Following on from our previous Game On Set. Sam will be kitted out with Serato’s Video-SL (review on CDMo), and I’ll be bringing a brace of live camera feeds with the Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer (minisite | on CDMo).

Last time it went down something like this:

Sampology at Game On – AV Turntablist Set (Part 1) and (Part 2) from Herovision on Vimeo.

Video-SL is fantastic fun, and as a visualist it’s somewhat humbling to discover what a turntable worrier can do when their spinning plastic discs suddenly have power over vision as well as sound. Tune in tomorrow to see.

To sweeten the deal, we’ll be preceeded on stage by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) and Matt and Yug (of Australian Gamer), who will have a screening of their show Game Damage, and then talk about games rather a lot.

Using web production studio Mogulus, the stream will be viewable on the CDMedia channel, and there’s a countdown and embedded player at Herovision.

At least now we know what the thing looks like:

I like the design — it’s not hard to imagine digital musicians and laptopists/electronicistas having good fun with this as much as traditional DJs. The MIDI controls look a little disappointing, though.

Previously (with lots of comments):

MIDI + Mixing: Ecler EVO4 DJ Mixer Specs, EVO5 UpdateMIDI + Mixing: Ecler EVO4 DJ Mixer Specs, EVO5 Update

That’s the approach taken by DJ-focused mixer maker Ecler. Their EVO5 (shown at right) does all of this, but at a hefty price premium — about U$1900 street. (That price could be more worth it, however, with updated firmware capabilities — more on that in a moment.) A rumored EVO4 at a lower price (expected at a non-cheap, but possibly mortal-compatible US$1000-1500) has been making the rounds on the Web. Today, Ecler confirmed those details and promised the final unveiling at Musikmesse next month in Germany and here Stateside for Remix Hotel Miami later in March.

No photo or official pricing yet (meaning if you’ve seen a photo, it’s an unauthorized leak or fake), but here’s what Ecler has to say:

The EVO 4 equips the latest digital audio technology with 24 bit stereo A/D and D/A converters and 96 kHz sampling rate.

The mixer is powered with 25 assignable MIDI controls on channels 1 to 4 and a dedicated MIDI panel with 4 rotary and push encoders.

However, the main strength of the EVO 4 is a double effects processor at 24 bit 96 kHz. Processors EFFECTS 1 and EFFECTS 2 are placed on each side of the mixer for an intuitive and ergonomic use, and both of them feature DRY/WET crossfader and 3 parameter controls. Both processors feature 18 sound effects, including different kind of filters, delays, beat crusher, sweep, flanger, phaser and loop sampler with automatic beat detection, to name a few.

Last but not least, the EVO 4 is equipped with an output limiter protected with password for a safe use of the PA system, as well as extra large ergonomic EQ knobs, loop to external effects units, faders and crossfader shape adjustment and much more.

The EVO 4 will be available next June

I was especially interested in the ability to combine MIDI functions with mixer functions. Some complained that the EVO5 did only one or the other — but a firmware upgrade announced last week addresses that, allowing you to send MIDI and process audio signal simultaneously on the same channel, if you so desire.

The EVO4 is a little different, says Ecler USA’s Jon Ghoddoussi:

On the EVO mixers (the EVO5 as well), you can choose to put channels 1/2/3 in MIDI mode, and then leave channel 4 in normal AUDIO mode to accept the signal from Ableton (or whatever). I believe this is the smartest method.

That could be appealing to people looking to merge a laptop-based setup with a hardware-based setup. And — as with a lot of DJ gear — I think the odd hard-core electronic musician, not just DJ per se, could find real use for this. (If you want DVJ capabilities — with MIDI controlling visuals while traditional audio mixing functions are handled normally on the same controls — the EVO5 appears to be the way to go.)

I expect to see more Ableton Live support — alongside traditional apps like NI’s Traktor, for which Ecler is a certified provider — showing up in templates and the like for both mixers.

We’ll keep tabs on this as it emerges. I think the ways in which digital DJing is evolving are just beginning to get interesting. 

Ecler USA

EVO by Ecler [Worldwide site]

Audiovisual performance has a history stretching back through the decades — from the 90s Japan audiovisual scene to 60s Acid Tests and whole heck of a lot of other places. Heck, I’m fairly certain people were shooting up on morphine or getting happy with the opium and chilling out to magic lanterns and colored lights at the end of the 19th Century. But there’s a new excitement brewing globally around live music and visuals. That’s important, because it could push the scene forward — a critical mass of performers could pressure more venues into better projection, from avant-garde to club, and raise the level of chops and artistry in the medium. And you won’t even need opium.

The growing interest in A/V performance was part of what made us so excited about Serato’s VIDEO-SL, as seen in our exclusive hands-on with dj rndm. It’s unquestionably the best (well, even arguably the only) true, integrated DVJ tool in computer software form, certainly as far as digital vinyl control.

But curiously, one of the tools at the center of this movement isn’t really a DJ app in the traditional sense, has no scratching capabilities for audio let alone video, only limited video support, no live video triggering support, and no projection support. It’d be as though, collectively, the world decided in 1965 everyone was going to build flying moon buggies by first buying themselves Chevy Novas.

That’d make no sense whatsoever, except the app in question is Ableton Live.

And suddenly, it’s a natural choice: Live is a favorite tool for slicing and dicing sound live, so why not visuals — even if only by transmitting MIDI to a dedicated visual app? There are a number of approaches.

Feed MIDI Out of Live

On Create Digital Motion, Momo the Monster details his technique for cutting up sound in the plug-in Lucifer, then feeding that MIDI output to a separate visual app for the eye candy. To me, this is the most logical approach: there’s no reason you have to make Live do everything at once. If you’ve got more than one person playing, you could easily have one person on sound and another person on visuals. But even with one person, it’s increasingly feasible to run both a visual and sound app on the same machine (and I’ve played fairly regularly with two laptops).

VJ Kung Fu – AV Cutups using Lucifer and Ableton Live from momo_the_monster on Vimeo.

Full how-to details and lots of reader discussion at Create DIgital Motion:

AV Cutup Secrets: Using Lucifer & Live

Make Live an AV App

That hasn’t stopped people from trying to get Live to do it all, though — something a lot of users wondered about when they first saw Live’s ability to use video live, full screen. When I first saw Live’s video support, the Ableton crew had started forwarding around a set featuring clips of an ostrich poking its head forward. Uh — okay, you had to be there, but it was hilariously addictive. The trick was to use Location Markers in the Arrangement View to jump around in the video.

That’s all well and good, but the real appeal of Live is its clip-based Session View.

Just Add Music for Live 6 and 7 offers a solution: sync most of the major stuff Live does with sound to video. You get four simultaneous channels of media, video, pictures, and Flash files. Or at least, so it promises — for now, I couldn’t even get a download link to work; word is, JAM is very much in “alpha.” Here’s the site, though, and hopefully we’ll see an update soon:

Just Add Music for Ableton Live

I have another problem with JAM, I have to admit: it feels too much to me like a dumbed-down copy of VJing of the past. Read Create Digital Motion and you’ll see lots of people excited about gorgeous, abstract 3D visuals dancing in time to the music. Sure, chopping up video and syncing it to music is fun — but you’ll forever be in the shadow of the masters, like Emergency Broadcast Network. Now, maybe I’m overanalyzing; it’s still a huge leap forward from playing a DVD in the background for a lot of bands. But I think the ever-evolving state of live visual tools means that ultimately dedicated tools will eclipse the hacked versions of Live.

Of course, the hackier the hack gets, the more interesting things get, like the unique, organic frame-by-frame animation in Live we saw last week from Cousin Throckmorton:

Make Live Scratch

Maybe — as Momo did with Lucifer — the best option is to focus on hacking Live for better sonic capabilities, then sync that to visuals. Which brings us back to Live’s inability to scratch. DVJ crew Cobalt Scratch Bomb from Japan have hacked scratching into a Mac Audio Unit plug-in:

You can’t have this yet, but our friend Terry Church at Beatportal  gets full credit for the scoop on the first preview:

Japanese DVJ crew invent Ableton plug-in

Industrious Max/MSP/Jitter users ought to be able to do things like this, too, exporting to a plug-in.

For full-blown DJ capabilities in Live, there’s also the possibility of running Image Line’s awesome new DJ tool Deckadance as a plug-in.

Watching A/V Performance Evolve

Of course, a lot of this is speculative. I remain, like many, interested in visuals for their own sake, in live visuals with music that aren’t synced, and in whatever crazy stuff evolves next. We’ll check in occasionally here on Create Digital Music, but if you want to keep up daily with live visuals, be sure to subscribe to RSS / bookmark Create Digital Motion.

And keep on hacking. Can’t wait to see what you do next.