Via Collin Cunningham at MAKE, MrBook has a lovely rig with a modified Gakken SX-150, the synth kit that sells for US$50 in the States and has even been seen as a free add-in with Japanese magazines. He’s added MIDI control and a digital audio converter, and put it into a housing, which makes for a quite-playable instrument.
Really terrific work! Of course, a few thoughts:
We need an OSC-compatible synth. (Anyone out there?)
I love you, Live, but this looks like a perfect job for Numerology (for its modular sequencing) or Renoise (for tracking).
Looks like more controls would make this even more self-contained.
Handheld eggs, ironing boards, machinedrums, phones … live setups can involve all sorts of oddities, especially among the rabid (in a good way) Ableton Live fanbase, and we’ll be showing them in NYC. Saturday night, we’ll chill out after Dubspot’s day-long workshop with a free, open party in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District at 675 Bar to explore some new musical interfaces, have a few drinks, meet each other, and hear some new sounds. [Facebook RSVP]
For more on the whole week’s events with Dubspot, see our previous post.
Confirmed lineup:
Isomer Transition (aka RJ Valeo) doing some superb-quality techno with lots of knobs and a machinedrum + Ableton Live
Sound artist Ranjit Bhatnagar with a musical MIDI ironing board (pictured below) controlling Live, as seen at Handmade Music (at which it was covered by Wired.com)
Track Team Audio’s Michael Hatsis showing some tweaked-out Live control in action – hopefully including his APC40 hacks and monome patches.
Me, playing a set with control TBD – possibly Lemur and/or my Android phone
The “beater” application is really quite nice, and follows with a lot of handheld-style, gestural controllers we’re seeing lately. That could mean that soon we could have some sort of software layer that works with any of these controllers — substituting, say, a Wii or mobile phone. Here’s a great video from the ITP show (the bi-annual exposition of the work of interactive technology students at New York University):
Pronunciation of some common music tech terms has been a source of debate. Generally, though, there’s only one right answer. I had hoped to kick off a pronunciation guide yesterday or today, but now I really can’t resist – not with none other than Tegan & Sara getting together to debate the right way to say Moog.
Don’t get me wrong. I love cows, and the sound “moo.” I suggest if you have something you want to name Moo, you should, like your own MooVerb max patch or something. However, here goes, a few of my favorites:
Moog: Rhymes with “brogue” or “rogue,” not the sound a cow makes. Don’t say “Moooooog” unless you want to get funny looks from synth nerds, or if you’re teaching synthesis to livestock in a dairy.
Monome: The community-based, (partly, at least) open-source controller rhymes with “MA gnome,” not the Spanish-sounding “Ma gnome ME.” You should not be able to use it in a couplet with paper mache. Get it? Two syllables. Sure, this pronunciation varies, but the two-syllable version is what the device’s co-creators call it.
OSC: Pronounce the letters of the open communications protocol, as in “O.S.C. / oh ess see”, not “osk” – though that would have been kind of cool. Think, “Rah, rah, rah, Give me an O! Give me an S! Give me a C! What’s that spell? Better than MIDI! Time-based messages, higher resolution, transport-independent high-speed networked communication with auto-discovery, gooooooooooOOOOO O.S.C.!” (People sometimes say this site is geeky. I have no idea what gives them that impression.)
And for now, O.S.C. stands for Open Sound Control, even though in one spot on the JazzMutant website it’s called “Open-Source Control.” Just get ready for this to change – because OSC really isn’t specific to sound, it may need a new name, like Open System Control. (A recent paper suggests dropping the “sound” in the name.)
MIDI: Rhymes with G. Gordon Liddy, or P. Diddy, or Tweetiebird saying “Piddy.” And, actually, it occurs to me I’ve never heard anyone mispronounce this. Fascinating – an acronym that’s actually intuitive. Oh, but “C.C.” stands for “Control Change,” NOT “continuous controllers” — look at the CC specs; most aren’t continuous. There. I got to be anal about something anyway. Updated: consensus is actually that “mee-dee” is a mispronunciation for native-English speakers, but likely makes more since than “mi-dee” in other languages — particularly if you speak French. So, in other words, it’s an acronym, and makes the most sense to pronounce in the natural way you would in your native tongue. (For English speakers, who knows what vowel sound is appropriate given how screwy our language is, but the creators of MIDI all say middy.)
Maschine: Native Instruments’ drum machine software and controller is German-engineered, so say “muh SHEEN uh,” three syllables, as if you grew up in Berlin. Now, granted, Maschine’s own promotional videos — outsourced to the US — anglicize this to “machine” / “muh SHEEN”, but the engineers and product folks who built the thing use the German pronunciation and think you should, too. And, anyway, it sounds cooler, just as I have to admit a currywurst is tastier than a Nathan’s dog.
I’m sure this is only a small selection of potential mispronunciations. Other candidates? We’ll have to release a full pronunciation guide soon.
What do most musicians really need out of an audio interface? The answer to that question can vary wildly, but for a whole lot of people, it’s as simple as wanting to get an instrument and/or vocals in, and a basic, high-quality stereo mix out. That’s it.
That’s part of why Apogee’s new compact ONE audio interface could be a huge hit on the Mac. Let’s reduce its specs to the basics:
It lets you plug in a mic, with a preamp and phantom power
It lets you plug in an instrument (high impedance — so think your guitar or bass)
It has an internal condenser mic, so you can record on the go even if you don’t have a mic handy
It has a stereo output for headphones or powered monitors
It has a nice big, shiny knob and lights for levels.
It’s really small.
Apogee’s converters are some of the most respected in the business. If this is up to their usual quality, that could make this a really special box – as a basic audio interface or an addition to your gig bag. This interface does 44.1/48kHz, 24-bit.
And it plugs in via USB with USB power support, so if you got one of Apple’s FireWire-less MacBooks — before the recent refresh returned FireWire — you can actually use this.
There is some bad news. This is really a single-input box; you can’t even use the instrument in and the mic in (even the internal mic) at the same time. That seems an odd choice, as it wipes out a whole bunch of singer-songwriters. The output, likewise, is unbalanced and out of a single 1/8″ jack, which isn’t always what you want out gigging. And the ONE, pretty as it looks, has some stiff competition in the affordable USB market. On the other hand, if these specs do fit what you need, the ONE’s stablemate Duet had fantastic quality and uncommonly plug-and-play operation and Mac OS integration, making this really appealing for the Mac crowd.
And you’ve got to love that optional mic stand mount and design. It’s also really, really small – 4″ W x 6.3″ L x 1.5″. Apogee says “pocket-sized” which is a stretch unless they mean overalls or someone’s metric conversion is off, but it is nonetheless very portable.
Now, Apogee, if we could just get a ONE AND A HALF for people who like this but want balanced 1/4″ outs and two simultaneous ins instead of one… (Yeah, I know, you can’t please everyone.)
There’s plenty of rightful skepticism about the use of mainstream displays for multitouch in general purpose computing. And why not? As a full-time replacement for other input, multitouch probably doesn’t make sense. But for music, the equation is changing. Multitouch capabilities are showing up on commodity-priced PC computers like the multi-touch enabled HP laptop models – the tx2z seen here starts, incredibly, at US$850. And because computer musicians are looking for more control, having a touch-enabled display (even single-touch) just makes sense.
The screen for a laptop musician is a huge piece of real estate. Finally, instead of sitting dumbly in front of you glowing, it can become an X/Y controller or give you shortcuts for controls or provide additional parameters. Yes, using a touchscreen exclusively can result in the dreaded “gorilla arm.” The ergonomics of using a vertically-oriented screen are extremely poor – if you use it exclusively for an extended period of time. But if you look at the way people are using these touchscreens, for incidental control in combination with other things – and the ability of convertible laptops to transform into a horizontal orientation – I think this is no longer the deal killer it once was.
At top, an HP laptop ($850) plus the free version of Sensomusic’s Usine is all you need to create a multitouch interface for Ableton Live. Correction: right now this is limited to single touch only, but multitouch is supported in the hardware, in drivers, soon in Windows 7, and support is promised for a future version of Usine. The point still stands — as does the ability to optimize controls for your fingers. Being able to use more than one at once will, of course, be that much better.
Fractal (see Myspace) uses the combination to play Ableton Live with some simple controls. If you get hooked on Usine, you can get the full “Pro” version for EUR70 with additional patches and objects.
The one major remaining obstacle to multitouch, at least, is cost. If you don’t especially fancy buying a new HP laptop, add-on kits still run in the range of US$800-900 (meaning, ironically, you might as well just buy the HP instead). Laptop vendors are still slow to adopt the technology, though that could change when Windows 7 ships later this year. (On the other hand, tablet PCs, even when they were shipping in relative quantity, often were constrained in available configurations and either skimped on specs or demanded a significant premium.)
But let’s not complain too much. The simple reality is you can add an HP laptop now to a live rig as a performance instrument for under a grand.
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