It’s the little things that keep you happy sometimes. The Sunday Soundtrack blog has an interesting idea for tracking work on the MPC — write it down. (I have to say, I miss having paper notes as I did when I was making hard-copy patch diagrams of my Moog and Buchla modular creations in college.) This fellow has a printable template you can use yourself if so inclined – and, of course, it’d work with any 4×4 grid, not just the MPC.
Keep anything on paper in the studio yourself – music notation? Lyrics? To-do lists? MIDI maps? Doodles of made-up creatures to keep you company? I’d love to hear how you work.
Out of the box, Akai’s APC40 has some lovely features for plug-and-play control of Ableton Live, with clip triggering, track control, device control, and dedicated buttons for command shortcuts. It also sends and receives standard MIDI messages for every last button and encoder. But what if you still want more? What if you need more controls to do multiple duties, or get bored with simple clip triggering and decide you want additional interaction? Enter the hackers. Already, using MIDI, clever APC40 users are squeezing more function out of this box. And while it isn’t solved yet, there are some clues to the infamous hardware handshake – a System Exclusive string exchanged between the APC and Live that locks certain Live software features to the APC and not to other hardware you might like to use.
Manual MIDI
Before we get too fancy, for power tricks, your first stop should be Akai’s own site: Tips and Tricks June – APC40
Live allows you to manually override the APC’s dynamic control assignments using the standard MIDI Map. Let’s say you don’t use headphones for cueing. You can select the MIDI Map, pick a control to which you want the Cue Level encoder to be assigned, and you’ll manually assign just that control – the rest of the dynamic template remains in place. Akai has some tips for scrolling through scenes, selecting scenes with one of the two footswitch jacks on the back of the unit, scrubbing and nudging clips, fine-tuning tempo control, and more.
monome Emulation for APC40 and Korg padKONTROL
Our friend Michael Hatsis of trackteamaudio has been hard at work in Max/MSP patching an emulator for the creative patches for the open-source monome hardware. (Thanks on Twitter to ruaridhTVO, too.) By translating from the (and, cough, superior) OpenSoundControl messages the monome supports natively to MIDI, the emulator supports not only the APC but Korg’s padKONTROL, as well. This opens up the use of the APC for creative microsampling and other tasks.
Video demo at top (updated late Sunday night, so if you saw this over the weekend, here’s a tighter version).
And be sure to check out the Java- and Python-powered open-source library for the monome on which Michael’s work is based: net.loadbang.shado
You’ll find plenty of documentation in Michael’s download, and the hope is that this is just the beginning — you Max patchers out there (and Pd, if we can port this) can keep hacking on it and try out some new ideas. One reason you might want to keep hacking on the padKONTROL is that you could find uses for velocity – unlike the monome and APC, Korg’s 4×4 drum pads are velocity sensitive.
I really have no words for this one, other than there’s a hilarious APC40 meme happening on the Ableton forums. Is it love? Disdain? The APC as the new “All Your Base” for the Live warping set? Does it really matter?
With Live 8 in the hands of Ableton fans, two big questions remain for a lot of aficionados: first, how the heck do you deal with this new warp marker interface, and second, how can you make controller mappings for hardware more effective? Thanks to some enterprising, expert users, we’ve got video solutions to each of those problems.
Warp: Engage
The new Warp Mode in Live may actually be friendlier to new users; it’s existing users, accustomed to the previous way of working, who seem thrown for a loop. (Erm… excuse the pun.) I’m at a bit of a disadvantage myself in that I tend not to do a lot of warping/remixing. But Medway Studios has a set of tutorials specifically geared for people wanting some tips on how to assimilate the new working method:
The Akai APC40, the result of a collaboration between Akai and Ableton, has made its way into the wild. Here’s the first hands-on video – I have to say, I love the green lights. Who would have thought that Matrixsynth green would be the shade this year? You can thank AudioMIDI.com for getting the loaner out in the world.
Not a whole lot to see in this very first video, but it does give you a feel for what the hardware itself is like.Update: AKAI requested that the first video in this story be removed by its author on Vimeo, so we no longer have a video to embed.
The integration between software and hardware we should see revealed more over the coming weeks. I’m hoping to get my hands on one myself in the near future; I haven’t yet.
Of course, the APC isn’t alone. I’m still eagerly awaiting the Ohm64 from Livid, a beautiful controller with a wooden body, made with care in the US. Unlike the APC, the Ohm has a customizable MIDI response — the way the hardware itself responds is programmable. And, of course, there’s still the classic monome (site | cdm tag), open source hardware with an elegant minimalist design. Custom Max control patches have made the monome a favorite, especially for those with the chops to not only use the community-made patches, but build their own – by coincidence, the monome folks just posted a link to a library of Max monome objects. For both the Ohm and monome, it’ll be easier and more powerful to integrate Max objects with Live when Max for Live ships later this year. Even the APC will get its own custom patches. And, as Hédi points out, there’s also the elegant, compact, solidly-built Faderfox, which could also get a new lease on life with Max patching.
The upshot of all of this: even if people are using the same controller, they won’t necessarily use it the same way, which is how it should be. Stay tuned.
Update: this just in – a second video of the APC, this one sent to us by our friend Stephan Vankov (tetmusic.com). We’ve seen Stephan before, tearing up a wild audiovisual remix of The Karate Kid with the crew at the CDM NAMM party last year. It’s nice to see the APC out of the trade show floors, naturally.
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