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.
At the risk of becoming Create Digital Monomes, here are two things that make me very happy.
For anyone who thinks it’s too hard to get hold of a genuine monome, or any of those of you who got the kit and haven’t built a proper case for it, this is for you. FYXDESIGN has posted a terrific tutorial enclosing the monome 40h kit (8×8 grid) inside a custom case made from LEGO bricks. The project comes out of a group at New York University’s ITP digital tech school who saved money, beat the monome’s scarcity, and made lots of friends by group ordering a bunch of kits and then assembling them together as a group. The magic here comes courtesy of some smart design sense and a boon to prototypers everywhere, the LEGO Digital Designer software, free for Windows and Macs.
Xiaoyang Feng’s design work is in general worth checking out; if someone with his experience and skill is using LEGOs, you’ll want to take note.
Even if you’ve got a project that’s not a monome, this is clearly a fantastic way to whip up an enclosure in a hurry – and that “prototype” might be all you need. Bless you, LEGO!
With the step-by-step tutorial, this is child’s play, even for someone as tragically un-handy as me.
Build Monome LEGO Case Tutorial
In other news, here’s a lovely live video shot by duo elle p & iftah in, apparently, a bathroom (no reverb needed)! It’s a reminder that, even without velocity control, an array of buttons really can make a musical instrument. (In fact, making performance easier is part of the grand tradition of instrument design – see frets, the Autoharp, the piano, and so on.) In an age of overproduced music (sorry, Glee), it’s lovely to see the Internets striking back with live performance, warts and all, as a way of conveying authenticity and personality. Elle has in her lap another interesting DIY creation that’s not a monome. The duo describe it as a “pixiphone,” a “general purpose d.i.y grid controller based on an old siemens operator interfaced with arduino.” I’ll have to get more documentation on that.
Embedding is acting a wee bit screwy for me today, possibly on Vimeo’s end, but you can always go straight to the video.
7up 2.0 – Introduction from makingthenoise on Vimeo.
What if the world of musical performance suddenly started moving a whole lot faster? That’s certainly the case among a handful of monome- and grid-wielding electronic artists.
In an evolutionary breakthrough, what previously had appeared in a period of months is showing up in a period of days, as long-simmering ideas come to the fore. Spurred by the blank-slate, minimal grid of the monome (and its design as mirrored in similar controllers from Livid, Novation, and Akai), musicians are re-imagining the step sequencer in new permutations. Many of these creations in recent days have been coming to Max for Live (site | cdmu tag), taking advantage of the potent combination of Live as a host, third-party plug-in instruments as sound sources, and Max’s own capabilities with sequencing and sound. But it would be a mistake to see this as a phenomenon limited to Max for Live. Other development efforts, built in free tools, work from the ground up instead of the top down, and may use code in place of patches. These efforts are running in parallel, taking ideas from one another, responding to each other as a challenge. And that could make the coming months very interesting, indeed.
What’s exciting to me is that a set of ideas is emerging that may go beyond any one tool. Even past the grid, what we see is people beginning to refine the idea of live electronic performance into reusable, modular components. There is a greater sense than ever that what computer performance is treads a line between composition and live playing. At the heart of that concept is embodying both in an “application,” and making that application work on the grid.
The biggest news is that 7up, the popular multi-page, multi-module performance app for the monome, is reaching a big new release. 7up 2.0 builds upon an earlier version written as a standalone application in Java.
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