We talk about tools a lot, but it’s really learning how to make tools expressive in your productions and performances that matters. DubSpot, the music tech production and DJ educational center here in New York, brings its multi-city Ableton Live Sessions tour to its hometown for several days of parties and workshops. If you’re in NYC and on a budget, we have a discount on the paid events and also some free events you can check out. If you’re not in NYC, we’re working on bringing free video coverage to the global CDM community shortly after the event.

This really isn’t a pitch for Live, either – part of why I’m excited to be able to hang out for the weekend is that I expect to learn quite a lot from some of the world’s most skilled Live users and producers.

Headlining the event is none other than global techno star Richie Hawtin – the Minus impresario some of our readers love to love and others love to hate. I hope we get to hear more about his unique Plastikman live rig – see the controller at top, with more details from our friends at visualist corps Derivative, whose TouchDesigner live visual tool powers 3D imagery in those sets. Hawtin will join in a conversation with Ambivalent about what the Minus musical process is about. Hawtin and friends will also play a real gem of New York’s club scene, Love on MacDougal Street – it’s a fantastic space that lives up to its name.

On the dub side, Scientist aka Overton Brown, one of the world’s real stars of dub, a King Tubby protégé out of Jamaica, will return us to the roots of electronic dance music and show off his own take on the use of this technology. Scientist and Dub is a Weapon play Le Poisson Rouge and Scientist will close out the Live Sessions with a dub battle versus Badawi.

KJ Sawka – Hell, Yes, Chops

Before we get into the lineup, here’s just an example of how cool the faculty of this event is – KJ Sawka. Sawka is, of course, what we dream of in live laptop music. His musicianship is fantastic unplugged (see a rooftop set video, apparently sponsored by PBR), so the laptop becomes simply an extension of that.

KJ Sawka will have a full Drums workshop on Saturday as part of the paid program. If you’re new to Live, though, he’s doing a free intro on Thursday evening.

Here’s what to see and how to get the exclusive CDM discount.

By the way, if you’re in Los Angeles, that’s the next stop on this tour; stay tuned for details.

Want to reignite interest in DJs who actually use their hands and fingers to slice up and juggle sounds? A cavalcade of “laptopists” is the ticket. Suddenly, at least in some corners, people are again interested in turntablism. It’s nice to see how a controller can integrate digital loop and cue points with a setup that still focuses on scratching. And Stanton’s SCS.3d turns out to be scriptable in the open source DJ software Mixxx. As some live PA musicians revert to a “push play” mentality, DJs can keep it interesting.

The pocketable DJ tool Pacemaker is now available here in the US at $499. That price is considerably more realistic than expected pricing earlier on, though it still fits in a funny sort of slot: it’s not quite the equivalent of pro DJ gear, which costs much more, but it’s still pricier than your run-of-the-mill DJ player. For those with the pocket change (cough), I could imagine it’ll be fun.

And you do have to admire the Pacemaker for being a really unique hardware gadget idea. It’s a glimpse of what music technology could be like in the very near future. Generically, you might describe it as:

• a specialized embedded mobile gadget with sonic-manipulation capabilities
• a connection between a mobile device and a computer-based editor
• a cloud-based, online community for sharing work

Take that as the template, and I think you’ll agree there’s a lot of potential in the basic concept. The specific idea here may be a tougher sell. It’s actually like the DJ-centric “Pro iPod” I remember Jason O’Grady of PowerPage.org and I once imagined in the first months of Apple’s iPod release. Whether DJs actually want that is another question – particularly with the iPhone and other mobile devices adding this functionality in software. But in the specific, as in the generalized view, the Pacemaker is nothing if not intriguing:

For everyone who thought Twitter was just about “i m eating a ham sandwich lolz,” the desire to use connectivity to actually be connected continues to win out in unexpected ways. So far this month, we already saw the use of Max/MSP. Now, Twitter is showing up in the geeky, open source sound tool SuperCollider and in DJ sets in Traktor by Richie Hawtin.

Tweet a Sound, to the Max

First, some updates on Tweet a Sound, the sound design tool in Max that lets you share synth presets.

Creator Andrew Spitz has an updated story on adding a cleaned-up subpatch to Max/MSP. It uses the Ruby programming language to access the Twitter API. (You should be able to port to Pd, too – I have to look closer at this.) Correction: Ruby is implemented as JRuby, so it runs on the Java virtual machine – and there is a Java implementation for both Max (mxj) and Pd (pdj)

This means, if you’ve got a Mac or Windows copy of Max/MSP, you can now send Tweets from your patches. And that should open up still more possibilities when Max for Live becomes available, for Ableton fans.

How To Send A Tweet From Max/MSP { sound + tutorial }

Even if you’re skeptical about Twitter per se, if you’re interested in using Ruby and Max, this should be a good starting place for other APIs, too.

Friends of mine like Francis Preve have gone utterly nuts for this.

The iPhone 3.0 SDK is a fantastic update, bringing a lot of what was on developer wish lists for the device. But some of the early speculation – that the so-called “library access” would enable music games and DJ apps — may have been premature. Jordan Balagot writes to let us know that, at least in the current SDK, access to media is very limited.

The “library access” in the 3.0 SDK is only a player control API similar to that of the iPod; there is not even read only file access for MP3s nor any way to modify the output from the library. So no iPhone DJing, no BPM detection, no interactive PD or Reaktor patches with your library.

Unfortunately, this seems consistent with Apple’s desire to be the one and only media player on the device. I’m hoping that this is still something Apple plans to add – imagine the ability to add effects or run games based on the library (a la the PC game Audiosurf) or create DJ apps. I know many people who use iPhone or iPod as sample players or backups for live sets; having a custom player app could also be useful.

By comparison, Google’s Android has no such limitations on its MediaPlayer class – the fundamental difference being that you aren’t limited from playing media on your device. Unfortunately, Android has its own limitations: no real audio buffer access, which means it’s not possible to build effects or DJ apps or games on Android, either.

And that’s typical of the sort of situation the newest mobile devices present. We have the iPhone, more sophisticated technically, but limited, apparently, by design in order to protect Apple control over certain functions. Then we have the Android, philosophically unlimited but technically limited by some key missing capabilities.

My question is, which device will evolve first to give us the freedom to make use of its full potential?

No file or output access to iPhone MP3 library – 3.0 SDK still too restrictive

If we’re lucky, perhaps the 3.1 SDK? (Or something we’ll still see in 3.0 that isn’t done yet?)