Here’s how to set up your own system in a similar hands-free operation style, for about US$10, without having to solder anything. It’ll take you about an hour once you gather the parts required, or less. No joke.

You will need:

• A QWERTY keyboard, preferably with a USB connector. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy an adapter to fit your laptop, which costs extra. You can get one for $7.50 at AllElectronics.com, but you can find them even cheaper at your local thrift store’s “technology pile.” I got mine for $2.
• A flathead screwdriver.
• Ableton Live. Ed.: Live is a perfect choice here, but you may find this useful with other music apps, as well — or even in a VJ set. -PK
• A free keyboard-mapping utility called Autohotkey (if you’re running Windows). If you’re running Mac, the program to use is calledIKey.

  That’s it. Here’s how to make it go:

  
  

  Above: Steps 1-2. Simple enough.

  1. You’re going to remove a significant number of the QWERTY keyboard’s keys, leaving only those spaced far enough apart to operate with your foot. Identify which keys you want to keep with a magic marker BEFORE you go hog-wild with the screwdriver, otherwise you’ll lose track of which is which. I ended up with 12 remaining keys, in two rows. Your feet may be smaller or bigger, so experiment with it.

  2. Glue some squares of larger, stiff material to the keys to give your foot a bigger target. I used some plastic lenses (20 cents apiece at American Science & Surplus) and hot glue. Epoxy or a plastic welding cement might work better in the long run.

  3. Plug the keyboard into your computer and boot up Ableton Live.

  4. Download and install either Autohotkey (WIN users) or IKey (Mac).

  5. Here’s the almost-tricky part: In Ableton Live, you need to create a new project with six audio tracks. Arm recording on all tracks. Turn off monitoring for all tracks except one.

  6. Use the keymappping function (click the “KEY” button in the upper right hand corner of Live’s screen) to assign a keystroke to each track’s “record/play” button. It doesn’t matter which keystrokes you assign, because we’re going to be remapping them anyways. For this example, the keys I used were !,@,d,h,k, l.

  7. Create a new script with Autohotkey and enter something similar to what’s pictured below. The 12 keys left on your QWERTY should be put at the start of each line. The idea is that as each key is depressed, Autohotkey remaps those into a sequence of keystrokes.

  I chose to have my top row of buttons select the track, delete whatever’s there, and begin recording. The bottom row of buttons hits “play” on the corresponding track, which stops recording and begins looping on the corresponding track. You can re-trigger loops this way also.

  Here’s an image of my keymaps in Live and the AutoHotkey script I made. Pretty simple, all things considered. I would be happy to share my blank Ableton set and accompanying AutoHotkey script to any windows users who need a little help getting started.

  
  

  If you’re running Mac, here’s an idea of what you’ll have to do using IKey. It’s very similar but slightly different. For instance, we permanently glued the shift key down, to skirt some of IKey’s trigger-key rules.
  

  8. Save the script, activate it (you’ll see the AutoHotKey icon appear in your taskbar), and you’re good to go. It’s that easy.

  The end result? Not too shabby:

  You can hear a track recorded by myself and bandmate Cameron Moore using two MIDI-linked Ableton Live setups here.
  Note: Cameron runs Mac and I run Windows, and we had no issues.

  Check the forums for a more in-depth discussion, and feel free to ask questions. Also, if you decide to undertake this project, please post your results!

  ]]> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/08/02/get-loopy-with-the-diy-10-ableton-footcontroller-no-soldering-required/feed/ 60 http://createdigitalmusic.com/2006/12/29/custom-digital-wind-instruments-laptop-orchestra-free-software-dorkbot-nyc/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2006/12/29/custom-digital-wind-instruments-laptop-orchestra-free-software-dorkbot-nyc/#comments Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:44:35 +0000 Peter Kirn http://createdigitalmusic.com/2006/12/29/custom-digital-wind-instruments-laptop-orchestra-free-software-dorkbot-nyc/

  Dorkbot is the geeky cultural phenomenon that somehow spread from the Computer Music Center at Columbia University all around the world. Normally, the presentations tend toward general electronics, but custom wind instruments, laptop orchestras, and open source audio rearrangers are all on tap for a special all-music Dorkbot coming up this week. If you’re here in New York, you’ll want to mark your calendars for Wednesday, but thanks to the power of the Interweb, we’ll make sure you get the full experience virtually.

  Here are the details (and for those of you everywhere else in the world, you’ll find plenty of additional information at each of these links):

  

  The 6021st dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007, at 7pm at Location One in SoHo.

  It’ll be full of musical dorkiness of the highest order, to start the year off right. Please bring snacks to share!

  Featured the fragrant and marvelous:

  Tomas Henriques: META-EWI and META-EVI (customized wind controllers)
  The META-EWI and the META-EVI are respectively a modified EWI (Akai’s Electric Wind Instrument) and a modified MIDI EVI (Steiner’s Electric Valve Instrument), to which were added a whole new set of controllers based on sensor technologies. The goal of these two projects was to achieve specific innovative levels of performance techniques and musical expressiveness that go beyond what is currently possible to do with either a monophonic wind controller or a monophonic acoustic instrument and to take advantage of meaningful performance gestures and body motions that are naturally used by a performer of such an instrument. These modified instruments succeed at stretching the expressiveness and the range of musical gestures found on the original instrument allowing the musician to have a more complete and far reaching control of a great variety of meaningful musical parameters.

  Dan Trueman: PLOrk The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a newly established ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments. Each instrument consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety of control devices (keyboards, graphics tablets, sensors, etc…). Dan Trueman, co-founder and director of PLOrk, will introduce the ensemble, describe its design and a number of the pieces written for it, and share video and audio recordings from recent performances.

  MEAPsoft: MEAPsoft!!!
  MEAPsoft is open source software for automatically segmenting and rearranging music audio recordings. It is aimed at musicians and experimenters who want to play with new ways to analyze, sort, and resynthesize audio fragments. MEAPsoft was developed by a collaborative group of students and faculty from LabROSA and the Computer Music Center at Columbia University. Members of the group will talk about the concepts behind the software and play lots of groovy examples!

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