MIDI control of analog devices from Michael Una on Vimeo.

John at HighlyLiquid has been busy this year- he’s got a new kit out and one in the works that really step up the game. You may be familiar with his previous kits, which add MIDI control to Speak & Spell, Atari 2600, or pretty much every Casio. HighlyLiquid also stocks more open-ended kits which can add MIDI control to pretty much anything- I used one in my MAKE Magazine article last year to build a drum-playing robot.

From the suggestion box at CDM, we’re taking a look at DIY party-rocking sound system technology from the birth of Hip-Hop. Ed.: Resident DIY expert and editor-at-large Michael Una returns – and the man has been known to do strange things with speakers himself.

Say you’re an up-and-coming crew with a turntable and some mics. You’ve got a gig this Friday at the middle school gym (the janitor has been bribed appropriately) and the boys on the corner have been passing out your flyers to all the lovely ladies. Everything’s set, except you heard that Kool Herc is coming to battle. Herc and his mighty sound system schooled you last go-round, so you know you need something fresh to rock the bodies proper. Your DIY solution? The 55-gallon drum sound system.

Step 1: Get yourself two steel 55-gallon barrels and two 15-inch subwoofer cones.

(Kool Herc shown for scale)

Step 2: Have one of your buddies who works at the auto shop around the corner cut a hole in the bottom of each barrel. Drill some holes to mount the speaker facing out from the bottom of the barrel.

Step 3: Face the can towards the floor and have your buddy weld some 6-inch pieces of pipe on to boost it up a bit. Hook up your dad’s hi-fi stereo amp, plug in your mixer, and turn it up as loud as it will go (10 block radius). Get those bodies movin’.

Big thanks to DJ Mister P-Body and the book Yes Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade. This idea comes from a story told by Tony Tone and DJ Baron about their early experiences as an MC/DJ duo.

Ed.: Now I can add this to my regrets about school, along with not taking shop to hone my welding skills — seriously, that should be mandatory. (Yeah, like I needed that extra AP. Dumb.) But I’m curious: have any of our readers tried this? Any tips to share? Perhaps we need a DIY speaker summit to try as many amplification and transduction options as possible — complete with welding lessons, natch. -PK

Laptop musicians are feeling out of sync — literally. But we can work together to help the situation.

Computer music making can be an isolating experience. But when users try to use their eminently-mobile tools to play together in the same room, they often find that the technology resists. MIDI, as a serial protocol, isn’t designed for networked environments. Software interfaces are designed to be visible to only one user. Sharing between users rarely figures into designs. Input points are made to be single-user only.

And most importantly, just getting a couple of computers to sync can be a Herculean task — one that seems to have gotten worse with advanced computer software rather than better. In short, for all the technology we have today, we’ve actually regressed from the state of interoperability 20 years ago.

I’ve been hearing more and more frustration over sync, as people begin to collaborate with multiple computers as they would with a small ensemble of instruments. Ableton Live is the most frequent example, but it’s only one case – and I suspect part of the fault is that people are more likely to try to sync multiple copies of Live. When I spoke to Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore in the spring for Keyboard, Martin complained that they had trouble syncing his Apple Logic sessions with other band members using Pro Tools and Ableton. This weekend in Los Angeles at the DubSpot sessions, Glitch Mob’s Justin Boreta talked about the issues that group has had with multiple copies of Live.

Synchronization is, by definition, a tough thing to do. But musical engineering is replete with challenges; it’s no longer acceptable to simply say “live with it” and walk away. It seems we need both better shared knowledge about what sync is how to make it work, and better engineering solutions on the software and protocols side to support the way users want to work. And yes, we need a new sync standard that goes beyond what’s presently available in MIDI alone.

Focusing this discussion, I just got an essay in my inbox that I think focuses the issue. I will try to speak to Ableton’s engineers about the matter, but this isn’t really about Ableton alone, so I’m posting it here first. We could use more data about how you’re working with various software and hardware, what techniques you’ve developed, and what frustrations you’ve had. We have a wide community here of users and developers (and a whole lot of you are both).

Mark Kunoff writes:

Clean is overrated. If you’re ready for a little digital dirt in your synth life, powered by the open-source Arduino hardware, Marc Nostromo’s Squealer is for you. Built atop the wonderful, Arduino-based Pocket Piano kit by Critter and Guitari, it’s a full-blown, simple, digitally-gritty synthesis engine.

You get a monosynth, some fixed waveforms, a resonant filter, decay, and some aliasing tricks for extra grit. The big news: the Arduino Piano Squealer is now under a GPL license.

Official Arduino Piano Squealer Synth Page has everything you need
Announcement of GPL v3
All at Mustalk@noisepages.com

Here’s what it sounds like:

SAP+BOM+Dodgey Eighties Ringing Reverb:
apbom.mp3

Eery piano:
ap-eery.mp3

SAP+Flanging Mini KP:
ardboy1.mp3

Novation’s Launchpad, its affordable (< $200) "grid" controller, may have a big Ableton logo on it. But underneath, it's just a MIDI controller. Bi-colored LEDs, containing a red and green element for red, green, and amber output (amber = red+green), can be triggered using simple MIDI note and control messages. That means, whether you're looking forward to Max for Live or you're sequencing in a tracker or writing Processing sketches, you can use the Launchpad just like any other MIDI controller.

One of the things I thought was a major demerit for Akai was the fact that they failed to ship a MIDI implementation for the Akai APC40. MIDI implementations are the charts of MIDI messages we've had since the very first MIDI devices came out in the 80s. They're usually printed in the back pages of the manual, and even the cheapest gear has often had one.

Score: Novation 1, Akai 0. Novation has done the MIDI documentation, and then some. Its MIDI “Programmers Reference” is out even before the official Launchpad ship date. And rather than just doing a MIDI chart and assuming people know how to read it, they’ve taken the care to fully explain the way MIDI messages work, how to calculate the right messages, and how to really use this. Experts will have all the information they need, but newcomers will also find they can spend a little time and learn how to do what they want.

Launchpad Support with Downloads (see Programmer’s Reference at the bottom)
Via: Novation released Launchpad Programming Guide, and Protocol [Nezoomie's Zen Wave Blog - great read]

It’s listed as “for Max/MSP programmers,” but anyone using MIDI will want to have a look; that’s obviously relevant to far more than just Max. (In fact, there’s not a single mention of anything specific to Max in the document.)

What might people do with stuff like this? Well, as of just four hours ago, Matt DiFonzo lets us know he’s written a simple monome emulator. It’s even got a clever name:

nonome – monome emulator for Novation Launchpad

There’s some bad news mixed with the good. Even with something as simple as a grid of buttons, MIDI isn’t as friendly as it could be. I still would like to have a MIDI editor for the Launchpad so you can reassign buttons if you like — that’s a feature, incidentally, available on rival Ohm and Block hardware from Livid Instruments. Also, the documentation reveals that Launchpad uses “a low-speed version of USB,” which runs at a maximum of 400 messages per second, thus taking 200 milliseconds to update a Launchpad’s LEDs. (There are some workarounds, but they’re … more work. Clarification: Once you double up messages, though, you can get this to a more acceptable gap, and that’s for updating all the LEDs, not the latency of input messages.)