In the Pocket (Rhodes and Moog Light Paint) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

Fantastic, hip, soulful keys couple with brilliant stop-motion editing, as a Moog and Rhodes keyboard are splashed with light painting, in this new music video from Ethan Goldhammer. (See his blog for more.) It’s the perfect example of how a much-seen technique can retain its novelty when used creatively, especially as the sound itself seems to dance in light-up oscilloscope patterns.

Background:

Original music by Ethan Goldhammer and S. Burke.
Time Lapse footage shot in August 2008 on Block Island, RI.
Stop motion and light paint September 2008 in Cambridge, MA.

The lesson here: gear pr0n and special effects work perfectly when they visualize the way we feel about our musical objects and sounds.

Okay, so how did he do it? Ethan responds:

Ableton all the way. Recorded as loops with an [Akai] apc, then arranged later. The secret is also, making the animations, rendering them in [Final Cut Pro] but then WARPING them in ableton to the proper timing and bouncing them back to FCP.

Nicely done. Of course, this is why some audiovisualists have turned to Sony Vegas for Windows – formerly developed by Sonic Foundry, Vegas is actually half audio, half visual software. On the other hand, Live is a comfortable and flexible tool that does many things Vegas can’t.

Ethan also has a beautiful rendering of “Air on a G String,” the second cut from the legendary Switched on Bach. Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, please don’t stop Ethan; I’d love to see more collaboration instead.

Air on a G String (Oscilliscoped) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

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?

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=116396

It’s good to know that, even as Ableton Live use has spread, us computer music folk are really not normal.

Via Tara Busch on Twitter of AnalogSuicide.

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:

Part 2:

Our friend Dennis DeSantis of Ableton offers his own take in a video shot at NYC-based music tech learning center dubSpot. This is a pretty good conceptual overview of what the whole thing is about.

Basically, what I’m hearing is that people used to previous versions of Warp Markers, while they find it confusing at first, do like the new system once they understand how it works.

Controllerism

Mark Mosher has been doing fantastic tutorials on his site Modulate This. For one thing, he’s got tips for getting Wacom tablets to work in Live 8 and finally getting text entry support, which means Kore works properly in Live at long last (among others).

Best of all, he has a tutorial that demonstrates how he’s putting together all his controllers – the Notation ReMOTE SL with Automap and the Akai APC40 – and making them function more effectively using some subtle controller changes in Live 8.

What’s interesting to me is that this isn’t so much about unique, proprietary stuff added to the APC integration, but basic feature improvements in Live itself, which could help you be more effective with other controllers, as well. That’s the kind of functionality I like to see, because it helps everyone.

All of this is great, but we are getting a little heavy on the Ableton-only video tutorials. It’s time to pick up the screencasting tools and demonstrate other tools, too. I’ve got some time blocked out this summer for the task. Requests?

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.

dubSpot, the West Coast + East Coast music technology training center is doing an eight-city tour of the US to talk about Ableton Live 8 and the Akai APC40 controller. They’re enlisting some of my favorite people to do the workshops. I like the curriculum: it’s not just “here’s how to use Live,” but a real focus on music production, finishing actual music, and pushing the envelope with live visuals, onstage performance and controllers. We also have a $25 discount exclusively for CDM readers if you want to attend.

I want to thank dubSpot for helping sponsor CDM this month – their support makes possible our own free tutorial content and artist coverage slated for later in May.

The tour kicks off this week in San Francisco, but will travel to other US cities soon (dates to be announced; stay tuned).

The artists doing the instruction are some folks whose work I particularly enjoy:

• Jon Margulies, author of Ableton Live 7 Power among other things, and the person doing the Live 8 curriculum here in NY. And like me, Jon is a secret Medievalist (he’s played early music at Spoleto).
• Moldover, “Moldy” to his friends, co-founded the Warper series in NYC and the new LoveTech party in SF, and has become notorious for hacking Novation keyboards and espousing controllerism.
• Christopher Willits is an utterly brilliant guitarist capable of morphing the instrument into all kinds of sounds, for those of you who don’t know his work. And he’s been doing a lovely series of tutorials for our friends at XLR8R TV.

… plus a powerful roster of artists: Funkaid for Africa, Dub Mission, Jason Short, Dub Gabriel, and Barry Cole.

The workshop is $125 for one day or $225 for both. If you are lucky enough to hail from sunny San Francisco, dubSpot is also offering a $25 CDM discount if you head to their site via this link:

http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

But we’ll have more for the rest of the world, too – I’m playing with the Warper crew on the sidewalk in front of dubSpot NY in June, and we’re working on a way of doing a live stream to the CDM planet from there. Stay tuned.

Price: US$499 / EUR499 / street US$399
Availability: April/May (also about the same time you’ll see Live 8 – Max for Live coming later this year)

APC 40 FAQs, features and questions [Ableton Forum]

Since they were frequently asked around these parts, I want to single out these answers:

In one of the NAMM videos, somebody at AKAI proudly mentions a secret handshake between Live and the APC. But other reports seem to indicate that this unit just sends out MIDI. Does the device or Live send anything other than MIDI signals?

The APC Sends simple midi messages, and most of the banking and Session View control is handled internally in Live. Connecting another controller and selecting the APC40 preset will not work, even if that controller sends the same MIDI messages.

Will this secret handshake prevent us from turning a Monome + BCR into an APC?

Yes.

Will it be possible to use the APC with Live 7 out of the box with default mapping intact, or will I have to purchase live 8 to use the APC.

We’ll have a point release update for Live 7 with support for the APC40 in Live’s preferences, Live 8 will work with the APC40 when it is released.

So, you won’t be able to turn a monome into an APC – well, unless someone figures out a way to emulate the secret handshake. I’m guessing you curl your pinkies, then do a fist bump …

Of course, there are plenty of other interesting ways of integrating a monome with Live, some of which aren’t possible out of the box with the APC, and more should be possible with Max for Live (and other tools).

Akai was one of the music manufacturers that stole the show at this year’s NAMM trade conference. The simple reason: the APC is a rare combination of a whole mess of colored buttons with a whole bunch of faders and knobs. Now, the APC’s big selling point is its out-of-box experience with Ableton Live. Contrary to what you may have heard, there are people who don’t exclusively use Ableton Live – including some Live users who use other software (drum machines, VJ apps) on the side. Looking at the APC’s layout, you see a combination of stuff that would work for lots of other tools.

The only question: would the APC actually work with other software, or would it be hard-wired only to work with Live? Aaron Liven writes with evidence from Akai technical support that suggests you can use any app you want:

The APC40 is designed to be a dedicated controller for Ableton with specific midi cc’s that are hardwired for Ableton. There would not be a way to remap this on the ACP40. However if you can manually map your sequencing software or plugin to other midi cc values, then you can match this up to what the APC40 is set to in order to have control.

The one catch is that, as this email notes, it doesn’t sound as though you’ll get a template mapping app to choose other templates for other apps. That’s too bad: the Novation ReMOTE line, for instance, also works out-of-the-box with Ableton Live, but if you decide you want to reconfigure it for something like, say, a Native Instruments B4 organ emulation, you can. (In the case of the B4, a template is included, or you can use the powerful Novation template editor.)

On the other hand, very often people do their mapping in software anyway – particularly with VJ apps – so this will mostly be fine. And if the APC does become popular as a music controller, you can count on some template maps elsewhere, too.

The more significant catch is that the APC has only a USB jack — no physical MIDI jacks for controlling outboard gear. And I suspect that some of the features of the APC work via System Exclusive messages, meaning it’ll be substantially less cool when away from Live. (You may have to hack a way of getting those lights to light up the way you want, for instance – though that may not stop anyone.)

CDM has a pre-release date with the APC, so stay tuned. And there are other button- and pad-strewn goodies to look forward to this year, as well (NI Maschine, monome, and new DIY projects we haven’t even heard of yet).

Jay Smith of Livid Instruments may be in the business of making controller hardware himself, but that doesn’t stop him from appreciate the knob-laden goodness of the NAMM show floor. Jay’s own gear reveals a not-so-secret love of knobs and buttons and faders, and if you’re into that sort of thing, this year’s NAMM music trade show had plenty to love – Akai’s APC40 controller for Live, Akai’s MPK keyboard, the Alesis MasterControl, Arturia’s Factory Experience controller for their soft synth emulations, and even another brutish-looking computer-in-a-keyboard, now with pads, from Open Labs.

The shots give you a particularly good feel for what the Akai APC40 is like up close and personal. It’s no accident that Jay himself is a VJ. I really imagine that a number of these devices might be brilliant for running live visuals, though we still have yet to find out exactly how the APC works. I assume it’ll run as a standard MIDI controller outside Live, but I’m unclear on the specifics of what that will mean.

Thanks to Jay for sharing these photos with CDM.

Now I can’t wait to get another look at Livid’s own controller line and what may be next for it; see its wooden crossfader below. Previously:

Hands-On: Livid’s New Ohm Controller, Custom Control Geared for Visualists

When Ableton refers to controllers, they do use “controllers,” plural. So you can expect more Ableton-official controllers coming soon.

Ableton does have a video where you can see more in action. (Video via the terrific audioporncentral.) What I need you to tell me is what you can’t see in this video, so I can sit down with Jesse in New York and cover that leisurely.

Briefly, there, it looks like the APC is ready to do its impression of the scene in Close Encounters. Grab your ARP emulation and Max in Live, and we could, um, actually do that with this device.

More on Ableton’s site:
http://www.ableton.com/touch

Note: no conventional MIDI jacks on the back, which is funny given that they show in some pretty cheap devices.

Ableton has posted new images of the side of this thing. Two footswitch inputs, power, and a security lock (handy for education customers, especially).

Maschine: It Has Hardware MIDI (Sort Of)

I’m only going to say one thing about Maschine: it has hardware MIDI inputs and outputs. A number of folks missed this yesterday.

This to me is a big deal, because Maschine is a really strong sequencer. I still want software MIDI output, so I can drop Maschine as an instance in Kore (or Live, for that matter) and drive soft synths or Reaktor patches or whatever. But while we’re not getting that in 1.0, we are getting MIDI output, so it could be an excuse to drive hardware synths.

Unfortunately, here’s the current situation: the MIDI output ports are only used when the Maschine is in controller mode. You have to be plugged into the computer to use that mode, because Maschine relies on the computer driver for MIDI output. And the sequencer can’t currently transmit out on the MIDI jack. So you do get controller features – meaning you could use as a controller for a hardware sound source, which is good. But as with software MIDI, we aren’t getting real output yet for the sequencer. I’m holding out hope we’ll see this in an update, which is possible – that’s the advantage of doing everything in software.

Akai APC40: It Doesn’t Need Max, It’s Not a Monome … We’ll Test to See If You Lose Your Place

You do not need a copy of Max for Live to get bi-directional control of Ableton Live with the APC40, or even to create custom mappings. In fact, it also sounds as though you don’t need Live 8, though I need to learn which features may be sacrificed in earlier versions. (In fact, word is Live Lite 7 will ship with the APC.)

I think the confusion was that Max for Live will ship with a patch for the APC. The APC won’t ship with or require Max for Live. And Max for Live might as well ship with a monome patch. (I expect by the time M4L is out, monome patchers will have ported a few of those patches so you can use a Live-style interface. Or you can do it yourself.)

For a quick hands-on, Lee Du-Caine did get to try out the APC on the show floor for Computer Music / MusicRadar. It’s nice that he sussed the controls immediately.

This is not a monome. Yes, you can use an example Max for Live patch to perform some sequencing tricks on its pads, and yes, that’s cool. But the real win is Max for Live, not the APC necessarily. If you really want a grid of pads to use as a customizable sequencing instrument, what you want is a monome. You can pick it up easily, move it around (with accelerometers, if you like), and it doesn’t have lots of faders and encoders getting in the way. And my sense is, while monomes were ridiculously hard to get in 2008, that won’t be true in 2009 – particularly with work on the arduinome clone. No, the big news there is that all the features monome inherited from Max patches can now be ported to run “natively” in Live, and by the end of the year once Max for Live has shipped, we should start to see monome take on Live-controlling powers it never had before.

One area to watch in testing. I’m a little concerned about feedback as to where you are and what you have selected, which is critical in a device that selects clips and parameters dynamically.

Good: A red outline on your computer screen in Live Session View shows you which clip you’ve selected. This must have made it into the current build, as Lee notes that he saw it there. (I’m hoping, actually, we can do this even without the APC in Live 8 – I’ll find out.) Good: The new magnification option in Live 8 should make it easier to see what you’re doing on the screen. Not so good: My biggest concern is that one of the nicest features is being able to dynamically select a rack and map the eight parameter encoders on the bottom right to that Device. I use this all the time on my Novation ReMOTE, but I have to select racks with the mouse. Akai gives and taketh away. They give you the ability to select devices with buttons on the device – no mouse needed. But that means you need to know which device you have selected, and which parameters are mapped, and you can’t, because there’s no screen.

I’m holding out hope that the magnification feature will compensate, but it does mean you either need to limit your devices to a couple you can remember, or look up at your computer for reference. And even there, Novation wins again for me with their implementation – Automap now has a huge heads-up display to show you what you’re manipulating on the computer screen so you don’t have to squint at your laptop, but you can use it for feedback. Kore has something similar, in which just touching a controller tells you what it is.

Anyway, enough ranting about that – I’ll test it and let you know if my fears have some ground. The rest of the layout still looks fantastic, of course.

And I do think the APC could be amazing controlling software that isn’t Live – like visual software.