Live.

By doing this, I can use Operator, Razor, Kontakt or any soft synth as the “oscillator bank” for one of my analog synths. The whole of digital tone generation combined with the warmth and fuzz of analog filters and the snap of analog envelopes is far more than the sum of its parts.

Francis also describes “hybrid” devices, combining Ableton instruments like Operator with outboard ingredients like the Moog Little Phatty filter and amp — all while controlling modulation and step sequences and such on the hardware with MIDI and Live clip envelopes. (He even talks about how to tame the MonoTribe, despite its – cough – lack of MIDI.)

The full article is online:
The Integrated Synth-Based Studio [Keyboard Magazine]

Free Sounds

Apart from being a producer, Francis has long been a sound designer, working for the likes of Roland and Ableton His free-sampling, hardware-loving, sound design-addicted spirit has been gradually developing a vast selection of free sample packs on his blog. Some come from software (NI’s Razor), some from new hardware (Moog’s aforementioned Slim Phatty), and some from oddities (my favorite being the Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy).

But whereas the Academik Records music will be dependent on your personal taste and aesthetic, here these are sound packs that are versatile enough to bend to your will and needs, and to produce something very different from what anyone else might produce. And that, ultimately, is the point.

So here, all in one place, are those great downloads from Fran’s blog:

21st Century Sawtooth Pad [Instrument Rack/Live Set, Live 7+]

The String Machine [Instrument Rack and Live Set, Live 7+]

Arkade [8-bit emulating Instrument Racks, Live 7+]

Ableton Preset: Wavescraper [Simpler-based Instrument Rack using Saturator waveshaping, Live 7+]

Sine of the Times [All sine-wave Instrument Rack, Live 7+]

Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy [Drum samples, Live set]

M-Audio Venom Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Native Instruments Razor Loops [128 bpm, in Cm | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Moog Slim Phatty Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

As Max for Live has matured, this tool for extending the functionality of Ableton Live has played host to a growing wave of brilliant custom tools – enough so that it can be hard to keep track. This month saw a few that deserve special mention. In particular, two tools help make MIDI mapping and automation recording easier in Live, and point the way for what the host itself could implement in a future update. (Live 9, we’re looking at you.) And in a very different vein, from Max for Live regular Protofuse, we see an intriguing alternative approach to sequencing.

Clip Automation does something simple: it patches a limitation in Live itself, by allowing you to record mapped automation controls directly in the Session View clips. (As the developer puts it, it grabs your “knob-twisting craziness in Session View.”) The work of Tête De Son (Jul), it’s an elegant enough solution that I hope the Abletons take note.

Clip Automation

Mapulator goes even further, re-conceiving how mapping in general works in Ableton – that is, how Live processes a change in an input (like a knob) with a change in a parameter (like a filter cutoff). Live does allow you to set minimum and maximum mappings, and reverse direction of those mappings. But the interpolation between the two is linear. Mapulator allows you to ramp in curves or even up and down again.

There’s more: you can also control multiple parameters, each at different rates. And that can be a gateway into custom devices, all implemented in control mappings. BentoSan writes:

For example, if you wanted to create a delay effect that morphs into a phaser, then cuts out and finally morphs into a reverb with an awesome freeze effect, you would be able to do this with just a single knob…

Again, this seems to me not just a clever Max for Live hack, but an illustration of how Ableton itself might work all the time, in that it’s a usable and general solution to a need many users have. Sometimes the itch Max for Live patchers scratch is an itch other people have, too.

Lots of additional detail and the full download on the excellent DJ TechTools:
Mapulator: An Advanced MIDI Mapping Tool for Ableton

Protoclidean We’ve seen Euclidean rhythms many times before, but this takes the notion of these evenly-spaced rhythmic devices to a novel sequencer. Developed by Julien Bayle, aka artist Protofuse, the Max for Live device is also a nice use of JavaScript in Max patching. See it in action in the video above. There are custom display options for added visual feedback, and whereas we’ve seen Euclidean notions in use commonly with percussion, the notion here is melodic gestures. Additional features:

• Eight channels
• Independent pitch, velocity, and offset controls
• Scale mapping
• For percussion, map to General MIDI drum maps (Eep – darn you, English, we’re using the word “map” a lot!)
• Randomization
• MIDI thru, transport sync, more…

More information:
http://designthemedia.com/theprotoclidean

Also, if you’re looking for more goodness to feed your Live rig, Ableton has added a new section to their own site called Library. You can find specific Max for Live content in that area, as well:
http://www.ableton.com/library
http://www.ableton.com/library/tags/mfl/

This is in addition to the community-hosted, community-run, not-officially-Ableton Max for Live library, which is the broadest resource online for Max for Live downloads:
http://maxforlive.com/library/

Digital: disposable, identical, infinitely reproducible. Recordings: static, unchanging.

Or … are they?

Icarus’ Fake Fish Distribution (FFD), a self-described “album in 1000 variations,” generates a one-of-a-kind download for each purchaser. Generative, parametric software takes the composition, by London-based musicians-slash-software engineers Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, and tailors the output so that each file is distinct.

If you’re the 437th purchaser of the limited-run of 1000, in other words, you get a composition that is different from 436 before you and 438 after you. The process breaks two commonly-understood notions about recordings: one, that digital files can’t be released as a “limited edition” in the way a tangible object can, and two, that recordings are identical copies of a fixed, pre-composed structure.

Happily, the music is evocative and adventurous, a meandering path through a soundworld of warm hums and clockwork-like buzzes and rattles, insistent rhythms and jazz-like flourishes of timbre and melody. It’s in turns moody and whimsical. The structure trickles over the surface like water, perfectly suited to the generative outline. At moments – particularly with the echoes of spoken word drifting through cracks in the texture – it recalls the work of Brian Eno. Eno’s shadow is certainly seen here, conceptually; his Generative Music release (and notions of so-called “ambient music” in general) easily predicted today’s generative experiments. But Eno was ahead of his time technically: software and digital distribution – both of files and apps – now makes what was once impractical almost obvious. (See also: Xenakis, whom the composers talk about below.)

You can listen to some samples, though it’s just a taste of the larger musical environment.

Fake Fish Distribution – version 500 sampler by Icarus…

12 GBP buys you your very own MP3 (320 kbps). Details:
http://www.icarus.nu/FFD/

The creators weigh in on the project for Q Magazine:
Guest column – Electronic band Icarus on whether algorithms can be artists?

The conceptual experiment is all-encompassing. Just to prove the file is “yours,” you can even use it to earn royalties – in theory. As David Abravanel, Ableton community/social manager by day and tipster on this story, writes:

“As a sort-of justification for the price, all Fake Fish Distribution owners are entitled to 50% of the royalties should the music on that specific version ever be licensed. A very unlikely outcome, but at least it’s sticking to concept.

I spoke with Ollie and Sam to share a bit about how the mechanism of this musical machine operates. Using Ableton Live and Max for Live, each rendition is “conducted” from threads and variables into a sibling of the others. The pair talk about what that means compositionally, but also how it fits into a larger landscape of music and thought. Of course, you can also go and just experience your own download (first, or exclusively) to let the music wash over you, an experience I also find successful. But if you want to dive into the deep end as far as the theory, here we go.

CDM: How is the generative software put together? What sorts of parameters are manipulated?

Ollie: The basic plan to do the album came before any decision about how to actually realise it, and we initially thought we’d approach the whole thing from a very low level, such as scripting it all in the Beads Java library that has been a pet project of mine for some time. But although we love the creative power of working at a low level, the thought of making an entire album in this way was pretty unappealing. We looked at some of the scripting APIs that are emerging in what you might call the hacker-friendy generation of audio tools like Ardour, Audacity, and Reaper, but these also seemed like a too-convoluted way to go about it.

Even though Max for Live was in hindsight the obvious choice, it wasn’t so obvious at the time, because we weren’t sure how much top-down control it provided. (As a matter of fact, one of the hardest things turned out to be managing the most top-level part of the process: setting up a process that would continuously render out all 1000 versions of each track.) Although it was quite elementary and unstable (at the time), [Max for Live] did everything we wanted to do: control the transport, control clips, device parameters, mix parameters, the tempo … you could even select and manipulate things like MIDI elements, although we didn’t attempt that. 

So we made our tracks as Live project files, as you might do for a live set (i.e., without arranging the tracks on the timeline), then set up a number of parametric controls to manipulate things in the tracks. Many of these were just effects and synth parameters, which we grouped through mappings so that one parameter might turn up the attack on a synth whilst turning down the compression attack in a compensatory way. So the parameter space was quite carefully controlled, a kind of composed object in its own right.

We also separated single tracks out into component parts so that they could be parametrically blended. For example, a kick drum pattern could be spilt into the 1 and 3 beats on the one hand, and a bunch of finer detail patterning on the other, so that you could glide between a slow steady pattern and a fast more syncopated one. So loads of the actual parameterisation of the music could actually be achieved in Live without doing any programming. Likewise, for many of the parts on the track, we made many clip variations, say about 30, such as different loops of a breakbeat. The progression through those clips — quantised in Live, of course — could also be mapped to parameters.

Finally, by parameterising track volumes and using diverse source material in our clips, we could ultimately parameterise the movement through high-level structures in the tracks. So we could do things like have a track start with completely different beginnings but end up in the same place. We did this in Two Mbiras, which is probably the track where we felt most like we were just naturally composing a single piece of music which just happened to be manifest it a multiplicity of forms. In that sense, this was the most successful track. Some of the other tracks involved more of an iterative approach where we didn’t have a clear plan for how to parameterise the track to begin with, but that fits with our natural approach to making tracks. At one point, we wondered if we could just drop a bank of 1000 different sound effects files into an Ableton track, to load as clips. To our glee, Live just crunched for a couple of seconds and then they were there, ready to be parametrically triggered. So each version of the track MD Skillz could end on a different sound effect.

The Max software consisted of a generic parametric music manager and track-specific patches that farmed out parametric control to the elements that we’d defined in Live. The manager device centred around a master “version dial”, a kind of second dimension (along with time), so you could think of the compositional process as one of composing each track in time-version space.

We used Emanuel Jourdan’s ej.function object, which is a powerful JavaScript alternative to the built-in Max breakpoint function object, and wrote some of our own custom function generators and function interpolation tools to interact with it. Using the ej.function object, we composed many alternative timelines to control the parameters, and then used the version dial to interpolate smoothly between these timelines, resulting in a very gentle transition between versions. I.e., version 245 and 246 are going to be imperceptibly different, but version 124 and 875 will be notably different (we quickly broke from our own rule and started to introduce non-smooth number sequences into some of the tracks, so for example in Colour Field two adjacent versions will actually have quite different structures). We spent some time making it well integrated into Live so that once we really got into the compositional process it would work smoothly and be generally applicable to all of the different ideas we wanted to throw at it. That said, it’s a few steps of refinement from being releasable software. 

Pictured: the master controller device, very minimal, just a version dial and a few debug controls. Double clicking on bp_gui leads to the other figure, a multitrack timeline editor, with generative tools for automatically generating timeline data using different probability distributions.

How did you approach this piece compositionally, both in terms of those elements that do get generated, and the musical conception as a whole?

Sam: Since 2005, we had been working a lot in the context of performance, not only as Icarus, but with improvising musicians through our label / collective Not Applicable. This is reflected in the records we put out both as Icarus and individually during that time, which increasingly used generative and algorithmic compositional techniques as structural catalysts for live improvisations. (As Icarus: Carnivalesque, Sylt and All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible World. Individually: Rubik Compression Vero, Five Loose Plans, Nowhere, Erase, Chaleur and The Resurfacing Of An Atavistic Trait). Our performance software was made using Max/MSP and Beads and we started by crafting various low level tools that would loop and sequence audio files in various different ways, giving us control parameters that were devised around musical seeds we were interested in exploring.

In many respects, our approach was very similar and partly inspired by Xenakis’ writings in Formalised Music, although the context is obviously very different. These low-level tools were augmented by various hand-crafted MSP processing tools which used generated trajectories and audio analysis as a method of automating the various parameters that effected the sounds themselves, the logic being that an FX unit as a manipulator of sound is in some way loosely coupled to the musical scenario it is contextualised in. In both cases above, the idea was to step back from performance ‘knob twiddling’ by using the computer to simulate specific types of behaviour that would control these processes directly (hence the reason why we have never used controllers in performance).

Our search for different methods of coupling our increasing parameter space led us to develop various higher-level control strategies at Goldsmiths and IRCAM respectively, culminating in autonomous performance systems built in the context of the Live Algorithms for Music Group at Goldsmiths College. The autonomous systems we developed used a battery of different techniques to effect control, from CTRNNs and RBNs to analysis-based sound mosaicing, psychoacoustic mapping and pattern recognition. This work resulted in us being commissioned to put together a suite of pieces for autonomous software in collaboration with improvising musicians Tom Arthurs and Lothar Ohlmeier called “Long Division” for the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2010. The challenge of putting together a 45-minute programme of autonomous music really forced us to think more strategically about how it was possible to structure musical elements within a defined software framework and how they could vary not only within each individual piece, but also from piece to piece.

The most obvious inspiration for how we might do this ultimately came from reflecting on what it is we do when we perform live as Icarus. The experience of working up entirely new live material and touring it without formulating it as specific tracks or compositions proved to be an ideal prototype not only for Long Division, but also ultimately for FFD. Here, in a similar sense to the work of John Cage, large-scale structure and form became a contextually-flexible entity, which meant that for us it became to a far greater extent derived from the idiosyncrasies of the performance software we developed and keyed in by our own specific way of listening out for certain musical structures and responding to them in either a complementary or deliberately obstructive fashion (or perhaps even not at all). Creating these two pieces (‘Long Division’ and ‘All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds’) gave us the conviction that we could devise musical structures that were both detailed enough and robust enough to benefit positively from some level of automated control.

Therefore, when we came to start working on FFD, the main question we had to ask ourselves was; within the music making practices we had already been working with, what were the tolerances for automation within which we were still ultimately in control of and ultimately composing the music we were creating? In the end, the framework we set up was comparatively restrained; the generative aspect of each track was always notated as a performance via a breakpoint function and therefore able to be rationalised by us, the variation between different versions of the same track was done using interpolation and is completely predictable and incremental and finally, the entire space of variation is bounded to 1000 versions, meaning that the trajectories of the variation never extend into some extreme and unrealisable space.

More notes on the album:

Web: http://www.icarus.nu
RSS: feed://www.icarus.nu/wp/feed/

Last.FM: http://www.last.fm/music/Icarus
Discogs: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Icarus+(2)

SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/icaruselectronic
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/birdy_electric

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/icaruselectronic
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus/132324596558

CREDITS

Music, Software, Scripting – Icarus (Ollie Bown and Sam Britton)
Mastering – Will Worsley, Trouble Studios
Artwork – Harrison Graphic Design

Icarus gratefully thank the following for their support of the FFD project

The PRSF Foundation (UK)
STEIM (Netherlands)
Ableton (Germany)
The University of Sydney (Australia)
Emmanuel Jourdan (France)

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.

Those are three significant breakthroughs. And it looks like there are lots of tweaks and improvements throughout the tool, many of which I’m sure we’ll hear about as people begin testing the beta. (One nice example: a vertical pane lets you view arrange and clip launching views simultaneously.) Multi-monitor support, while present in many tools, is sorely lacking in Live but available here. Plus, as some readers note, you do get 64-bit support, though that seems an advantage over Ableton that won’t last long.

The challenge is, as a new entrant to the market, your first obstacle is telling a story about what you are. And here, there seems a missed opportunity to make a first impression as something truly different, rather than something “similar, but better.” Ableton Live 1.0 when it was released was a significant departure from what had been seen before. So, too, were the first trackers, the first audio+MIDI DAWs, and the first graphical sequencers. Bitwig Studio isn’t that kind of breakthrough – not yet.

Not that being different is easy, or even always desirable. Amidst so many things users want, and so many expectations they have about how things will work, it’s tough to do something genuinely new without simply confusing everyone and driving them away. But it has happened – Ableton Live’s original release being a notable case. One question is whether you make some sacrifices to release the most significantly-different tools initially, or whether you choose to cover the basic bases to provide a workable solution from day one, and the Bitwig devs seem to have chosen the latter.

The most interesting features remain on the horizon. LAN multi-user jamming and multi-user production are both on the roadmap – features we’ve seen in other tools, but which have yet to catch on. And there’s an integrated modular system that lets you build your own instruments and effects with graphical patching – something seen in various forms from Buzz to Max for Live, but one that could use a fresh take in integration with the tool.

In the meantime, we’ll have to hear from beta users whether Bitwig is something worth a look. You can sign up now:
http://bitwig.com/bitwig_studio.php

We’ll be eager to hear what you think.

Pics:

It’s that time of the year, when the halls echo with the sound of … horrible electronic synthesized Christmas tunes, playing on endless loops from strings of lights and other cheap electronics!

But wait – what if you could take those sounds and embrace their low-fidelity, chippy sounds to more inventive musical purposes?

Turn to our friend AfroDJ, who has gradually built up several dozen Ableton Live racks. The latest samples Christmas tree lights for a festive, chiptastic holiday timbre.

I just put up my Christmas tree and put on some lights that play Christmas songs. The songs are comprised of very simple monophonic melodies, coming out of a tiny little speaker, but as soon as I heard it I was transported back to my youth sitting around the tree late at night. Naturally I had to sample it. So I put my AKG C3000 right up to the speaker and let it play. I selected four different notes to use in the instrument.

With reverb and the wave shaper inside Ableton’s sampler, those samples get a bit more creative. (If you don’t have a copy of Live, you can use the samples and add your own effects chain.)

The results are good fun, and could be just the thing for an improvised track while fiddling with your laptop, the warm glow of Egg Nog spreading through your fingers. Enjoy! (And if you make a track with this, do send it our way!)

Want more inspiration? AfroDJ is selling packs at 50% off through January 1. So take that holiday, and make some music.

Ableton Live Rack #39: Christmas Tree Synth

Sound and light artist, guitarist, Max patcher, and all-around sonically-fascinating guy Christopher Willits has opened up his “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” record on Ghostly to remixing. Halfway through the project, we talk to Chris about what’s going on – and what the results so far sound like. And we share, from earlier this fall, a composition in which you can recharge.

The project begins not with stems, but with samples, the raw materials on which the album was based. Christopher walks CDM through the audio highlights, one sample at a time. Along the way – as with all these samples – you begin to appreciate the process by which Christopher makes his decisions, how he moves from samples like pieces of wood to the finished structure. And of course, by opening these up to remixing, you have an opportunity to hear the work differently in his finished, released form, as well as to find your own, distinct decision-making process. It’s perhaps obvious in a remix project, but what this does is to allow the sounds a life separate from the fixed set of decisions that produced the album.

And that can even change Christopher’s own view of the work, he says. He tells us:

I think it’s fun to play the set like an album. I’ve heard these pieces so many times that it’s really refreshing to me to hear them alone. Now I hear the pieces differently.

That was actually one of the thoughts behind sharing all of these sounds, so people can hear the layers, and if they wish, tune their ears to the subtleties and intention I wanted to create in the mixes.

You can find the remix project at:
http://willits-sample-library-vol1.herokuapp.com/

“The stuff i’ve heard so far is AMAZING,” Christopher tells us. “I can’t wait to feature the best of the best. We’ll be releasing a free comp on [Christopher's experimetal label] Overlap and Ghostly will feature my favorite remix on a free comp, too.” Winning remixes get Ableton and SoundCloud prizes.

Let’s hear a few words from Christopher about the sounds he’s produced.

A Tour of the Sounds

A lot of the samples are about variation of common materials, so there’s plenty to explore. Christopher tells us that just one sample – like this guitar solo – can take on very different meanings with different processing, heard in two variations.

Guitar process solo1-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar process solo2-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

This tone is created from a custom-made Big Muff > BOSS distortion > Fender Twin with a couple power tubes removed for low volume and max distortion. This is a trick that ted from Flipper showed me around that time, and it created the exact orange laser beam i was hearing in my imagination.

Guitar solo long noise-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar solo-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The whole piece “Plant Body” came from this guitar improvisation. With releases like “Folding and the Tea” and “Seven Machines for Summer,”

I set the process to be only the guitar recordings. With this release, I gave myself a new set of constraints and permissions, allowing my imagination to add whatever comes up for me. No judgement on which one is better to me, they are just different. There are infinite possibilities within any process I determine, yet discerning the process that resonates with my true intention is what creates the shapes and forms and colors that feel like love.

Guitar process4 fold-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The drum samples come from:

…my great friend Jeff Pierre – one of the best drummer I’ve ever worked with, and the youngest, as well. All of Jeff’s takes were one take; this sample is shortened from the original length, but you get the idea.

Drum2-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

Drums distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

I just love the lightness and feel of this sound — like the funkiest insects in the jungle, getting down.

Perc1-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Willits-120 by Willits

Someone please make a disco track out of this.

Synth arp-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

Me and my friend Reiko were messing with patterns; then we would find a loop. We were laughing so hard as we were playing this stuff.

Perc-Intend-Evolve-Willits-120 by Willits

Check your volume for this one — probably should have exported it at a lower volume for this set! The heat of this, the crushed distortion, is from a technique called input flipping on the SSL. This is an input flip with the preamps cranked, with odd harmonics.

Ryan (Ryan Kleeman) and I just about lost it when we first input flipped like this for a distorted sound. It became a theme in a sense that resonated with this orange laser beam electromagnetic sound that much of the work stems from.

Synth arp noise-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

You can also hear it here- and a few other places on the record, to a less extreme degree. There is something about this texture that has a cleaning function to me. Washes things off, away, cleans the ears out. Resets your space.

Branches Into Flowers-Willits by Willits

“Could hear many more strings and horns in this piece.”

Guitar2-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this floating feeling.”
Guitar lasers-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“This pattern makes me want to get down.”
Perc distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this kind of generative sound.”
Subconscious Transmission-Willits-120 by Willits

Two samples that were not used in “Light into Branches.” Made the baritone thing in one mode of listening, came back and asked myself, why did I put a baritone guitar solo in the middle of this song? Did I really think that’s what it needed, or did I just want to play my baritone along with this song for fun? The answer was the latter. But here it is anyway.

The ambient layers sample was to create more depth of field in the mix, have it floating behind at a low volume, but it was not doing was I wanted it to, so I cut it out.

Baritone solo unused-Light Into Branches-baritone-Willits-75ish by Willits

Guitar layers unused-Light Into Branches Willits-75ish by Willits

Videos

From the original record release:

More information:
http://ghostly.com/releases/tiger-flower-circle-sun

Soak in a Sound Bath

Another release from this year revealing Willits’ musical approach, “GOLD” is an ambient piece in you can inhabit, in which you can restore yourself, according to its maker:

GOLD is a 24 minute and 17 second sound bath / ambient piece to soak into. Listen, relax and recharge. This harmonic weaving of sound was created with the vibration of affinity, love.

Made with voice, processed guitar, and a low-frequency oscillation out of a Nord Lead synth, Christopher actually encourages people to share how they “used’ the piece and how they made it felt, a kind of design experiment for spiritual being in sound. Have a listen or pay-what-you-will on Bandcamp:

Read up on what he has to say about this release:
New Release – GOLD [Sound + Light - Chris' blog]

Infinite

It seems only appropriate to close with this reflection from Christopher:

After working on this project, I’m realizing so tangibly what I’ve always known — that any mix is a sonic photograph of vibrational affinity, and even with a grounded intention behind any mix, and a very clear outline for a process in which you allow that intention to emerge, there are infinite possibilities of expression. Infinite. It is so beautiful.