Native Instruments had already revealed that it would add new hands-on remixing capabilities to its flagship DJ hardware and software line. But today, we get to see precisely what form that will take, with a grid of light-up, colored pads that seek to make DJing with Traktor as much about remixing tracks as playing them.

Plenty of DJs and electronic musicians have been doing just that via a variety of methods. Some use samplers like the MPC, some hardware like Korg’s KAOSS line, some combine live and DJ sets in software like Ableton Live, and some even use custom creations built in tools like Max and NI’s own Reaktor. What sets Traktor Kontrol F1 apart is an approach that melds those sampling/remixing features with DJ-style decks, in something NI calls “Remix Decks.”

The function of the touch-sensitive, light-up LED colored pads is a bit different from similar offerings, as well. Any light-up grid of pads will recall hardware for Ableton Live and devices like the ground-breaking monome grid controller. As with the Ableton solutions, those F1 pads do indeed launch clips, as well as everything from full tracks to loops and one-shot samples (samples that play once without looping).

These triggers act as shortcuts, too, however, with settings like Punch mode, effects assignment, and sample muting mappable to the matrix of pads, too. There are 16 pads, as on iconic hardware like the MPC, but you can scroll through pages on an encoder. You can also trigger functions like Sync, Quantize, Sample Size, and Reverse. As such, the F1 is a bit like a compendium of everything we’ve seen in grid controllers. You could treat it like an MPC with more conventional samples, you could treat it like Ableton’s Session View of clips, or use it as a set of shortcut keys as we’ve seen in hardware like DJ Tech Tools’ MIDI Fighter – or some combination, or more than any of those things.

In case you don’t want to combine this with another controller – perhaps hoping to squeeze into cramped quarters in a DJ booth – there’s also a set of four volume faders and four filter knobs.

The release today is also about new functionality in Traktor Pro software itself. Delivered in the 2.5 release, the new build packs up to 64 slots for samples – much as you’d find in a sampler or something like Ableton Live – right in the DJ tool. These samples then play on up to four decks. The “Remix Deck” is differentiated from a normal “Deck” in that it adds beat grids, BPM, and key information associated with those samples – again, a bit as you’d find in looping software. (I’d utter the word Ableton again, but it’s really Acid and Propellerheads’ REX that introduced that idea.)

To me, it’s really the combination of those sampling-style functions with DJ-style decks that are interesting. The moment you bring the deck metaphor back, you’re re-entering a realm that’s more comfortable for DJs. On the other hand, all this remix business could finally bridge some of the gap between DJ software and production tools for producers who find themselves juggling both roles.

We won’t get shipping hardware until May 30, but I hope to talk to NI more about it before then. US$279 / 249 € is the full price. Given that comes with a full copy of Traktor Pro 2.5, I’m not sure if the software has become free or controllers are becoming standard dongles for software. There are also 4 GB of pre-remixed sound content to get you started. You existing users of the Pro hardware and software will get Traktor Pro 2.5 as a free update.

NI is assuming you’ll use this alongside a mixer or their own S4 and S2 controllers, but it’d be nice to try to only use this, I must admit. Oh, and there’s also a new bit of luggage for it for when you hit the road.

DMC champion (read: internationally-recognized) DJ Shiftee shows off the new instrument. I got to meet Shiftee through Dubspot, and the guy is an immensely-talented musician with an incredible sense of rhythm, as well as a supremely nice guy.

Now, I want someone standing behind me shouting me on as I work. It’d sound a little different.

“P.K.! P.K. here in X-Berg! Berlin, baby! It’s cold! It’s wet! You’ve got the granular reprocessor! You’re crunching up sensitive acoustic piano sounds! You’re making MeeBlip noises acid basslines, you’re coding now! You’re doing generative – what’s that? I think you’ve got a bug. You lost your 3D camera in your reactive Processing.

And now you’re blogging, blogging, go hit the spell check. Add in that Oxford Comma. My boys, Struck & White.

Publish that s***…”

www.native-instruments.com/f1

Building on the original Midi Fighter, a 4×4 array of arcade push-buttons, the Midi Fighter 3D adds interactive, light-up color feedback and gyroscope-powered motion sensing. The work of electronic music site DJ Tech Tools, it’s an impressive-looking piece of work. But if you’re not interested in the “3D” sensing, don’t overlook the clever color feedback and bank shifting, which could prove as much of a draw.

The Midi Fighter 3D, announced today, will ship in April at US$249. There are now orders yet, but there is a preorder list.

DJ Tech Tools is pushing the 3D orientation functionality. In a good way, it mirrors a bit of the branding and design we see from Nintendo (well, at least that “3D” moniker). If you don’t mind moving your controller around as you play, it looks like it can do some impressive things. Dan White of DJTT explains how it works to CDM:

The 3D uses a gyroscope and a compass to track the position of the controller in space. The gyroscope tracks relative position (meaning angling the controller towards any of its sides), and the compass tracks rotation along the same plane that the controller is on (think turning the controller like a steering wheel).

While the sensing may not appeal to everybody, the big advantage here is integrating continuous control of parameters (which buttons obviously lack), in a way that’s integrated into the design and gestural.

A wrist-strap will be available, and designed in such a way that you can access all the controls, including even those on the side.

At $249, though, fans of the original could easily justify the purchase based solely on the new light-up, assignable color indicators on the buttons. Apart from looking cool, they promise to make elaborate control setups possible, with the aid of bank controls and lots of customization in the software. You get four banks of controls via the top, but there are also six nicely-integrated triggers on the side which can be used for whatever you like. That could give you more banks, effect kill switches, or some other function you haven’t thought of yet. The fimware can send up to 68 unique Control Change messages and 70 button messages, so presumably DJTT is betting – as they have with their other product line – on lots of preset ideas for different performance rigs and styles.

All of this communication happens via MIDI, so using it with your favorite software is a cinch.

Specs:

• Included configuration software
• Customizable RGB arcade buttons: 4 x 4 button array, with individually-addressable light-up RGB feedback on each button
• Four banks, six side buttons
• 3D motion tracking of five movements

It’s hard not to notice the cable in the images. DJ Tech Tools tells us that’s their own DJTT USB cable, which will be bundled with the hardware and also available separately. They say it’s a “high-quality” USB cable – I’m guessing the main test is whether it can stand up to moving the hardware around, since it isn’t wireless. Having right-angle USB cables is hugely useful in tight corners, though; Hosa was showing off something like that at NAMM and I’m happy to replace my USB collection with them.

Also worth noting: DJTT says they’re applying for a patent on the five-way motion control tracking method they’ve developed. (I find the patent process to be pricey and arcane, personally, but I’ll be interested to see how it goes for them!)

$249 seems to me a really good deal for this gear, but if you liked the brute-force simplicity of the original controller – and its greater customization options – the Classic remains available, starting at US$119.99.

More details:
Introducing the Midi Fighter 3D [DJ Tech Tools]

What should DJing software look like, anyway?

It’s just a teaser, but for once, the idea is simple, straightforward, and clear. Native Instruments have taken their DJ software, Traktor, and combined it with a grid of pads for sample triggering and loops. The upcoming hardware/software combination we expect later this spring.

At the risk of stating the obvious, what’s significant about adding loop triggering to any DJ set is that you can more easily move beyond playing and mixing tracks. Even without drum machines, this kind of manipulation is part of the grand tradition of DJing, made all the more impressive when ground-breaking DJs were able to accomplish it using only a turntables. (It’s perhaps a triumph over the linearity of recorded music in the 20th Century that, at last, artists found a way to subvert recorded music’s permanently-frozen state and reclaim the playback device as an instrument.)

What the upcoming product does is to take the virtual deck metaphor of Traktor and makes each deck a sampling machine. Each deck can trigger one-shots and loops, coupled with the mixing, cueing, and effects possibilities of Traktor as a DJ tool.

The obvious comparison will be to Ableton Live, but here, it’s as significant what is different as what is not. This wording from NI’s description will admittedly sound a lot like Ableton Live and colored renditions of the monome: “Stylish multi-color pads trigger loops and samples, allowing for on-the-fly remixing.” There’s definitely some influence there.

But the grand-daddy of all these things is sampling drum machines, the first instruments to popularize triggering one-off or looped audio content from a grid. (Tip of the hat here to Roger Linn and his designs.) Ableton’s breakthrough was taking that sample-triggering grid metaphor and cross-breeding it with the DAW, the all-purpose studio workstation with its channel strips, tracks, and arrangements. In Live, the track is king.

NI’s breakthrough here promises to be seamlessly making each deck – not each track – the focus for sample triggering. And their hardware literally combines the DJ mixing and effects functions with those pads. In the future Traktor tool, the deck, not the track, is king. And that makes all the difference. The deck will behave like a deck for cueing (a common complaint about Live), for one, but it’s also important that whereas Live gives you as many tracks as you want, you’re forced into the limitation of four decks in Traktor. That limitation is neither positive nor negative, but rather something that will influence every other decision you make. (Having looked over the shoulder of Richie Hawtin’s impossibly-enormous Live set recently for Plastikman, with tracks that scrolled on seemingly endlessly, I can tell you this isn’t a minor point.)

Of course, the other amusing point is the timing of when NI is tipping their hand. NI already makes a popular sampling drum machine, Maschine, combining a dedicated controller with software. Akai has just entered the ring with their own revision of the MPC – combining a dedicated controller with software to make a sampling drum machine. NI, for their part, here reveals that their next move is a new dedicated controller/software combo that also adds in DJing.

Anyway, for now, it’s just a video, so everything else is speculation. Feel free to have a look and let us know what you think, which, knowing comments, I’m certain you’ll do in no uncertain terms.

Side note: My brain is fuzzy; can anyone remind me of the capabilities of 4decks? This was, as I recall, a Reaktor patch that combined looping and decks.

What an extraordinary thing an interface can be, a map to making music.

A new community-generated album from users of the now-legendary monome grid instrument yields a variety of musical outcomes. The results are instrumental and lovely, breaking off on lots of different stylistic vectors, but glued together by the notion of key and pitch. Let’s let contributor Joshua Saddler explain this – and the holiday album – as well as share some of the music. If you celebrate Orthodox Christmas or more generally the idea of “Holidays” (ahem), or if you just like good music, you can overlook the fact that the latter arrives a bit late on the Western calendar. But both albums are terrific, and I suspect the approach to the music in key, to sharing samples and field recordings, could well be an inspiration in your own music-making endeavors. Sometimes rules are liberating.

If you want to get a jump start on musical New Year’s resolutions, I can think of nothing better. Joshua writes:

The monome community has released not one, but two albums for the holidays. Both are freely available at http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com

The first, MCRPv11 (Monome Community Remix Project, volume 11), was released mid-November, five months after the MCRPv10 album (which CDM has previously covered).

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/mcrpv11-all-keyed-up-edition

As with all MCRP albums, there are guidelines and a theme. Participants submitted a field recording and a short instrumental sample in the key of G/E-minor. The participants then chose as many samples as they wished from the shared pool (though they couldn’t use their own samples), and had a couple of weeks to assemble their tracks. Sounds ranged from falling rocks to ocean waves to modular synthesizers to toy ukeleles and dogs barking. From this pool emerged fifteen startlingly diverse tracks.

Have a listen, and head to Bandcamp for downloads in any format you desire:

I appreciate the chance to see Joshua’s process in video:

I’m pretty pleased with how my contribution, “mnml autmn,” turned out:

mnml autmn by ioflow

I sequenced bits and pieces from four samples with Renoise (in some cases using single-cycle waveforms…so it still counts, even if it sounds nothing like the original!), exported sections to loops, and performed them live with rove (http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:rove) on a monome 128. I recorded and rearranged the resulting segments using Ardour3‘s timeline view. The tracker and the traditional DAW actually worked well together. As I’m the sole Linux musician on the album, composing and arranging takes much longer using free software than more common tools like Ableton Live. Things that took me hours are probably three-click operations in Live. Still, by having to strike out on my own, I learn so many new things each time I sit down to create…it’s worth the occasional frustration at not being able to do things the easy way, using the same process as everyone else.

The second release is the annual Monome Community Christmas Album volume 2, made available on December 21.

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/monome-community-christmas-album-volume-2

This project had much more leeway; no hard-and-fast rules about samples or themes. I ended up forgoing the monome entirely for this album, instead improvising an original acoustic piano piece:

gloria by ioflow

http://soundcloud.com/ioflow/gloria

There were fewer participants for MCXAv2, since it began immediately after MCRPv11, but the quality of the tracks is still extraordinary. Warm neo-retro-loungetronica. I’ll be listening to it year-round, not just in December.

Me, too. And perhaps you, as well:

Thanks, monome-ers!

http://monome.org

I tend to tune out when it comes to sample libraries, but here’s one that takes the scripting capabilities of Native Instruments’ Kontakt sampler to extremes. The Grid Machine line developed by Lindon Parker (Channel Robot) and distributed by LoopMasters brings to Kontakt the sort of grid-based, sliced-up sample manipulation we’ve seen in the monome community and in custom tools in environments like Ableton Live and Renoise. Using KSP, the scripting environment in Kontakt, these produce entirely-custom instruments that cut, chop, stutter, reverse, mix, trigger, sub-loop, re-trigger, and modulate. You can change speed, mute, skip, reorder, and play patterns, and even mix between loops.

Even before you get to Kontakt’s effects, this kind of work really challenges the notions of what people imagine a “sampler” or “loop library” to be. And that’s been true of the sample sound design community, generally – they can brew things beyond the expected boundaries of a sample. I could even see this becoming a performance instrument.

Now, for those of us not content to use existing loops, I hope we can somehow convince Lindon to explain how he did the KSP scripting work to make it all happen. Drum ‘n Bass and House libraries are £29.95 each.

Loopmasters: Channel Robot

Some House for those of you who weren’t into the DnB version:

FL Studio, beloved to its users by its original name “Fruity Loops,” has long had a Playlist mode that could be used to assemble simple live performances by jumping to sections of your music.

But a new alpha mode takes this mode far further. It’s still based on the Playlist, but can add clips dynamically – including Audio, Automation, and Pattern. While still in early testing, developer Image-Line has released some information about how triggering works, as well as the video above. And oddly enough, just like the video we saw earlier this week in Renoise, it employs a Novation Launchpad controller. (The impact of the monome on the market is really hard to overstate.)

More details from the developers:

Controllers

Keyboards – There are 12 Clips assignable to each Playlist Track (one octave of a MIDI controller per track)

Launchpad & Mouse – Unlimited Clips assignable to each Playlist track.

Other Pad based Controllers – Limited only by the number of MIDI note assignable pads

At the moment there is basic scripting to define extra pages on the launchpad, you’re able to define actions for buttons, among transport ones, notes & controls.

The CPU load is similar to the project as it would play normally.

Performance Mode [Image Line forums]

It’s not quite an Ableton killer – not yet, anyway, especially as it lacks Ableton’s unique Session View paradigm for working in this way. It’s even a bit short of some of the hacks we’ve seen for Renoise. On the other hand, if you’re an FL fan you should be able to make your performance plenty sophisticated – and since just trigger clips isn’t everything, you might also want to play along with an instrument or sing. And I could see this catching on. It’d be great to see something other than Ableton in live laptop performances. Variety is the spice of life.

Rating: very, very promising.

Previously (this week, no less): More Renoise Step Sequence Goodness: Launchpad + Lauflicht (Other Controllers, Too)

Thanks to Dario Lupo for the tip!

What happens when you meld the most futuristic Microsoft technology with the most futuristic Apple technology with the most ColecoVision-esque graphics as built in Jitter? Or you create gameplay that couples physical human contortion with the step sequencing rhythms of music? A different take on music games, that’s what.

Developers Matt (“M@tt”) Boch and Ryan Challinor work, in their day jobs, on the music game as most people know it, at Harmonix. Harmonix’s roots remain in the rhythm game, so that music play, even at its most serious, is still about musical timing accuracy. Pxl Pusher is a very different mechanic: imagine a step sequencer grid on an iPad, presenting blocks that, true to the classic game Twister, require another player to balance and stretch their bodies to match.

I caught up with Matt and Ryan over the summer at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Before throngs of crowds swarmed the game – easily one of the most popular of the night – I managed to get some quick footage of the creators doing last-minute patching and trying out gameplay. (The quiet there is atypical; we got to shoot before the doors opened.) An insane travel schedule kept me from publishing sooner, but here, Matt and Ryan share their process.

Another interesting twist: Max/MSP and Jitter allowed extremely rapid prototyping with Kinect, something of interest to anyone doing this sort of work. (And dig those “3D” images … if they don’t blind you.)

CDM: How did you work together on this project?

Matt: Jamin from Kill Screen had asked me to make a project for the Pop Rally, and I was looking for someone to team up with to make it happen. Around the same time, Ryan was developing Synapse, and I got super excited about that tech. Having worked with him closely on Dance Central 2, I was positive we’d make a killer team, so I proposed we team up and make it happen. He got the ball rolling immediately.

Max/MSP is a pretty ideal environment for the both of us to work in, as it lets us evaluate ideas really quickly, and completely obliterate the lines between disciplines that we’re used to in traditional game development. Each of us designed, coded, sound designed, and made art for the game. It was awesome to be able to share in the creation of all parts of the game.

Ryan: We riffed on ideas with each other until it snowballed into the final product. Max allowed us both to work in the same space, as opposed to the traditional programmer/designer arrangement, where I would work in code and Matt would tweak values that I expose. This allowed us to work much faster and blurred the line between programmer and designer.

Any roadblocks, discoveries along the way?

Ryan: The whole project was driven by discovery: discover a fun interaction, then figure out how to leverage it. There were no real roadblocks, other than Matt being on painkillers for the entirety of the project!

Matt: I fell, knocked out four teeth, and fractured my jaw, so I was on heavy doses of painkillers for much of the development. I’m doing much better now, almost fully recovered.

The greatest discovery for me was more of a rediscovery. I remembered how freeing it is to design a game for a very specific context. Before working at Harmonix, I made arcade games in a contemporary art context. Getting back into that mindset was a blast.

Tell us a bit how you work with Max for rapid prototyping. How did you set it up? Any specific tools you made use of? Any tips, either related to Max or Kinect specifically?

Ryan: No real tips for Max, other than do a lot of commenting when you’re working on a file with someone else. As far as Kinect tips, my main advice would be to explore and discover what fun you can have with he input, other than starting with a specific goal. The only tools we used outside of Max were Synapse for the Kinect data, Adobe Premiere for the background movie, and some web app Matt used to generate some of the sound effects.

Matt: We ended up using Beanstalkapp & Versions for version control, which was huge for us in the late stages of development when we both needed to be working simultaneously. It was great that we structured our patch in such a way that we could easily turn elements of the patch into standalone patches, so simultaneous work could happen. You lose some flexibility, but it’s worth it to be able to work in tandem.

How did you conceive the idea for this game?

Matt: Largely through iteration and idea exchange. I VJ around Boston a fair amount and often used TouchOSC to VJ with my iPhone, so I’m not stuck behind my laptop for hours at a time, so when Ryan brought up the idea of using TouchOSC with MAX and Synapse, I was totally sold. We quickly arrived at the mashup between Twister and Step Sequencer, and every after that was polishing mechanics, arriving at a unified aesthetic, and then finding the best way to ramp difficulty.

Ryan: Matt approached me to work on a game for the PopRally right around when I just finished up Synapse, so I wanted to leverage that in the project. I had also just learned about TouchOSC, so I thought it could be fun to incorporate that. So, the initial concept was born out of experimenting with interactions that combined the Kinect and iPad.

How did things go at MOMA? Any surprises in terms of reception? It was effectively rapid playtesting — anything that you would now incorporate into the game? Or things that worked well, for that matter?

Matt: It was a phenomenal success. I never imagined we’d have a line of people waiting to play the game all night, never mind a line full of people cheering, laughing, and clapping as they watched others play. We’ve talked a bit about ways to modify the existing game to make it a bit deeper and more broadly compatible, but I’m also wary of upsetting the balance we arrived at.

Ryan: I was pleased with the reception at MoMA, it was very satisfying to work on a project and then immediately have people playing it, literally 10 minutes after it was finished (thanks to a last-minute feature request from Matt’s friend Christina)

What does it mean to you to have this game in this landmark art museum?

Ryan: I’m really grateful that we were able to show it off in such an amazing space. It feels a little unreal to me, my brain hasn’t really processed it yet.

Matt: It was hugely validating, especially because my Dad was in town and was able to make it to the event. He’s never seen crowds of people play the games I’ve worked on so to have him there, seeing how much fun everyone was having, was awesome in and of itself. That it was at the MoMA? Still haven’t totally processed it. It was the stuff of dreams when I was getting my art degree; it’s going to take a bit for me to internalize that that dream was realized. Not only was I able to show work at the MoMA, but it was shown in the context of so many great games: Bit.Trip Beat, Limbo, B.U.T.T.O.N., QWOP, the list goes on…

How about the connection to Kill Screen Magazine?

Matt: I think Kill Screen is far and away the best game writing happening right now. Both their daily updates on the web and their themed print issues are staples in my life. To be fair, I might be biased as I’m good friends with [editor-in-chief] Jamin, but nevertheless, I think what they’ve accomplished is undeniably phenomenal. What other publication could convince the MoMA to have a video game night?

Can you tell us a bit about your roles at Harmonix, and how you came to be there?

Ryan: I’m a programmer at Harmonix, I’ve worked on The Beatles: Rock Band and the Dance Central series. I was a CS major at the University of Texas, I got an internship at a game studio in Austin that turned into a job, then a few years later a coworker talked me up to someone he met from Harmonix, and I got recruited to work there.

Matt: I am a Project Lead at Harmonix, though I’ve occupied many roles previously, most recently Senior Designer. I started at Harmonix as a Production Assistant while I was finishing my thesis at Harvard. My friend and VJ partner, Josh Randall, is the Creative Director of Harmonix. We’d been VJing together for a bit while I was in school. He gave me a call one day, suggesting I apply for a Production Assistant role. One of my jobs was to track all the prototype hardware, but I ended up spending most of my time repairing it, as my art practice of building arcades gave me a fair amount of experience about mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, and coding. That landed me a role as hardware designer, and, many Rock Band iterations and trips to China later, I was tasked with investigating tech for a potential dance game. That lead to me heading up the development of a game prototype that would become Dance Central, and I’ve been designing for the franchise ever since. A circuitous path for sure, but I’m really happy with where I ended up, and deeply grateful to Harmonix for allowing me to occupy such varied roles throughout my 4 years tenure.

Synapse is something other folks can use, too, correct? What does it do, and where might they begin?

Ryan: Yep, Synapse is a freely released toolset. The primary focus of the project was for controlling Ableton Live with Kinect, but it can be used with anything that receives OSC input. You can find more information at http://synapsekinect.tumblr.com/

Any future plans for this game, or other Synapse-powered stuff?

Ryan: In the immediate future, we’ll be showing off PXL PUSHR at Indiecade in LA on October 8th. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the future is. At the very least, we’re going to keep the ideas of the gameplay mechanic in mind to be incorporated into future projects. As far as Synapse, I’m currently exploring other ideas so I don’t have any Synapse stuff in the works at the moment, but I know of a few other people working on Synapse-powered projects currently.

Matt: As Ryan stated, we’re showing it at Indiecade, and are hoping we’ll get more opportunities to show the game publicly. I deeply enjoyed working on the game with Ryan and I hope that TeamPXL, the moniker we’ve adopted, will develop additional games with the same working methodology. For now, given that we both just wrapped development on Dance Central 2, we’re taking a much needed break to recharge. I know Ryan’s got some awesome audio manipulation patches in the works, and I’m excited to see what comes of those. In time, I’m sure an awesome idea for a game will cross one of our minds and we’ll have no choice but to dig in and make something new!

http://teampxl.tumblr.com/

There’s a beautiful immediacy and tactile quality to hardware step sequencers. And there’s all the flexibility, convenience, and power of software.

Solution: combine them.

We’ve been following various custom creations for the music production tool Renoise – the latest being a lovely performance grid, and back in 2009, the beginnings of Launchpad grid sequencing.

You can thank Renoise’s powerful API, which allows its users to modify the way the app works with surprising ease (at least for the hack-inclined), all for free.

The latest is Lauflicht, an 8-, 16-, or 32-step step sequencer for the Novation Launchpad controller (or, alternatively, other controllers like the monome) and Renoise. What’s nice about it is, you can add as many tracks as you want, with whatever samples and instruments you want, but then trigger those steps from hardware. Now, this will appeal of course to those who want these kind of regular rhythms – I’m already anticipating some frustrated responses from our fans of non-duple rhythms and polyrhythms in comments. But if that is what you want, this looks fantastic.

The creator sells the tool for EUR24. How much that means to you is dependent, of course, on the stability of the Greek government. (Sigh.)

Side note: rockin’ domain name.
http://www.stepsequencer.net/

Via BrenMcGuire on CDM comments – thanks!

Lots more videos; check the site for the artist’s own techno tracks:

Light-up grids of buttons are nearly commonplace, but the BlipBox is something different: its array of lights is also a sensor, making it both X/Y controller and light-up grid. And it’s designed to be completely open — firmware, hardware, schematics and documentation are all fully GPL-licensed and open source.

For those of us who aren’t ninja coders, it’s also easy to customize, thanks to friendly software (pictured below) .k for making nifty interactive animations on its display and support for the artist-friendly Processing code environment. As the creators describe it, it’s three (three!) pieces of hardware in one:

• a creative tool and musical instrument
• a large, high definition x/y controller with visual feedback
• a uniquely versatile MIDI and OSC controller

Lest you assume such oddities as this come only from non-musician hackers, these are designed by musicians. The project, built right in London, is available in fits and starts and stock becomes available, but a recent run was “Prices are GBP 140 for a complete ‘box with USB and MIDI interface, and 9v external power connection, in a black aluminium case with perspex side panels.” (To the team: apologies for giving you splashy publicity right as you have precisely none in stock. Readers, follow @cdmblogs on Twitter for updates. Or just follow their site:

BlipBox News

Side note: yes, we need to stop putting “blip” in the name of things. Guilty as charged. (I’ll be writing soon about the Blippo Box, which is … completely different.)

It had to happen — button triggering, as popularized by the monome, here meets a conventional two-channel DJ mixer. But the layout I must say is quite spare and lovely, the work of the Japanese-based PICnome project. Furthermore, it’s Open Source Hardware, covered as I have recommended by a ShareAlike Creative Commons license (with no commercial restrictions) and GPL v3. (The creator prefers the term “Free Hardware,” which I love theoretically but have avoided for fear of people demanding we mail them MeeBlips by sending us a self-addressed, stamped box.)

With clean, subtle markings and a nicely-composed layout, it’s hardware that doesn’t scream out its design with big decals or overblown features. It’s just a (colored) grid controller, similar to the monome, combined with controller setup laid out as a two-channel mixer, with the sorts of features you’d expect of each. I love the angled labels, at least aesthetically. (I should note that this is not related to the monome project; the monome is not open source hardware, though it works via open software and commercially-restricted availability to some schematics. It is, of course, deserving of credit for inspiring a whole generation of hardware.)

The controller works with both OSC (OpenSoundControl) and MIDI for maximum flexibility. And, incidentally, this could be an ideal live visual controller, too, especially with that native OSC support.

Good grief; I realize I filled this post with nothing but technical jargon. Hopefully, those of you who speak in such tongue-twisted terms have followed along, and everyone else just looked at the pretty pictures and video.

Carry on.

PICratchBOX – Sneak Preview [atelier.tkrworks]

http://made-in-yamamoto.com/

Japan, hope to come visit you some day soon. Thanks, Regend, for the tip!

Update: Read in comments about some lingering frustration that the original PICnome project was derived from the monome; since the monome doesn’t permit the sale of derivative designs, that could be viewed as an abuse of the available specifications for the monome. In this case, based on what I see, however, I’m hard pressed to see this product as being subject to the same criticism by virtue of having buttons, unless there’s some detail I’m missing. If I am missing something, please let me know.

By the way, if you want to revisit the PICnome project and decide for yourself, that thread is still on the monome community. It’s not accurate to say as some commenters do that the PICnome was a “bootleg” or simple clone of the monome, as it was re-implemented on a PIC chip. The issue is that the product was then made available for sale, because it was built on monome schematics; while those are readily available, they are not licensed for this kind of use. The firmware is free for use; it’s covered under a GPL license, which is non-revocable. However, to my knowledge, those same concerns may not necessarily apply to this project.

To recap: the PICnome project indeed is technically incompatible with the intentions and licensing of the monome project, but the new PICratchBox should be fine. So, here’s to the PICratchBox, which is more interesting precisely because it’s something new.

It is my view that the original PICnome project violated the terms of the licensing of the schematics; whether because of a misunderstanding or not, that’s not something to condone. But the new project does not do so, in my view. I contacted monome’s Brian Crabtree and while we didn’t have an on-the-record conversation, he took no issue with that statement.