From Berlin’s Melissa Taylor and Tailored Communication, for my money, just about the best publicist for electronic music out there, we get one epic playlist. If you’re lucky enough to get one holiday or another (Christmas? Boxing Day?) in the next few days, fire up this terrific playlist. You get a full range, from some favorites of mine in 2011 like best-of-toppers Sepalcure, Ghostly’s Mark E, mainstay Thomas Fehlmann, Four Tet, and many more.

It’s exceptional quality stuff, perfect to settle back and take your ears and musical mind on a much-needed vacation.

http://soundcloud.com/melissa/tailored-xmas-mega-mix-2011

Clocking in at one hour, forty five minutes, you can stream or download via SoundCloud. Just remember, as Melissa reminds us, “music is for life, not just for Christmas. Buy vinyl!”

(Or, uh, this being a site with ‘digital’ in its name, go lossless and make backups, too. Actually – do both.)

Tailored Xmas Mega-Mix 2011 by Melissa

1. Planetary Assault Systems – Movement 12 / Ostgut
2. Deadbeat – Fourth Quarter (Cala´s House) / BLKRTZ
3. Popol Vuh – Schnee (Flow edit) – Thomas Fehlmann Flow Mix / SPV
4. Jonsson / Alter – Acapellan / Kontra
5. Locussolus – Gunship / International Feel
6. Steffi – Yours feat. Virginia / Ostgut
7. SCB – Loss / Aus
8. Matilda – Protea / Exone
9. Mount Kimbie – Carbonated (Peter Van Hoesen Remix) / Hotflush
10. Lucy – Bein (James Ruskin Remix) / Stroboscopic Artefacts
11. Peverelist – Dance Til The Police Come / Hessle Audio
12. Drums Of Death – The Jerk / Civil Music
13. Mark E – Belvide Beat / Ghostly
14. Exercise One – Top Score (Stop Thinking!) / Cocoon
15. Boo Williams – Devil Music / Anotherday
16. VCMG – Spock (DVS1 Voyage Home Remix) / Mute
17. The Black Dog – Heavy Industry (Shifted Remix) / Dust Science
18. Four Tet – Locked / Text
19. Untold – Sweat / Hotflush
20. Sepalcure – Pencil Pimp /Hotflush
21. Roll The Dice – Cause And Effect / The Leaf Label

Tailored Xmas Mega-Mix 2011 – mixed by Exercise One

Hot For Heat by Moderna

For visual design, we look to look books and scrapbooks and massage our eyeballs and optical centers of our brain. For music, increasingly, the mix helps us find the mood, aided by expert practitioners in finding the right sound.

Sure, dozens of Web startups show up in my inbox each week to tout some magical automatic music selection engine that turns over your tastes and mood to HAL and pumps out some mix. I’ll choose the humans. Take Ghostly International’s Moderna, who has turned her music selection tastes into a career. As I huddle in for the northern European winter, Missy is celebrating an LA-style Indian Summer.

As she describes her background:

Moderna’s music history began at the age of 15, booking legendary artists such as Blonde Redhead, Out Hud and !!! to play shows in her native Utah. Her travels and eventual moves to London, NYC and LA, informed the founding of Re:Up magazine, a now legendary publication that documented the early-mid 2000′s electronic and downtempo scenes, as well as featuring some of the world’s greatest artists and designers which led her to start her work at Ghostly International, where she produced and planned events in some of the world’s best clubs and festivals, from Berghain to Sonar.

Moderna lives between Los Angeles and New York. Alongside her dj sets, she also creates unique and worthy listening environments for various spaces.

As for the tracks, they span the gamut from the addictive new Tycho track “Hours” to sun-kissed, tightly-tuned rhythms.

Track List:
Jack Shit – TJ Kong & Modular K
Legend Gold [BlackLodge Remix] – Professor LaCroix
Discocracy (Hannulelauri Remix) – Bottin
Left The Ground (feat Ziggy Franklin) – James Curd
Hours – Tycho
Church (Midland Remix) – The 2 Bears
Twist – Peter & The Magician
Household Goods (Justin Martin Vocal) – Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs
Behaving Badly (Diamond Lights Techno Remix) – Magnifik
Good Bye Horses – Q Lazzarus

Of course, we have plenty of producers looking to get the attention of folks like Missy – and many of us aspiring to put together tasteful mixes, if for nothing other than our own playlists, let alone the urgent need for artists to themselves work out how to become tastemakers and to put their music in a greater context. So, I’m always interested in how the head (or ears) put together a mix I enjoy.

Missy tells CDM:

A good solid beat and warm high synths are what I usually get into.
I tend to really enjoy simple basic vocals, not too “sing-y” clean and clear that can play almost as a beat, as well, like the eedinosaurs track.
I have to force myself on dance mixes like this one to not get too dark, as my tendency is to play the tracks that you usually hear at the after parties as the sun is coming up which is the next mix I’m working on.

I pick the tracks mainly by sound, beat, and speed, not necessarily by artist. I like to keep the entire mix on a complimentary flow — each track has to compliment the previous and next, and so on. Even the genre doesn’t play a huge part; I like to mix it up not do all techno or all Disco a little bit of everything (almost)

Whoa, wait — Missy, did you say you were afraid to get “too dark”? (Sorry, folks; I may have neglected to tell her which site she was on. Ask our designer/artist/friend proem about how dark music should get.)

(Thanks, though, for the quick response; I was pestering Missy over email in the middle of the night Pacific time.)

Here’s how she describes the mix:

I was inspired by the extraordinary heat I experienced this summer both in New York City and the Indian summer that is upon us now here on the west coast. If you know me well you know I am a fan of warmth so this summer has been one of my favorites (despite those few sweltering days in Manhattan that made me to question why I love the heat so much). But those days are now coming to an end as Halloween is among us along with the brisk air and the changing of leaves…for winter is coming (insert Game of Thrones Quote here).

So here is an ode to the heat, past, present and future, for which I am in no doubt hot for.

Give it a listen, check out Missy’s site and SoundCloud and latest, and have a great weekend, y’all.

http://modernas.info/
SoundCloud link

Photo: Lindsey DeWitt – and I love the retro look, Missy!

Novation has unveiled this week their own “free” step sequencer offering for Ableton Live. It’s some lovely work, with basic melodic pattern playback that comes alive once you add some envelopes.

It’s a cool creation — but for me, it’s massively overshadowed by a new video featuring the upcoming Renoise 2.5 beta with the same Launchpad controller.

I’ll introduce it by saying, simply… hot damn.

And what a difference you get in price. Of course, to use either, you’ll need a Launchpad, currently running around US$200. But for the Renoise solution, you need only spend an additional US$75/EUR49 for everything. For the “free” patch for Live, you’ll need Ableton Live 8 or higher plus the Max for Live add-on, which even with current sale deals will set you back US$698 (unless you own some previous software, though even then, you’re unlikely to get down to $75). Free after an investment of nearly a grand is a bit of a stretch.

Now, trackers aren’t for everyone, as with any tool, some of you own Live already, and I’m all for spending more money when you need to. So I don’t want to harp on the price issue alone, even if we are talking more than $600 (an 800%+) difference.

Instead, look at the results. Renoise’s Matrix View is simply astounding – perhaps as much so as the first time I saw the Session View in Live. Rather than being an independent patch, this is the innards of Renoise under control here. Each individual step is a pattern. It can easily retrigger notes. It can do melodic patterns, if you like, but each step can have an individual pattern, each pattern can be directly edited in your actual arrangement file using the controller. You don’t have to touch the mouse. And while fader control of additional parameters isn’t there yet, it’s coming.

Oh yeah — and it’s a video step sequencer, too. (That’s thanks to Jitter, though it’s not presently in this release because of some performance issues.)

In this case, the ingredient remains Cycling ’74′s powerful patching tool, Max/MSP. But because the standalone version of that package – unlike Max for Live – includes a free run-time, you don’t have to buy Max to use the results. Also, even Max may not be necessary in the future, as later in the year 2010, the developers of Renoise will offer MIDI control scripts, Lua scripting of the environment, and OpenSoundControl. This functionality appears to be something you’ll get with the package, not something you’ll need to spend hundreds of dollars to use. The reason Max is necessary now is simply to map the Launchpad’s someone arbitrarily-mapped bi-directional MIDI to Renoise’s eminently-controllable grid. (Jitter is, in turn, used for video output, though that could work elsewhere.) With these functions integrated directly into Renoise – something sorely lacking in Ableton Live – you’ll be able to do more, more easily. With OSC sent from a device like the monome or (hopefully soon) Livid Instruments’ Ohm line, you ought to be able to just plug in the device for direct control.

It’ll also be easier to interchange devices, whereas some of the recent Max for Live devices are tied to specific controllers.

Don’t get me wrong – these are different tools. While scripting Renoise opens up a number of terrific possibilities, it won’t do everything that Max 5 (standalone) and/or Max for Live can do. For instance, if you’re looking to build your own video sequencer, you do want a separate tool, and you may indeed want the power of being able to drop that patch creation right into Live.

The point for me is that the core program itself in Renoise is controllable here, which for certain workflows can be an edge.

Competition is good. I’m certainly inspired to work on my own step sequencer creations and trying to make them better. And Novation has lucked out here, because I expect I’ve just sold them a few more Launchpads. But sorry, Ableton – I fully expect some Renoise users to find a way to tattoo their program of choice onto the hardware, as in this mock-up. This round goes to Renoise and the ingenious work of patch creator Johann Baron Lanteigne.

Depending on your tool of choice, if you’re a Launchpad owner, go grab now – and stay tuned for more step-sequencer-on-host action. Yum.

Launchpad Step Sequencer download, on the Novation support pages. Via:

Novation Launchpad now a step sequencer

Renoise Based Audio-Video Step Sequencer [Discussion, download available now]

Previously:

Renoise 2.5: A Matrix for Everything, Modulate Everything; Full Scripting, OSC Coming

PS, Ableton, Cycling ’74, don’t feel bad. I did get to see the step sequencer creations by Little Scale last night at our party. They’re obvious choices for Max for Live, and he’s only had the Launchpad for a few weeks.

In fact, I think the best thing that could possibly happen is for all the Launchpad, monome, Ohm, Ableton, Renoise, SuperCollider, chip music, and other fans to throw down and let the out-step-sequencing battles begin.

Go.

The KORG nanoSERIES has a rabid following among many Ableton Live users, and with good reason. The nanoPAD and nanoKONTROL street for about US$60, provide basic knobs + faders + transport (KONTROL) and pads and X/Y control (PAD), plus a fully-featured, cross-platform editor, but still fit in a backpack. They’re small enough to use in coach on an airplane.

Having to open Live templates, however, just to get the mappings you want is a big pain. So, instead I’ve created a basic set of MIDI Remote Scripts and Kontrol Editor templates for Mac and Windows, Live 6.x and later, and wanted to share them with you.

If you’re Windows-based and a big fan of the nano, I will say that I recommend you use something else altogether – the brilliant nativeKontrol. It’s a hell of a lot more sophisticated, gives you more control, and still requires no template:
nanoLive

Of course, there are some advantages to my (otherwise inferior) humble solution. It’s free, it works on Mac, it’s completely editable, and much of the idea was to provide an easy way of learning about MIDI Remote Scripting. (Check out the tutorial below.) Now, knowing CDM readers, I imagine someone out there can improve what I’ve done, so feel free to modify it and please send us a copy of what you’ve created!

korgnano_live.zip [Cross-platform archive; will update with a fancier release later on once I've gotten some feedback]

Ableton Live MIDI Remote Scripting How To: Custom Korg nanoSERIES Control

And, of course, read all the instructions…

Install instructions:

1. For full control, upload the templates to your Korg nanoSeries using the Kontrol Editor, via the Communication menu. (See your manual for more.)

2. Place the proper folder(s) in your User Remote Scripts folder, inside your user preferences folder (NOT the Live program folder). That’s something like (Windows Vista/7):

[Windows boot drive] > Users > [username[ > AppData > Roaming > Ableton > Live [version] > Preferences > User Remote Scripts

or (Mac OS)

[boot drive] > [Library folder] > Preferences > Ableton > Live [version] > User Remote Scripts

3. Start Ableton Live 6.x or later (restart if it was already running)

4. Select the device. Choose Preferences > MIDI/Sync, select Control Surface in the first column (nanoPAD or nanoKONTROL), and then its Input and Output ports. Finally, enable the Control Surface Input for Track and Remote. Note that you can have more than one control surface, so if you’ve got both nano’s plugged into a hub, set them both up!

Usage instructions

nanoKONTROL Scene 1 is for device control. The buttons act as triggers for pads in drum devices, and the faders control the eight Macro encoders in any selected Rack. You’re free to assign the scene 1 knobs to whatever you like.

Scenes 2-3 control tracks: the top button record arms tracks, leaving the button button free for whatever you like (mute, enable/disable). The faders control level on tracks 1-8, and knobs control the first send for each track.

Scene 4 is basically unassigned and ready for custom assignments.

Across all scenes, fader 9 is the master level. Transport buttons are automatically mapped and will work as expected.

Because there are so many controls free, I’ve created a sample template that pre-maps some parameters. In case you prefer to work that way, that template can get you started.

nanoPAD: The nano is much simpler, but I’ve set up the X/Y pad to dynamically trigger the first two parameters in a rack, making this much more fun to use with a Drum Rack. I like having access to all 8 Macros, so I’ve spread them across the four scenes. The pads will dynamically map to the first 16 pads, with 1-12 on scene 1 and 13-16 on the top of scene 2. There was some trickery to allow you to map these pads more or less as you see them in the software, beyond those first 16. I’ve provided alternative versions that allow easier continuous melodic control or keep CC 1 + 2 consistent across all four scenes.

(I didn’t say that very well, so if anyone’s feeling really motivated and wants to do a quick post or video of this or even modify them and make them better, feel free!)

To avoid accidentally triggering parameters with the X/Y pad, you can either turn flam/roll mode on all the time, or make sure instruments you want to play are added to racks first.

For more detailed instructions on Live setup and how MIDI Remote Scripts work, please see the separate tutorial!

Scripts for KORG nanoSERIES and Ableton Live by Create Digital Music is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Want to help motivate me to do more stuff like this? (I and others on Planet CDM really will — open to non-KORG, non-Ableton requests!)

Drum machines, from Ace Tone to Yamaha: The site KB6.de has an obscenely large collection of drum sets from most of the popular drum machines over the years. They’re raw samples, and you definitely get more of an all-around package from commercial sets, but if you just want some free samples, it looks like a good place to start. Donations encouraged to cover bandwidth costs.

Free stuff from Goldbaby: CDM reader Hugo of Goldbaby sends his treasure trove of free soundware. The latest addition: an analog tape-sampled recording of the rare 1987 German Vermona DRM machine.

To celebrate the release of our new product (Tape Drum Machines Vol 1) we have created a free sample pack called: TheTapeVeronaDRM.

Contains 142 x 24 bit samples of the Vermona DRM. Recorded on an Otari MX5050 1/4 inch tape machine… plus the original drum hits without any tape love as well.

Each drum sound has also been recorded multiple times for use in Round Robin Layering. This can help recreate the analog feel of the machine.

Some really nice and unusual stuff there.

Goldbaby Free Page (download is on the top, among some other goodies)

IDM Nerds: From Munich, some strange and glitchy loops. Der Einmeier writes:

we just published a new sample-package of more than 120 mbyte containing 174 individual and unique, FREEWARE bassline-glitchnoize-loops for idm/mimimal-nerds.

mnml_blslns — 124MB of basslines
bleepbox.rar — 50 bleeping loops
more stuff described as “warez” but looks quite legal (no guarantees about whether your significant other / cat will like the noise, though)