I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

What are those alien, otherworldly sounds coming out of the iPad? That’s not GarageBand. It’s what happens when Reed Ghazala, the father of circuit bending some decades ago, meets the iPad. Not that it’s his first encounter with products from Apple – he’s been approaching that company’s hardware as he does everything else, prying unexpected life with modifications and experimentation.

But just as “circuit bending” need not be seen as “breaking,” here, too, Ghazala’s modifications make the device more humane, more musical, and – for all the shouting about how the design is perfect – far, far more usable. A breakout and controls mean that you can finally extract sound and video from the iPad in usable form, without the usual, fragile, impractical connections. Reed sends the details to CDM; I can’t wait to see readers build some of these. (I may wind up building two – one for my Apple tab, and one for other hardware experimentation with whatever Honeycomb Android tablet I pick up, which at this point is probably going to be a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. It’ll be doubly important, as apparently Samsung in their infinite wisdom juggle the usual pinouts on their 30-pin connector.)

Whether your sounds tend in this vein or somewhere else altogether, Reed’s DIY instructions look to beat promised commercial offerings from the likes of Akai. (The Akai dock, for the record, hasn’t shipped yet, so it’s no contest for the time being.) As Reed describes it:

I’ve been sneaking around Apple’s garden for a long time, dating back to the Apple II motherboard hacked into my code-munching poly-synth of the early ’80′s. I’ve modded iMacs, towers, endless accessories, and I’ve drastically bent mac-centric code with wonderful result. This movie loosens another brick in Apple’s wall, and opens the iPad’s usability tremendously.

I know I’m not the only individual appreciating the experimental music apps available on the iPad. I’m anxious to support the developers’ fine work. But for musicians, the iPad’s interface can be frustrating. Do you really want to use dongles, mini-jacks and flimsy wire to get in and out of the thing?

This audio breakout solves these problems, is easy to do, and is inexpensive.

No bending here, just a quick, theory-true hack based upon iPad docking charts I found online. Not a superdock. No competition for the Alesis breakout. But if you want a slick, basic and functional DIY audio desk, on the cheap, check this hack out!

The breakout board is available at kineteka.com

Be sure to see the photos and REVISIONS, and pick-up the printable schematic at my iPad Audio Desk flickr gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/moonbear3325/sets/72157626688587705/

This audio desk is really fun to use. Hacking the apple is always a good thing. I hope you’ll enjoy the movie! (Let it download for full-screen 1080).

Instructions in the final slide of that Flickr deck:
iPad Audio Desk Schematic

If someone would like to be commissioned to write a step-by-step tutorial with CDM, get in touch and I can help.

We celebrate 3.14, PI day, with some selections of mathematics, music, and visualization…

Sometimes the results resemble scores, sometimes toys, and sometimes – more rarely – real musical instruments. But part of why I love computing as a window into music is its ability to visualize music’s mathematical beauty.

I happened across this image from Flickr. It’s a chalk pattern on pavement for a children’s game (I’m not actually sure what game). But the math-compelled photographer found in it musical, harmonic intervals. I’ll have to sketch a little Processing and Pd design that plays with this idea. I put it here because someone out there might be inspired to do the same, and this is just ambiguous enough that it could easily lead in dozens of wildly-divergent paths.

I know some of my own students are literally on a beach for spring break and the nerd elite is busy partying in Austin, but, uh, maybe someone out there will file this away for later.

The photographer explains the math:

Also not sure what this game is called, but it contains some interesting mathematical properties. Can you see the oblong numbers (2,6,12,20,30…) in this representation?

Per Mathgym:

Readers who are familiar with the theory of music will recognise the list of oblongs as the intervals in decreasing order of consonance: Octave (1:2), Perfect Fifth (2:3), Perfect Fourth (3:4), Major Third (4:5), Minor Third (5:6), etc. It is Pythagoras who is credited with discovering this mathematical relationship between music and numbers.

This discovery, that the pitch of a note is related to the length of the string which produced it, is credited as being the spark which ignited Pythagoras’ imagination and philosophy. It allowed Pythagoras a glimpse of a whole new order in the Universe, one governed by intellect and logic and capable of the sublimest of pleasures. And a glimpse was all that he needed.

With this discovery, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans set in train a way of investigation which has proved to be one of the most productive ideas in human history – that mathematics can be used to unravel the mysteries of the Universe.

Now, after those deep thoughts, who’s worked an appetite for some PI pie?

Sampling and online reuse are enormously common in our culture today. But if you really believe in making some of that culture freely accessible, it follows you must also make free licenses explicit. Simply taking something because it’s there isn’t fair to the person who created the content, whose rights should come first, and it doesn’t help advance the cause of free content. If we want content to be more freely accessible, we need to give first priority to those materials explicitly licensed for free use.

All of that is to say, we need to obey the law. And that’s generally been the goal on CDM.

Here’s the rub: while Creative Commons licenses show a lot of promise, they also have occasionally run up against vague definitions or not-quite-airtight license variants. Case in point: the “non-commercial” restriction commonly used by creators. Let’s say you upload an image to Flickr. Adding a “non-commercial” restriction seems logical enough as a way to protect yourself against your image being abused, right?

The problem is, when looking at the actual language of the license, the definition of non-commercial use is not clear. Here’s what the license says:

“You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. “

Source: the current full text of the license (3.0)

Is CDM’s usage of Flickr images with non-commercial Creative Commons licenses a violation of that license? It’s not entirely clear. While the site uses those images for illustrative purposes, and while the site carries ads from which we gather revenue, it’d be a stretch to say the use of the images themselves was directed toward monetary gain.

Ultimately, though, an ambiguous license isn’t good enough. To be able to use images without contacting photographers for their permission, we need confidence that the license is clear. And even if we were on legally good standing – and it’s unclear that we are – we would want to obey the intentions of the content creators.

The question of commercial status and the Creative Commons license led to a prolonged Twitter discussion between me and Chris Randall of Analog Industries and plug-in maker Audio Damage. Unlike CDM, the Analog Industries blog is copyrighted, not under a Creative Commons license, but Chris has used CC licenses in the past for his music. Chris’ argument was, in short, that CDM was in violation of the CC-NC license as the use constituted a commercial use. The obligation lies with me to prove otherwise, and based on the survey results, I don’t think I can.

I’m not the only person bothered by the ambiguity. Creative Commons has conceded that questions about commercial or non-commercial are some of the most common queries they receive. And the situation was ambiguous enough for CC to undertake a full survey of CC users and creators.

The results of this survey were published in September:
Defining Noncommercial

Read through the complete results, however, and the question of non-commercial status is murkier than ever. The most significant question for publishers (and many content creators) is at what point a site with ads becomes a commercial use. You’ll see the answers can vary wildly depending on how the question is asked, and what the respondent understands to be the usage case.

That said, now having fully read through the results, I think I have to change the policy on CDM. Having some people disagree isn’t good enough, and no matter how you ask the question, a significant number of content creators view sites with ads as commercial – no discussion. (Some even would classify sites by non-profits using ads to recoup hosting costs in this way!)

I’ve found Flickr users have actually been really enthusiastic to discover their work on the site; those are the comments I’ve gotten. Unfortunately, I have to balance that enthusiasm against the larger perception of the policy.

In short, if you’re placing images under an NC license, don’t expect to see them on CDM any more.

New CDM policy

From here on out, I will only make use of images that fit one of the following conditions:

• Creative Commons licenses with BY, SA, or ND restrictions, but not NC
• Public domain images
• Images used as implied (such as press images, etc.)
• Images used by specific permission

Videos are, of course, a different story, as the ability to embed these materials is assumed to mean an implied license, and I’ve never seen otherwise. Likewise, it seems that the use of Flickr tag slideshows and badges containing images – even copyrighted images – does not violate Flickr’s terms of service or the wishes of the copyright holder; this is in essence a view of the Flickr site itself, and should not diminish the value of a photographer’s work nor conflict with their likely intentions when they upload to Flickr.

There’s really no way to operate on the Internet without coming across some of these gray areas, but to me the spirit of the law and the intentions of the creators remains paramount.

How to protect your work without Non-Commercial restrictions

This may raise the question, how do you prevent your work from being exploited while at the same time allowing a site like CDM to republish it? One of the “commercial” uses cited in the survey results is the rather nasty scenario of the spam blog re-purposing stories via RSS. There have been cases of CC-licensed Flickr images being used for ads in bus stops. (See the instance of Virgin’s ads, taken from CC-licensed Flickr images. Note, however, the controversy there – aside from whether they actually complied with the CC licenses – was whether they had the rights to the likenesses of people in those images, which is a different legal area.)

My answer, and the answer on which I’ve settled for CDM’s content: use a ShareAlike license.

What makes ShareAlike unique is that it requires any distribution or repurposing of your content to have the “resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.” That means you couldn’t, say, make an ad out of your photo without placing the ad under the same license — effectively preventing some of the more nefarious uses of CC-licensed works.

I do think that Creative Commons needs to present more explicit, clear, legally-binding documentation for the Non-Commercial restriction in the actual license. But until then, if you’re bothered by this ambiguity, you can resort to the more unambiguous ShareAlike license term.

Note that CDM itself is under a ShareAlike license. Because it’s compatible with any of the other CC SA licenses, that also gives us the right to use SA-licensed content – and, incidentally, were we not licensed that way, we should not have that ability.

HELP US!

To bring CDM into compliance with the non-commercial license, I need your help.

Got some regex skills? A regular expression should be able to purge all the images in CDM’s story database with non-commercial CC licenses, because images link to the specific license used. It’s simply a matter of then pulling the img src, anchor, and image caption div code around that license link.

Get in touch or respond in comments.

Got an image you don’t want to see lost? You can search CDM easily by your name and/or Flickr userid and find your image. Then let us know:

Provide permissions for a CC-NC-licensed image [Google Docs form]

Correction: I can actually observe a number of images I’ve used over the years with links back to CDM from the Flickr pages. So this would actually be the worst possible thing I could do, to remove those images. Obviously, the better solution is to wait and see if someone requests that an archived image be taken down. The Creative Commons license itself is non-revocable, but since this falls into a gray area in which we may not even been in compliance with someone’s license, that’s a moot point. And since those images are clearly marked by license, any derivative work based on them could check first if the license permits derivations. (That’s something you’d have to do anyway, as some images on CDM are copyrighted and used exclusively on CDM by permission.)

As a separate note, I’m now going to go through my own Flickr accounts and remove the non-commercial requirement, because my sense is that ShareAlike will prevent the unlikely event of them being abused within the license terms.

Disclaimer: This story is an editorial, an opinion piece. It does not constitute a legal statement (I’m not a lawyer) or official, binding statement of Create Digital Music’s policy. It expresses only the opinions of its author.

Very often, computers and music gear greedily consume whole corners of the room. Here’s a tidy alternative, modest in space consumption as well as in cost.

So, what’s so wonderful about DIY creations by our friend Sasa Djuric (aka fibra)? It isn’t just that his stands are recycled from monitor stand parts. It’s not just because the free ReBirth for Windows and an Asus netbook make for a wonderfully affordable computer music station. It’s not even that his cases for the x0xb0x 303 clone and a MIDIbox project are beautifully executed, or that magnets on the stands more effectively support those gadgets and place them in an ergonomic position.

What’s wonderful to me is that these designs relate the scale of those music-making objects to human hands. You just want to put your fingers on these devices and make some music.

From the Flickr set, Sasa explains:

This universal stand was part of the monitor once. I attached a piece of thick still and and 2 neodymium magnets recycled from hard drive.

[on the now-free-as-in-beer software running on the Asus netbook] …yes, in the name of good old times. ReBirth was my very first step in music making. I couldn`t even imagine I`ll build myself clones of all those machines.

He tells CDM:

I used 2 stands that are leftovers from monitors that are installed into an info kiosk. One is bigger than other which is allows me to cascade few machines. This was a really quick project as I used what I had laying around. Thick piece of steel is wood joint. Magnets are from a hard drive; the
tin plates glued on the eee and other machines are cutout from CDROM drive case, rubber comes from a blood pressure meter…
pretty much everything is recycled.
Besides the x0xb0x and eee you recognized, you can also see a ClockBox – MIDI clock generator (midibox project).

Really beautiful work – economic use of materials, clever design, and it could let you put a drum machine in your kitchen so you can cook music and food for a brilliant evening.

More on the elements of this project:
The x0xb0x is a fully open-source 303 bassline clone
The clockbox is a project based on the Midibox platform (see site, blog)
The Liliputing blog has great netbook coverage
ReBirth lives on as freeware at the ReBirth Museum. This is Windows, but if you don’t want to swap Windows onto your netbook, you can run it in WINE on Linux. (have to try that myself!)
Flickr set

All photos by Sasa Djuric, used by permission.

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

SoundCloud, an online sharing community for sound and music, is now hours from public launch. I’ve been playing around with a closed beta for several months, and have to say, I’ve been really impressed. SoundCloud isn’t the first attempt to provide places to share music files with others, but previous attempts have been lackluster when it comes to easy sharing, features necessary to make music listening more enjoyable, and upload capacity. Most importantly, none has accomplished the community “stickiness” that has been the cornerstone of successful media services like Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube. In fact, there’s been so much of a noise-to-signal problem with the Web space, I expect a lot of you have simply tuned out new Web services. There are some good reasons to pay attention to SoundCloud, though:

• Singing telegram, anyone? Music on SoundCloud acts more like a messaging service. Tracks from people you’re following appear in an inbox for you to sort through. You can even create a DropBox for other people, so this could be huge for people running labels or live events. (That’s especially welcome now that a lot of people have given up on individually clicking myspace links to hear what someone sounds like.)
• Easier uploads and sharing: Getting files on the service in your favorite format, with whatever length you want, is a whole lot easier than on competing services.
• Smart player interaction: Services like this now live and die on their embeddable player. SoundCloud’s is really clever and attractive. Download links are everywhere. Also, SoundCloud attacks the biggest problem with music – it’s invisible. There’s a waveform view, and people can comment on specific points in your music. That feature has been annoying in a lot of video players, but here comments appear only if you want them to, and I’ve found them really helpful in getting feedback. (See my example track below, for instance.)
• Open API: A full API means you can built interesting apps atop SoundCloud. Check out the lovely Radioclouds by Matas Petrikas for an example of how interesting this can be; source code is available.

SoundCloud, indeed, seems to have all the kinds of features that made Flickr stand out from a crowd of photo services. Labels are already onboard, too: Compost, BPitch Control, and Goldie are already making it part of their workflow, says SoundCloud.

One very significant missing feature: it’s not yet possible to embed licenses in your music, so it’s not possible to tell what’s copyrighted and what’s Creative Commons-licensed. SoundCloud founder Alexander Ljung tells us this feature is coming very soon, though, and as on Flickr, you’ll be able to set a global default for your music, so if you want to release everything under a CC license, you can. That should make SoundCloud absolutely explode as a place for CC-licensed remixing.

Now, the only bad news: pro accounts are a bit pricey when compared to a service like Flickr, priced at EUR9-EUR59 each month. The EUR9/mo account is actually probably what most people will need: 15 tracks per month (that seems like plenty), plus basic stats, dropbox, and support. If you were a beta tester like me, you probably got a complimentary Light account through the beginning of next year. And importantly, there’s no limit on file sizes on any of the accounts. That means you could easily upload 15 live/DJ sets a month, so no complaint here. My guess is that the rates are a reflection of what it costs now in bandwidth for an ad-free site. And you can always go for a free account and see how the service works. But I do expect price to be the major obstacle to this service’s popularity. Update: comment to that effect in, what, five minutes of me posting?

Alex and the team say they’re CDM readers, and I’ll get to meet with them next week while I’m in Berlin. So if you’ve got any questions or feedback, let us know. I’d also love to see this stuff integrated more tightly in other communities; Facebook is there, for a start. Stay tuned.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud Tour

SoundCloud Blog

Here’s an example of my player (just an informal live improv set, not a full track). I need to go upload more content but plan to do that over the coming weeks. But it gives you a sense of how this works in action.

Here’s the upload interface, which I find quite usable. Note that you can also use SoundCloud for private files:

An old PC laptop could be relegated to the closet or (worse, since it’s highly toxic) landfill. But filled up with tasty freeware plug-ins, it’s a virtual studio full of tools and oddities. Via the feast of gear that is the CDMusic pool on Flickr, our friend Jumahat Leman aka uncle bigbrown artfully captures his budget software setup, described as follows:

• A 4+yrs old Acer laptop (a desktop replacement to be exact)
• Ableton Live 5.01 w/lots of freeware VSTs
• using same earphones/headphones/ToneportGx for recording

** My observation:
If you’re a “free VSTs/plugins” hunter/user like me, there’s tons of them available for download for the Wins platform in the worldwideweb. That’s where “cheap” Mac users/lovers (like me) are at a disadvantage with our OSX. So its always good to have a Wins machine at your disposal…

The Mac doesn’t get left out either, though. A G4 tower has become a virtual guitar stompbox and recording studio:

• 9 yrs old Sawtooth “Earache” G4 Mac
• Ableton Live 5.01 w/freeware plug-ins
• $80 Toneport GX
• old iPod earphones or $50 Sennheiser Headphones (for recording/monitoring/mixing)

**most times i load the “mixed songs” into the iPod to listen/compare/mix and check eq/volume.

(The guitar is a PRS SE Paul Allender.)

If these visuals got your attention, there’s another lesson to be learned here. Not only does this visual illustration give you a sense of what his workflow is about and perhaps passes along some tips, but he uses photos and illustrations as a great promotional tool. It helps that Jumahat is a talented designer. I love his mini-portfolio, below. He also makes wonderful promotional posters and stickers. As I noted earlier this week, the ability to make something visually expressive that is meaningful to your music can be powerful – starting with album art, but going beyond that.

Or, to make a more important point, Jumahat has one of the only tasteful MySpace pages I’ve ever seen — and that’s a feat.

Happy weekend projects to everyone; hope this provides some inspiration.

drechohead, Jumahat’s MySpace page
echoinmyhead @blogpspot, with more visual goodies

Updated: Plug-in List

Now, the answers revealed. (See if you guessed any of these correctly.)

Mac

• Studio Devil BVC (for my guitar needs)
• Togu Audio Line TAL Tube (to “tubify” guitar or other sounds, or “overdrive” them more)
• Togu TAL Dub (for my delay needs)

PC

• BTE Audio Juicy77 (for most of my guitar distortion needs)
• BTE Audio TSS (tube screamer stompbox simulation)
• Audio Damage Pulse Modulator (for crazy sounds)
• E-phonic Retrodelay (for mild delay needs)

ALL of my plug-ins are freeware coz i’m cheap! ; )

We asked to see inside the Ableton Live sets you use in live performance, and you’ve responded with an overwhelming variety of responses. There are plenty of very practical submissions, from beginners and advanced users alike, which should give us a real sense of the ways in which people are playing Live as an instrument. Naturally, there are also some more unusual entries.

At top: Mark Gutierrez has used the Live arrangement grid as a palette for animated pixel art, with 8-bit game characters from Space Invaders and Super Mario Brothers dancing across the screen. At bottom: Manuel Palenque has connected Live to the patching environment and 3D visual tool vvvv for live, animated visuals. (Manuel, maybe you can tell us – do you output those visuals to a screen, or use them as feedback during your set?)

Insane examples, yes, but they do illustrate what’s possible. Videos after the jump.

Keep your Live sets coming. Grab a screenshot or video and send to:

• our Live set Flickr group or
• email to pictures (at) createdigitalmusic.com

Ableton Live 8 bit Space Invaders from mark gutierrez on Vimeo.
TP2 from Manuel Palenque on Vimeo.

As seen in Japanese on Hideyuki Fukasawa’s blog.

Related:

vvvv Adds Music Features; Get Your Synesthesia Patching On, Free on Windows

Lots of people play violins. If you pick up a violin for the first time – whether it was an expensive instrument or not – it’ll sound really awful. So, given that music played on laptops is still music, it seems reasonable to assume that it’ll take practice, and that not everyone will do things the same way. There are technicalities to learn, of course – just as with a violin. But there’s also a combination of repetitive effort with originality. Your computer software may not be nearly as elegant a design as a centuries-old acoustic instrument, but some of this surely still applies.

Go out to clubs or concert halls now, and you’ll find musicians and DJs from a broad variety of genres playing live with software. Often, they’ll use Ableton Live, the one product that suggests live performance right in its name. Live is a good place to start, because its Session View is a kind of meta-view of music itself, with patterns, scenes, and interaction. Those clip slots can be played like a “sampling instrument,” and additional instruments can be added to channels. Playing the software requires a combination of performance and composition, even for DJs.

But the one elusive thing about Live is just how to deal with that Session View. There’s plenty of talk in the manual about how everything works, but not what that means musically. You can store clips in channels, but you can only play one clip per channel at once. How do you keep the number of resulting channels manageable? How do you control different musical changes? How do you avoid touching the mouse or squinting at the screen? And, at the simplest level, how do you manage the complexity of clips and channels so that you can perform a set from beginning to end and have a good time?

Bjorn Vayner is one of the world’s leading Live gurus and a master of Live tutorial writing. He’s been tackling this very problem on the Covert Operators blog. (Read parts 1, 2, 3.) It’s a good start, but it raises as many questions and answers, and by the third part he’s already reevaluating his whole approach. So while he sorts out his tutorial, I’ve been thinking.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking over people’s shoulders as they use Live, back to Live 1 when I first started using it. I’ve stood behind the much-hyped Sasha set back when he was still dragging a whole iMac around (before the Intel laptops), and I’ve also seen experimental violinists and modern dance performances. Part of what excites me about Live and what it means for music is that no one seems to use it the same way. There are tightly-organized sets of clips, particularly in DJ sets. There are DJs who drag clips in and out onstage. There are musicians who use Live more or less for backing tracks, or just as an effects hosts. There are people who can make a whole set out of one clip or one instrument rack. Some people have even grown frustrated with Session View and augmented it with an MPC or custom Reaktor patches – but then, that sort of makes all of this all the more interesting. We’ve even seen Live used for controlling visuals on our sister site, Create Digital Motion.

A Call to Action

Maybe there is no Ultimate Tutorial – or maybe, what we need before anyone can write that, is a look at the range of how people use the software in the real world, assembled in one place. In that spirit, I’d like to ask you for some help.

Live users, how do you use Live — live? Take a screenshot of one set that you feel best represents the way you work in performance or DJ sets. No need to be shy; part of the idea is to see how a range of people work in the real world, so it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Send it to us one of two ways:

1. Add it to our Flickr group, http://www.flickr.com/groups/cdmlivesets/ (Apply a Creative Commons license if you know how to do that, so it can be easily shared. Short videos are welcome, too, if you’re that ambitious!)

2. Email an image (JPG or PNG, please) to pictures (at) createdigitalmusic.com. (By doing so, you give us permission to reuse it.)

Most of these will be Session View, I imagine, but if you use Arrange View, send us a shot of that. If you do rely on a custom Max, Pd, Reaktor patch, etc. in conjunction with Live, go ahead and send us that, too. If you make use of Live’s new drum and instrument/effect racks, make sure you can see at least one of them in the shot. If you can, write a sentence or two describing how it works. And feel free to raise criticisms – we’re doing this independently of Ableton, so say whatever you like. Feel free to include a link back to your music site; I imagine your fellow readers would love to hear what others are doing.

You also might also take a look at the work that Puremagnetik has done, not only with their live-oriented sets but also the performance features of their drum machines and the like.

Now, I realize not everyone uses Live. I’ve recently been building sets in Kore, not only because we’re working on the Kore minisite but because, personally, I wanted to try breaking some habits I’ve acquired with Live. It lets me play without Live, but it also makes me a better Live user. Still, Live seems as good a place to start as any. (If this goes well and we survive, we’ll have to follow it up with a look at other tools.)

I’ll be very curious to see the results. Stay tuned, and we’ll do a roundup within a couple of weeks to see what you’ve shared.

Handmade Music, the semi-regular evening of DIY musical oddities brought to you by CDM, Etsy, and Make Magazine, will mercilessly descend upon yet another peaceful Brooklyn evening. Expect an informal, free party + show and tell + science fair featuring self-made electronic musical projects.

Already confirmed for the lineup:

• The MIDI Pick, a pressure-sensitive DIY digital guitar pick by Roy Vanegas


• Mystery musical controllers from Eric Singer, the mind behind the world-infamous LEMUR, an educational outlet in Brooklyn and collective of musical robot/electronics-creating artists
• Theremin-playing robots and possibly other surprises from series favorite Ranjit Bhatnagar. (See the Theremin robots in action, covering Gnarls Barkley. If we’re really lucky, Ranjit will bring his students. Students, if you’re listening, we’d love to have you there!


• David Brynjar Franzson with a generative piece using custom software built in Max/MSP

And I’ll have a new iteration of my video/gesture-controlled musical creation, which allows users to virtually navigate musical structures via a webcam/DV cam. Going to keep working on that until it develops into something, then share how to do it, hopefully. I may have a surprise or two, as well, in addition.

But that’s just the beginning of the lineup, because part of the lineup can be … you.

Share Your Work in Person

As always, we welcome projects in progress to show off and share. Got something brilliant? Got something partly finished? Got something completely broken you can’t figure it out? Bring it out. I know we had at least one person from the circuit bending challenge in the greater NYC area, so of course we’d love to bring some of that into meatspace / the real world.

Share Your Work Virtually Around the World

I’ve felt bad that we can’t involve the global CDM community, much of whom, as it happens, don’t live in the NYC area. (A remarkable number of you are in Australia and Norway.) So, the circuit bending challenge video submissions worked so well, we’re going to open up the event to virtual projects on the Interwebs. Got an unusual music project — even one in progress — you’d like to share? Send us photos and/or embeddable video links by Thursday morning New York time or so, and we’ll feature it here on the site and hopefully (if wifi is cooperative) even have a “kiosk” going at the party. Best way: drop us a line on the CDM contact form.

Fair game: circuit bending, chiptune – vintage gear, DIY controllers, handmade software (code, Reaktor – Max – Pd patches, SuperColldier, whatever), hacked hardware, the works.

Drop by!

As always…

Where: Etsy Labs (blog)
325 Gold Street, 6th Fl.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(the building has a big clock tower on it. Do NOT put too many people in the elevator! Read the sign!)

Subway: Take the A/C/F to Jay St. or B/M/Q/R to DeKalb.
Map

When: 8:00pm – whenever

Cost: FREE (light refreshments provided; feel free to bring some more)

Bring stuff if you like, or just come to hang.