A $50 synth that makes neat noises is fun. But a $50 synth that has a proper housing, audio jacks, and can be MIDI controlled — that’s a whole lot better. So readers were wowed last week as we saw the work MrBook did with his Gakken SX-150.

Now, by popular demand, MrBook shares his techniques with specs, instructions, and code. This isn’t a bad project to get started with if you’ve been thinking of doing something on these lines.

The basic ingredients and process:

• Find the connections on the synth for audio and control, using contact points on the board
• Build a simple circuit that adds MIDI input (control) and audio output – schematic on his site. It’s not a tough circuit at all — this could be fun soldering practice.
• Add the Arduino, the open source, dirt-cheap, accessible microcontroller project board, and some code MrBook has written for you.

That should be fun even for relative newcomers – provided you have basic soldering chops. If you want to get more advanced, there’s room to modify the Arduino code to do fun stuff, or, as MrBook is doing, add a standalone Arduino sequencer or the like to drive your synth in hardware alone. (While I’m still on a crusade to do OSC for stuff that talks to computers, I think MIDI should absolutely be used for what it’s good add – connecting hardware.)

You can also have some fun with the casing. (Someone needs to mod the drab colors on the Gakken, too, I think.)

If you do a project and document it, do let us know! And we’ll be watching for more from MrBook.

You can get your SX-150 kit from our good friends at MAKE. (Nope, I’m not getting any cash for saying that. Hmmm… okay, I need an affiliate account, don’t I? Make?)

SX-150 synth mod instructions, schematics and code [MrBook]

Reminder: we’re meeting Saturday in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District to chill out, hear some music, and share strange and wonderful and hacked hardware controllers for Ableton Live as part of DubSpot’s Live Sessions tour. If you’re in the NYC area, you won’t want to miss out on music-controlling ironing boards, handheld controllers, and folks like RJ Valeo (Isomer Transition) above.

Full details
Facebook event

But if you’re not in New York, DubSpot and CDM are working together to make sure the weekend gets videoed, and we’re doing some work online.

Friday afternoon I’m chatting and answering questions as I work with the Live API to hack in OSC support for Live, and build a simple app for Google’s Android phone (which can be ported to other platforms, as well).
irc://irc.freenode.net/cdmblogs

Join the Noisepages Ableton Live hacker group for bleeding-edge discussion of some of these topics, too:
http://noisepages.com/groups/ableton-hackers
(I’ll be doing some link dumps with resources later today)

And Sunday, I’ll be giving a workshop about some controller secrets, with more to come online. (Sign up with promo code CDM for a discount if you happen to be registering at DubSpot; otherwise, hang out here.)

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:

Out of the box, Akai’s APC40 has some lovely features for plug-and-play control of Ableton Live, with clip triggering, track control, device control, and dedicated buttons for command shortcuts. It also sends and receives standard MIDI messages for every last button and encoder. But what if you still want more? What if you need more controls to do multiple duties, or get bored with simple clip triggering and decide you want additional interaction? Enter the hackers. Already, using MIDI, clever APC40 users are squeezing more function out of this box. And while it isn’t solved yet, there are some clues to the infamous hardware handshake – a System Exclusive string exchanged between the APC and Live that locks certain Live software features to the APC and not to other hardware you might like to use.

Manual MIDI

Before we get too fancy, for power tricks, your first stop should be Akai’s own site:
Tips and Tricks June – APC40

Live allows you to manually override the APC’s dynamic control assignments using the standard MIDI Map. Let’s say you don’t use headphones for cueing. You can select the MIDI Map, pick a control to which you want the Cue Level encoder to be assigned, and you’ll manually assign just that control – the rest of the dynamic template remains in place. Akai has some tips for scrolling through scenes, selecting scenes with one of the two footswitch jacks on the back of the unit, scrubbing and nudging clips, fine-tuning tempo control, and more.

monome Emulation for APC40 and Korg padKONTROL

Our friend Michael Hatsis of trackteamaudio has been hard at work in Max/MSP patching an emulator for the creative patches for the open-source monome hardware. (Thanks on Twitter to ruaridhTVO, too.) By translating from the (and, cough, superior) OpenSoundControl messages the monome supports natively to MIDI, the emulator supports not only the APC but Korg’s padKONTROL, as well. This opens up the use of the APC for creative microsampling and other tasks.

Video demo at top (updated late Sunday night, so if you saw this over the weekend, here’s a tighter version).

Direct download:
http://www.warperparty.com/datter/Monomulator0.9.zip

Forum discussion:
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=117307&start=0

And be sure to check out the Java- and Python-powered open-source library for the monome on which Michael’s work is based:
net.loadbang.shado

You’ll find plenty of documentation in Michael’s download, and the hope is that this is just the beginning — you Max patchers out there (and Pd, if we can port this) can keep hacking on it and try out some new ideas. One reason you might want to keep hacking on the padKONTROL is that you could find uses for velocity – unlike the monome and APC, Korg’s 4×4 drum pads are velocity sensitive.

If you’re using Ableton Live 8, you’ve hopefully already discovered the joys of Track Groups. Track grouping is a welcome feature in any DAW, but in Live, the mixer-centric Session View can easily get unruly with endless columns of vertical tracks.

I wanted to share some discoveries about Track Groups, including what I thought was a big realization about how they worked with clips that turned out not to be as exciting as I thought.

To group tracks, select multiple tracks first (click one, then shift-click the last one), right-click (ctrl-click on Mac), and choose Group Tracks. The result – what’s basically a submix:

• You can save space by collapsing tracks in your view, clicking the triangle at the top of the Group
• You can add insert effects to the whole Group, and signal will be routed through that entire chain (making them like a quick send)
• You can control the whole “submix” Group at once using the Group’s mixer parameters

No surprise there. Here’s the surprise.