In LA’s DubSpot Live 8 Sessions, I shared a panel with Daedalus, talking about design, live playing, the monome, and how limiting tools for performance can be powerful. Austin gets its own cast of presenters this weekend.

Sadly, I can’t be in all places at once. If I could, I’d be in Austin – twice over – this weekend. Handmade Music session two hits with an all-new set of learning and noise-making. Whether new to electronics making or an old hand, there’s something to absorb from some of the best mad sound scientists in the world. And our friends at DubSpot are in town, too, with a big lineup of production, recording, and performance techniques centering on Ableton Live 8. And on top of all of that, the city is host to the brilliant art + sound East Austin Studio Tour – a fantastic idea coupling events, studio tours, and art exhibitions I hope we steal in cities like my home New York.

This is all of interest to a tiny fraction of a percent of our readers since it’s really relevant only if you’re in Austin, but therein lies my plea — if you are in Austin, we could use your help documenting this weekend’s events. Get in touch, and we should be able to hook you up with a free pass for the DubSpot event, plus — well, whatever I come up with to thank you for videoing and/or writing about Handmade Music.

First up, Handmade Music:

This sunday is Handmade Music Austin #2.

We’ll be building 4ms’ Autonomous Bassline Generator. The upper division class is filled but there should be some space in the beginner class. Even if there aren’t any seats available, there will be all kinds of things happening in the gallery space for EAST. You can play with the Thingamagoop 2, Eric Archer’s noisemakers, Andromeda Space Rocker kits as well as other handmade instuments.

Noon – Gallery space opens. Bleep Labs, Eric archer, and friends interactive exhibit.
4 pm – Free beginner class
6 pm – Upper division synth class $45 at door
6:30 – Free performances :
Red X Red M
Douglas Ferguson/Steve Marsh
TelepathiK Friend

Red X Red M
Douglas Ferguson/Steve Marsh
TelepathiK Friend

As always, see:

http://handmademusic.noisepages.com

DubSpot’s event includes two full days of programming covering production and performance. It’s about Ableton Live 8, but it’s also more broadly about how to make your tracks sound better, how to get them into the world, and how to be successful as an artist both in your releases and live. Austin includes many of the folks I’ve been hanging out with in NY and LA, plus favorites like Ableton veteran sound designer and Keyboard contributor Francis Preve. Christopher Willits will also take a first look at Max for Live and talk about how he uses Max/MSP to process his playing. And Saturday night is a FunkAid benefit with DJ OBaH, Ocote Soul Sounds, Akina Adderley & The Vintage Playboys, and Daetron Vargas.

I expect we can get a guest in if you cover the event for CDM.

http://www.dubspot.com/abletontour/austin.html

It’s music production. It’s … lasers. If you’re in the LA area, you’ll want to be there. If not, let us know in comments what you most want to see covered / interviewed / videoed for CDM.

DubSpot’s Live 8 Sessions Tour heads to Los Angeles this weekend, for a set of workshops, performances, and demos on Hollywood Boulevard. I’ll be out with the crew, and hosting with DubSpot a special interactive performance lounge Sunday night.

Sunday night will feature generative audiovisual art made on iPhones, and laser-powered, open-source gestural controllers and a laser installation that responds to motion and sound, plus Christopher Willits, Kid Beyond, Irwin, myself, and a lot more.

The weekend workshops: The artist lineup includes legends from a number of genres, including Scientist, Kid Beyond, Daedelus, Justin Boreta (Glitch Mob), Thavius Beck, and Christopher Willits. Other names you may not know have their own resume in sound design and performance (Irwin), producing and education (Steve Nalepa), mastering technique (Daniel Wyatt), and business (Barry Cole). Sunday, monome virtuoso Daedelus and I will talk about controllers, performance, and sampling technique, I hope going well beyond Live to design and playing technique in general. Passes are $110 for one day, or $195 for the weekend. Watch for a similar series in Austin, Texas this month, and other cities TBD, or for everyone else, stay tuned to CDM and DubSpot.

Ableton is a co-presenter, and Live a jumping-off point, but the topics really wind up being about more than any one tool. You’ll find deeper questions about composing, sound design, mastering, business, performance, controllers, and design in these discussions. I hope to work with some of my artist friends and DubSpot to bring more of those conversations to the CDM readers worldwide.

Want a free pass? One free pass awarded by the end of the day Thursday to the first person in comments to … write a really quotable comment about why you need a free pass. (Sorry, it’s the best I can come up with; I have to sleep and leave for the airport shortly.)

Los Angeles Tour [DubSpot]

Sunday night – $5 benefit Interactive Performance Night + CDM 5th Anniversary PARTY CDM turns five this month, and we’ll be kicking off a series of parties in LA, Boston, and New York. For $5 (all proceeds go to the sustainable charity NextAid), catch a night of audiovisual performance and bleeding-edge musical and visual inventions:

• Featured live performances by Kid Beyond, Christopher Willits (Ghostly International), and Irwin
  , with surprises through the night
• Open laser instruments: Open-source, gestural laser music controllers you can build, presented by Meason Wiley (www.cyclespersecond.net)
• 3D mobile music: iPhone-based performance live, synchronized three-dimensional audiovisuals by generative artist Aaron McLeran (Electronic Arts – Spore)

9:00 pm
SUNDAY, November 8
Los Angeles, CA
$5 / free for tour attendees
King King Hollywood | Directions
Facebook page

Full disclosure: The author is currently providing consulting services to DubSpot, and DubSpot’s Live Tour is a CDM advertiser, though there has been no compensation for this story or for my appearance in LA. (In the interest of disclosure, I’m happy to be spending my weekend being involved with the event!) – Peter Kirn

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.

Schedule, Free Events, and Discounts

Thursday

7-9p, FREE KJ Sawka Live 8 clinic, 675 Bar
9p Funk Aid for Africa benefit release party, 675 Bar

Friday: Richie Hawtin @ Love

Saturday

11-6: Ableton Live and Production Sessions: The first day focuses on moving a project through the production process, with KJ Sawka talking live recording of drums, DJ Kiva and Jon Margulies on developing and finishing materials, and veteran engineer Daniel Wyatt on mixing and mastering. The day finishes up with a chat with Richie Hawtin and Ambivalent.

6:30-9p FREE CDM Live Lounge party Saturday evening, we meet up at former sex club / former horse stables (really) turned chilled-out Meatpacking District lounge 675 Bar. We’ll have some surprise unusual Live controller rigs and music.

Sunday

11-6: Performing with Live, Live Onstage: The second day of workshops focuses on live performance, with Jon Margulies, DJ Rupture, and myself talking about working with performance-ready live sets, controllers, and Akai’s APC40. (With Jon covering the APC, I’ll focus instead on alternative and unusual controllers.) Barry Cole of Blue Mountain Publishing will go a different direction entirely – how to understand licensing and distribution and actually make money on your tracks.

7-9p: Scientist will talk about miking and live setup with Dub is a Weapon – and will mix them live.

9p: DubSpot Sessions party, Le Poisson Rouge, with live and DJ performances from Scientist, Dub is a Weapon, Badawi, Kiva, Rupture, etc.

CDM DISCOUNT: Enter promo code ‘CDM’ for $25 off the tour, or follow this link:
http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

The weekend is US$225 for both days ($200 after our discount); $125 for one day.

Here’s a wrap of what happened in San Francisco:

And if you’re there, do come say hi! It’s always nice to meet readers.

Mixed Up – Beat Blender and Mixmaster 1200 from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

Ableton Live enthusiasts, you take very seriously what gear you plug into your laptop sets. We’ve seen painstakingly-created DIY controllers like the arcade button hardware below, and bizarre oddities like calculators and arcade cabinets and blenders and Osterizers (above). So, in celebration of New York installment of the Dubspot Ableton Live 8 Tour, Saturday, June 27, we’re going to get together in a fantastic space and have a little Live party. And we want to see what controllers you’ve made.

If you’re coming to town for the Live Tour or are in the New York area, we’d love for you to show some of your creations. Built or customized your own controller? Got your Wii remotes and webcams running your Live set? Built your own special Reaktor / Pd / Max / Python creation to customize your Live performance? Invented some hardware that works with Live? We’d love to see it. It’s a week that includes some of the most skilled Live minds in the planet presenting, plus celebrity appearances by the likes of Richie Hawtin, Scientist, and others. So we expect that even though this is last-minute, this could be a fun chance to get together.

If you’re interested, just sign up below or head directly to the Google Docs form. This is an informal, relaxed venue with drinks and finger foods. (Check out the recent New York Magazine write-up.) The idea is to bring along some headphones or small speakers and show things off in the catacomb-like former stables (and former sex club) nooks of this fantastic bar, meet up, relax, and get to know each other. We’ll also feature a live performance or two; if interested, let us know what your stuff sounds like.

The event will be open to the public; stay tuned for more details on this and the event itself.

And if you want to learn how to use controllers intelligently with Ableton Live – from the cheap and accessible to the weird – I’ll be teaching a workshop at Dubspot on Sunday 6/28.

Sign up, creative folks:

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.