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.

Ready for more dynamic control of Ableton Live, on the cheap? My how-to on MIDI Remote Scripting in Ableton Live was just last week, but it has already inspired new scripts for hardware, this time on the Novation Nocturn. (My examples for the tutorial were the Korg nanoPAD and nanoKONTROL.) The Nocturn is also very easy to slip into a backpack or carry-on, and very affordable at US$100-130 street. It just happens to become more valuable with a little user hacking.

Why the Novation Nocturn? After all, Novation touts their own Automap technology for just this purpose. But Novation assumed you only want to use the Nocturn Automap with your plug-ins and not to control Live. Here’s the non-dynamic hack from Novation:

How to control Ableton Live with the Nocturn?

Musician NCKN (”Nicken”) of Aachen, Germany has a better solution. He uses MIDI Remote Scripting to create a downloadable file that will map the Nocturn’s eight knobs to your device racks automatically. If you did pony up for Automap PRO, it’s useful, too, as it allows mapping buttons to Live keystrokes. (Bome MIDI Translator would be another option.)

Complete instructions and a free download at NCKN’s site. Be sure to check out his music, too; there’s some wonderful stuff.

DIY: Automap in Ableton Live with Novation Nocturn

Beautiful ambient-ish tracks with field recordings and acoustic noises blended elegantly into an electronic production:

Back to the controller that has an Ableton logo tattooed on it, we’ve got still more APC40 hacking going on, too. Darren Cowley sends along his Live rig and a video:

APC40 Customization from Darren E Cowley on Vimeo.

The “short” film clocks in at nearly eighteen minutes, but here’s the basic ingredients:

Korg padKONTROL + the free Farmpad customization tool for Mac + Akai APC40 + the mighty, powerful Bome MIDI Translator for more control over events + the now-discontinued Lucifer VST (which I believe has now been replaced with the audio-recording-manipulating Live Sync Recorder.)

There are some really tasty hacks here. Scene launch buttons glitch the sound or impact launch quantization. Controls provide quick access to recording and playing audio loops. Effects are on summed tracks for DJ-style effects manipulation. There are clever tricks for using lights for additional feedback. It’s all proof that no two people really approach Live or even this fairly clearly-mapped hardware in the same way.

Side note: I received a comment from a gentleman who is color blind and therefore can’t see the red/green light feedback on the APC40. Anyone with tips? I don’t think you want to rip out the APC’s lights, for sure. It does really prove that one size can’t possibly fit all in hardware.

CrudBox by Steven Litt at ITP from Core77 on Vimeo.

How much performance power can you pack in a briefcase? What if you could have a magic box that did whatever you wanted?

That’s the question asked, in various different ways, by the artists we’re showcasing at this month’s Handmade Music NYC, Thursday evening 7/16 in Brooklyn. It’s a free event if you’re in the New York area, and we’ll be bringing as much of the work to you online around the world. Full event details:

Brooklyn, July 16: Suitcase Sequencers, Handmade Loopers, APC Hacking, Shake That Egg

Facebook event/RSVP

Join the global Handmade Music group on noisepages

The projects:

Sequence everything: CRUDBOX / STEVEN LITT
The CrudBox is an original hardware step sequencer in a briefcase, which plugs into and sequences everything from cassette decks to power tools and turns them into musical patterns.

Looping hardware: LOOOP-R / RUI PEREIRA
Looop-R is a musical, visual, hardware, software instrument.

Shake the beats: EGGBEATER / TED HAYES
This wireless, egg-shaped controller lets you mash loops, control filters, and play music using live gestures.

Ableton hacking: AKAI APC40, HACKED / MICHAEL HATSIS
Live laptop fans, take note: the commercially-available Akai APC40 Ableton Live controller warped to make new musical performances possible.

Handmade Music is FREE and, as always, made possible by our hosts at Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward creative space, plus our friends at XLR8R Magazine, MAKE Magazine, and DIY marketplace Etsy.com.

Handmade Music’s Brooklyn home:
http://www.3rdward.com/handmade-music/

Handmade Music in NYC and (soon) around the world, @ CDM’s Noisepages:
http://handmademusic.noisepages.com

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).

Direct download:
http://www.warperparty.com/datter/Monomulator0.9.zip

Forum discussion:
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=117307&start=0

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.

APC40 Customization, Performance Tweaks

This is the best video I’ve seen yet with the APC40. The APC itself is strikingly limited for a MIDI device, without even basic abilities like preset switching or the ability to change default MIDI assignments. But because it’s connected to a computer, if you’ve got some MIDI programming skills and time on your hands, you don’t have to stop there. Stray411, the creator of the brilliant nativeKONTROL software for the padKONTROL, Korg nano series, and Akai MPD32 has turned his MIDI hacking superpowers to the APC.

First, he demos the manual remapping technique. But from 1:38 onward, he remaps and reroutes messages via Bome’s MIDI Translator, commercial Windows (and now Mac) software for more sophisticated mapping of MIDI messages. This allows him to create his own dynamic template for control that applies more functionality to the onboard hardware controls on the APC.

I’m not even sure you’ll want to do this – it can make for a more complex control scheme – but it’s impressive just seeing the ideas out there.

Note that this sort of thing should also be possible via any software that does MIDI input and output, including the free Pure Data (Pd) patching environment and Max for Live when it ships in the fall. (I’m not entirely sure how intercepting MIDI with Max for Live will work, though, especially with the hardware handshake to contend with… more on that in a moment.)

Korg fans (and Akai MPD owners), be sure to check out:
http://www.nativekontrol.com/
And see the nativeKONTROL videos:
nativeKONTROL YouTube Playlist

…and really, that deserves a separate post.

MIDI for Lights

Akai left out the MIDI Implementation that’s traditionally included with MIDI hardware (cough), but it does use standard MIDI messages both for outgoing control data (when you move an encoder or press a button) and incoming messages (like Live switching a light from off to amber to green).

I’m going to publish the Missing MIDI Implementation later this week here on CDM, but to get you started, Danny P on the Cycling ‘74 forum has deciphered the toughest part – the messages that light up the clips:

Midi confusion with APC40

And even better, CerebralNektar (of the nativeKONTROL) project has already built a full-blown Max/MSP template for the clip grid:

OK, let’s hack the APC

The Hardware Handshake: First Clues

Ableton has worked with Akai to add a specialized MIDI implementation to Ableton Live, using a set of System Exclusive messages to prevent the hacker community from emulating certain APC features in other hardware. Specifically, this includes several abilities:

• Using bank buttons to trigger different sets of clips in a larger set, without running out of MIDI messages to do so
• Providing a red rectangle overlay to show which 8×5 (40 clip) array is selected in Live
• Sending MIDI messages for clip status back to the hardware (thus lighting up the lights)

Now, granted, as implemented this functionality may be of limited to use to hardware that isn’t the APC40 – particularly because it’s hard coded for an 8×5 grid of buttons, which is a non-standard size. But having talked even to some passionate fans of the APC, I know it’s bothering a lot of people. I think there are several reasons why.

In short, it’s the first time I know of that standard MIDI messages were used not for the purpose of interoperability, but to actually prevent you from using your own hardware. The APC itself won’t work properly with Live if this string is interrupted (and you’ll see complaints on the user forum in which people are having related problems). Also, while the functionality here is hard-coded to the 8×5 array on the APC, that raises another question – why not make a generic implementation for other hardware? Why not a rectangle that shows a 4 x 4 grid for hardware like the Akai MPD series, Native Instruments’ Maschine controller, and the popular Korg padKONTROL and M-Audio Trigger Finger?

In the meantime, cracking the handshake could be useful for owners of the monome or upcoming Ohm64, even with their 8×8 grid – you can use the last three rows for shortcuts.

Michael Hatsis writes (consistent with what I saw running MIDI through MIDI-OX):

from what I can see both the APC’s 2nd string and Live’s 3rd string have 24 bytes, both with bytes 8-23 different each time
- There’s your handshake…

I have set up two max patches that parse and output the SYSEX sent by both the APC and Live. the one called handshake only outputs the unique bytes for both the APC and Live to the Max window. There are more details inside.

Have a download, folks – this gives you some of the MIDI to look at even if you don’t have an APC40:
http://warperparty.com/data/handshooken.zip

I couldn’t figure out what the algorithm was, but then, I’m not terribly good at that sort of thing. So we’ll be interested to see if anyone else can sort it out.

By the way, this is sent in the clear as MIDI messages. There’s no real reverse engineering here. It’d be like printing the secret password for your speakeasy on a billboard at a rush-hour bottleneck on the 101 highway. Nor is there any kind of theft involved. These are capabilities built into Ableton Live, which Ableton has effectively blocked from use with this System Exclusive communication.

In a matter of days since the hardware shipped, the APC40 user community has already done some incredible work. This to me makes a powerful argument for openness – and it says that the same community could do even more if hardware and software used more intelligent communication schemes like OpenSoundControl instead of being locked to the limitations of MIDI.

A Video to Close us Out

To close, here’s a reminder that part of why we expend this much energy on controllers is to make them personal instruments for ourselves. Here’s a YouTube demo that shows people can make the APC, well … shake.

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).