Beat Blender Prototype from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

Sure, Wacom may be trying to get into the DJ market, but watch out for Hamilton Beach. This is a real flea market blender controlling Ableton Live beats with the aid of an Arduino and RFID-tagged fruits. Sadly, you can’t actually blend things (that might do nasty things to the RFID tags, and the blender would have to work), but it’s beautiful nonetheless.

“One-man collective” Matti Niinimäki has been giving us all kinds of goodness from his secret Finnish “ninja hideout,” working on projects like controlling real-time animation with Mickey Mouse’s head with the aid of Max/MSP.

This is only the first draft, so I hope to tune in again as the project progresses.

Ah, Fruity Loops:

The audio tracks are triggered by inserting different fruits into the blender. The buttons on the front panel control the mixing modes and you also have two different types of transformer switches for cutting the sound in and out.

The options are:

* Stir
* Puree
* Whip
* Grate
* Mix
* Chop
* Grind
* Blend
* Liquefy
* Frappé

How does it work?

* Arduino for brains
* RFID reader
* RFID tags inside the fruits
* Max/MSP for converting the serial data to MIDI
* Ableton Live for playback
* Mad skills to pay the bills

Side note: this also demonstrates why Max for Live should be nice for Live users; as I understand it, you could theoretically just drop in a plug-in style Device for inputting serial data, as easily as you can add Beat Repeat. (Speaking of which, maybe Beat Repeat needs an Osterizer Live Pack, complete with a Frappé preset. I get a cut of sales if you use that.)

Now, if I can just figure out a way to make my Breville an ambient music generator so I can make sandwiches while performing and producing. Mmmm… baked beans.

Would You Like to Tap My Box? from kamoni on Vimeo.

Drum machine lovers, you now have the beat gear equivalent of Matt Harding and Where the Hell is Matt?. Kamoni, aka sonic creator, composer, and experimenter Micah Frank, takes his favorite devices out on the road, piecing them together into an epic YouTubular jam.

Doepfer and Korg, Elektron and Akai, plus a lot of other devices make their way around New York and Brooklyn and other parts of the world. Ableton I think figured into editing the video clips in time — thank you, Live, for video. I could point out individual devices, but then I’d ruin your fun, wouldn’t I?

Of course, this could be both emulated and expanded. We could perform a single rhythm, played by MPC and Machinedrum owners around the planet. (You could even get that laptop running on battery.)

I can see it now. Internets, go!

And yes, this does demonstrate where puremagnetik gets all those beats for their line of sampled things. Micah gets his hands on a lot of gear.

Updated: Replaced with a Vimeo link. Google seems to be having a bad week. We like Vimeo better for videos, anyway.

DyNAmic sequencer from Lo-Fi Massahkah on Vimeo.

Ready for some musical genetic engineering?

Much of the sound of electronic music today grows out of the use – and abuse – of specific designs. The electronica beats bred in discos and techno, Detroit and Berlin have a direct lineage to analog step sequencers and the rigid precision of Roland’s early electronic devices. These designs create limitations to embrace and to oppose – just as music notation or theoretical convention did for composers for centuries.

Okay, that’s a lofty way to put it — the question here is, how do you re-engineer music, even an ounce at a time? If you’re a composer a few centuries ago, you make subtle changes to your craft, working inside a convention, and write that down. (Just as with electronic music, there is a layer of separation – only then, it was a piece of paper.) If you’re an electronic artist today, you can likewise change what you’re able to control, and how, playing live. The differences at first may be imperceptible, but just like learning an instrument, the long-term payoff can be huge.

I asked for examples of what people are doing with the Lemur multi-touch touchscreen controller and its recently updated V2 software. This isn’t just about the Lemur – it illustrates what’s possible when the musical device and the controller can flow freely out of a musician’s imagination. That could apply to hardware or software designs well beyond the Lemur.

Mikael Björk of Sweden responded with a terrific example, a “dynamic” sequencer available to all Lemur users via JazzMutant. The open-ended screen layout of the Lemur has allowed the creator to provide all kinds of unusual control over morphing beats, with your fingertips manipulating simulated physics as beats twist around you. It’s not just electronica and sampling and DJing, either – he also has an incredible clip working with a very talented vocalist. It sounds markedly different from the more conventional, Loopstation-style loop performance.

If you could have an ideal drum machine and sample-slicing workstation, taking the physical control of hardware but the flexibility of software, what would it look like? We talk a lot about hardware control of software, but hardware usually comes second – software gets designed first, and then either you have to figure out how to map hardware to it, or someone else comes along and designs gear. That means there’s usually a disconnect in the design and workflow of the two, and most of the time, you have to reach for the mouse to make up the difference.

Maschine (pronounced as the German, mah-SCHEE-neh) was developed at Native Instruments with the goal to design the hardware and software simultaneously, not separately. That’s not an easy goal, and I don’t expect Maschine to be perfect or please everyone. But I got to visit the prototype at NI while I was in Berlin in October and see it in action, and I can say at the very least, the folks who created feel the way many of us do – they love software, they love hardware drum machines like the Elektron, and this is an attempt to be a real hybrid.

So, while contrary to rumors, NI does not have a box that does any audio generation in the hardware, this is a real attempt to fuse the controller and software in terms of design and workflow. The idea is to use the screen for visual feedback (you do have this big, pretty monitor on your desk or notebook), but to be able to work without a mouse.

Maschine can also work as a plug-in as well as a standalone app, depending on how you like to work (or how you want to play live). That means if you’re already in love with something like Ableton Live, you ought to theoretically be able to put the two together. Unfortunately, you can’t yet use it as a sequencer to drive other software, which would be an ideal next step; sequencing is as big a part of what Maschine does as sampling and sample manipulation. (No official statement on MIDI output has been made yet.)

Maschine’s hardware also works as a controller. So, for those keeping score, you could put Maschine next to the just-announced Akai APC40 and use them both to control Live – or Maschine could compete with the APC for your Live-controlling dollar – even before you touch the Maschine drum machine software.

Here’s NI’s intro video, which gives you a sense of how this stuff ties together (and we are officially the first to post it).

We’ll naturally be looking more closely at Maschine soon (I’m going to buy a new espresso maker and not sleep for the next few months). Here’s a quick overview:

There’s a special love among certain Ableton Live users for the Korg KAOSS Pad KP3, Korg’s lovely and capable sampling/effects box. Al, aka DJ Chinkial (see his trippy MySpace page) has a free VST for free as a holiday gift to us all (Windows-only). The basic idea: make a beatbox plug-in for your computer, using the KP3 as outboard controller, complete with visual feedback. (If you don’t have a KP3, you can use any controller, minus the blinkie lights – monome hack, anyone?)

The results are very wonderful: the KP3 becomes a synth drum machine. The only problem: some bugs may yet need to be ironed out, as the plug-in eats some CPU resources and this is a first version.

I don’t have a KP3 to try out that aspect myself, so if you grab it, let us know how it goes. (Your mileage may vary.)

Al writes us:

the info u posted is on one of my first attempts at a vst version of my reaktor beatbox live machine

kaoss64 is a 16 step 64 part sequencer
that triggers the slices of two bar
loops like a sort of rex file player for wavs

oh and if you’d like to try it out
it would work with any old midi controller just wont have the visual interaction

x position is cc10
y position is cc24
pad trig is cc25 but thats just used for visuals

the abcd buttons are the lowest register keys on a keyboard

cheers again and have a good christmas and new year al.

Description

Direct download link Link not working; exceeded bandwidth

Updated: CDM is now hosting the file as kaoss 64.rar

PLEASE don’t link directly to the file without linking to this post! Thanks!

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