The LinnDrum II (once the BoomChik) has become a somewhat mystical beast, looming over the horizon and taunting fans of synth and beat hardware. The collaboration between beat machine guru Roger Linn (of LinnDrum and MPC fame) and synth guru Dave Smith (of Dave Smith fame), the box has gone through various design revisions, each leaked and dissected by, well, people like me. Saturday brought a new set of news, as spotted by Tony Mission on Gearslutz.

Here’s what we know now:

We know that the LinnDrum will be a combination of Dave’s synthesis know-how and Roger’s approach to real-time sequencing and beatmaking. We know it’ll have digital and analog synth voices. We know it’ll do MPC-style real-time and 808-style step sequencing. It’s almost certain to retain onboard sampling, too. In fact, presumably the specs on Dave Smith’s site are still reasonably applicable.

What we don’t know is what the design will look like, or when it’ll ship. It won’t ship in 2008, so … 2009? The image above is not what the new LinnDrum II will look like. Roger released these images over the weekend, but they’ve already hit the wastebasket in favor a new design. On the design elements:

Stanton has sent CDM some product shots of the new DaScratch touch controller. What we couldn’t see before is evident here: the fit and finish looks like it has some potential, and most of all, this device is really compact. (Well, that or they just shot it using someone with very large hands.) I look forward to seeing it up close and personal.

I want to hear from you: what do you think is the competition for this device? What are you looking for in terms of expressive controllers — controllers that aren’t just mixer / control surfaces? Mixer-style layouts or simple boxes of encoders/knobs have tended to be the rule. (Coming soon, we’ll have a round-up of controllers on iPod touch and iPhone as well as DS. They’re fun, but none of those give you a whole lot of surface here.)

More photos, as you ponder:

Stanton has released the details of its new DaScratch touch controller, and I have to admit, it looks pretty terrific. About as far as anyone has gotten with a smart touch controller is an X/Y pad; this controller, by contrast, defines different areas of the touch surface for different functions and provides LED feedback so you can see what you’re doing. “Scratching” alone doesn’t really make sense in the computer world, even with DJ software, so you get lots of different functions for live performance. I think this may be as big a hit with Ableton Live users and laptop musicians as DJs.

Updated: Richard Devine video above now restored.

The specs:

• 5 touch sliders, 3 of which are switchable via preset
• 1 rotary touch controller (switchable)
• Loads of buttons: 4 hardware backlit switches + 10 + 9 switchable buttons
• USB bus powered
• Windows, Mac compatibility (Linux should work, too; it’s class compliant — you just miss out on the included software app)

What can you do with those touch areas? Stanton suggests scratching, scrubbing, navigation, cueing, looping, sampling, pitch shifting, effects, and the like, but of course, you can hook it up to whatever you like, and for our friends building crazy Pd and Reaktor soundmakers, this could be even more fun.

By switching modes, you can shift the kind of gestures you’re using on the center touch area, selecting three vertical faders, or one vertical fader and a circular touch area, or one fader and buttons. That’s in addition to the buttons and fader areas elsewhere. I’m impressed that in a small space, there’s a significant set of controls. If you want more, you can even snap together multiple units.

The clever addition is that, on top of the hardware, you get a software app called DaRouter. Dumb name, but functional stuff: built on Bome’s MIDI Translator, the software makes it easy to swap between presets for Traktor and Serato or select a generic/Ableton preset. You can’t edit the software presets directly, but you can make your own in MIDI Translator. See the DaRouter page for more.

The best part? Our friend Richard Devine demoing the unit in the video at top. I’m sure Richard can do something a lot more out there with this as the controller, though.

Lots more at the product page:

SCS.3D: DaScratch

Pricing: US$299 list
Availability: Unknown

Stanton wants this to be part of some giant “system,” by which they mean they want you to buy more things from Stanton. I’ll leave that up for you. On its own, this looks like a potentially wonderful controller; I’m eager to try it and see if the hardware build and touch quality delivers.

Previously: Stanton to Release Touch DJ Controller; Surface One, Thunder, Reborn?

Stanton is teasing a new DJ controller with touch controls, and particularly a circular scratch/control area, with live LED feedback. This allows “virtual” controllers not only for DJs, but (Stanton hopes) VJs, laptop musicians, and the like. (Stanton says “multimedia artist,” to which we suggest “visualists”.) I especially enjoy the “confidential” site, though I’m not sure marking press release with “do not publish / embargoed” has much more impact given a lot of sites these days.

It’s a little hard to tell, honestly, how this is different from a lot of controllers that use physical controls, thus giving them better tactile feedback. And the Stanton brand earns some skepticism from the discussion on the Ableton forum. But there’s some potential here; launch date is supposed to be September 19 so I’ll update with availability plus other specs then.

In the meantime, DJ/vinyl/DVS site Scratchworx deserves full credit for breaking this story posting the first video; they picked it up from the basement of one of the beta testers. (It looks reasonably cool, though, again, surely any controller could keep you from having to touch the laptop.):

Updated: Retail list is expected to be US$299; see turntable poetry which appears to be the first blog to have carried the story.

The moment I saw the DaScratch (or wait, is that da DaScratch? an DaScratch?) … I thought of the aborted Midiman (now M-Audio) Surface One. Announced in 2001 but apparently scrapped after it was determined to be overly expensive to produce, the Surface One still looks desirable. It combined touch controls with physical encoders, and the faders were arrayed in positions that made sense for, well, human beings with two hands.

Let’s be clear about one thing: building your own Monome from a kit isn’t actually necessarily for everyone. DIY is a wonderful thing, but you want to make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew — always start simple and grow from there. You can buy a premade Monome, the sustainably-produced, open-source, boutique controller, and be much safer. That said, sometimes something wonderful happens along the way when a project evolves from what you thought it would be into something else — the occasional bloodied finger a necessary sacrifice.

Johan Larsby was inspired by the team behind the Arduinome clone. (I got to talk off the heads of Arduinome’s Jordan and Owen yesterday and get to stalk them in the LA area next week.) Somehow, in trying to create his own, something … else happened. And there was blood.

It was one of these I tried to build, but failed with as you will read further down, so instead I created something that suited my skills better and something I probably will use a lot more :) Thus I dubbed my contraption to Moanome.

You really have to see the thing in action — oversized with its giant arcade buttons, it’s got a quirky character quite different from the minimal original:

Cubase 4.5 is here, with CC121 controller and MR816 audio I/O hardware integration, some new sample content, and a mysterious new “media management” format called VST Sound. It is nice to see the hardware/software integration we’ve been clamoring for. But will developers actually start supporting VST Sound and VST3? Will I manage to find a way to get excited about Cubase? We can only wonder… and it’s time for some Steinberg advocates to speak up.

Cubase 4.5 was released last week as a free update for 4.x users. The main story is that it integrates with the CC121 hardware controller. You may recall the CC121 as the hardware controller I just didn’t get, because it requires mousing over the parameter you want to control so you can tweak it with the hardware knob. Well, now here’s a rather lame marketing video from Steinberg, which doesn’t help. (Video via AudioPorn Central. Not sure why companies insist on making things like this, but they do.)

Help! Our band is caught in THX 1138! Hint to Steinberg: this is what a marketing video should look like. Okay, maybe you didn’t want to dump paint on your CC121.

I’ve been following Ruin & Wesen’s development as they’ve been hard at work on new, petite MIDI controllers, promising to be the first of a line of DIY-friendly controllers. “Open source hardware” has been getting a lot of play as a concept, but the idea here is really built around the product: their stated claims emphasize musical usefulness, documentation, extensibility, and customization in addition to the making code and schematics available to hackers.

Today, Ruin & Wesen have launched their website, with two nice-looking products ready for pre-order. The MIDI Command is a small box with five endless rotary encoders on it and a “Macro Knob.” Here’s where things start to get interesting: not only does the unit ship with support for Ableton Live and Elektron Machinedrum support out of the box, but you can flash your own firmware using SysEx. There’s also an LED display, so combined with the software editors and MIDI mappings, this could even allow you to “roll your own” Kore-style controller.

Elektron fans should be even happier about the MonoJoystick, as featured in the video above. As a companion to Elektron’s MonoMachine SFX-60, it gives you six buttons and joystick control over the boutique drum machine. It’s obviously suitable for emulating Elektron’s own joystick add-on, but it’s again hackable for custom firmware and features, and as seen in the video, allows control even Elektron does not. Given those features, I’d actually be interested in seeing the MonoJoystick re-purposed as a software controller for those of us who aren’t lucky enough to own the MonoMachine.

Both units are handmade in Germany. The MonoJoystick is EUR130 / USD190; the MIDI Command is EUR180 / USD265

Ruin & Wesen Digital Products

I’m in touch with R&W, so hope to have more on this soon. I do think we’re seeing the birth of a new business model for music hardware, one built around open source. You’ll notice that it’s often the interface of open and closed but extensible tools that may be the most productive (like an open source controller for the proprietary but well-supported Ableton Live). Naturally, a lot of the open source ideas out there won’t work — that’s the nature of business — but the ones that survive could be wonderful for the music landscape.

Universal Audio’s UAD-1, a sound processing platform built on DSP hardware add-ons for your computer, has gotten a much-anticipated sequel this week. The UAD-1 was always a favorite choice for sound production, delivering tasty analog-emulating sound tools on a PCI card platform. The UAD-2, on PCI-express cards, offer up to “ten times” the processing power of the original — supposedly even the single-processor model delivers a greater-than-twofold performance gain. The DSP hardware is just the platform, though, and Universal’s main push here is its plug-in developers. Sure, these days your CPU is a plenty-powerful sonic number cruncher, so I think it’d be a stretch to say anyone needs DSP cards. But what the platform can mean is plug-in goodies not available anywhere else, with a no-nonsense approach to sound that may not be as practical in native plug-ins. (And with support from software like Ableton Live, Apple Logic, and Cakewalk SONAR, you can then drop these into your host of choice.)

Here’s a look from around the Web at what people are saying about the UAD-2.

Oliver Chesler at Wire to the Ear notes what could be a real “killer app” / highlight of the UAD-2: a Moog multimode filter.

Sometimes, simple stuff matters. DJ mixers like Pioneer’s DJM-800 have simple, single-knob low- and high-pass filters. Laptop software often doesn’t. Enter FZero, with his free and open source Single Knob Filter to fill the gaps. (Windows-only, built in SynthEdit, but it’s open source and schematics of the basic signal processing are available, if anyone wants to translate this to Mac.) Drop this into an insert in a tool like Ableton Live and go play.

Single Knob Filter [Project Page]
SKF-VST at Google Code [Source, VST Download]

It’s apparently a big improvement on an Ableton forum solution that used 127 different filter instances in a rack.

I’m aware of the goodness of Single Knob Filter thanks to the Aurora open source DJ mixer project (see yesterday’s write-up); they assign an instance of the plug-in on each of the Aurora’s two mixer channels. Aurora’s Matt originally had the SKF plug-in in their Ableton template, but I encouraged them to replace it with Ableton’s Auto Filter for cross-platform compatibility and ease. That said, for plain DJ filtering, this it the One True Knob.

Now, go forth and use it on some crazy experimental noise soundscape you’ve been working on, just to spite cliche.

Not happy with what you can get off the shelf? Build your own. That’s increasingly the philosophy of people working on music hardware. But a second economy is growing around these unique, boutique projects. By open-sourcing the designs, they offer the opportunity to build upon their work, buying something from a small group of designer-musicians and then modifying it to your purposes. The latest addition is the Aurora, which just became available for sale this week. CDM got an exclusive hands-on look at the new hardware and a chat with one of its designers. Here’s our first look at open source hardware’s newest musical gadget.

The Aurora is called a DJ “mixer,” but it’s really a control surface. It connects via a USB jack for power and to transmit serial-over-USB data, then uses free software to translate that data to MIDI messages for use with software like Ableton Live. The project is the work of a three person team, with Matt Aldrich designing electronics, Mike Garbus designing firmware, and Maro Sciacchitano working on the form factor and look and feel. They have an impressive background in making stuff. I got to hang out with Matt in Boston, where he’s joined MIT’s Media Lab Responsive Environments group, so I expect more good projects out of him soon. Matt and I talked frankly over coffee and pastries about the strong suits, weak spots, and future of the device and other projects.

Kit Availability and Pricing

Availability of the first aurora224 model was announced today:

• Complete unit: This kit requires only basic assembly. The PCB is pre-assembled, as are top and bottom panels, and all parts are included. Basically, you just put those panels, boards, knobs, and button caps together using a hex screwdriver — no soldering required. US$340.00. ($420 international)
• DIY kit: This is the one with all the soldering — not recommended if you’re new to soldering, as there’s some tricky stuff in there. US$270. ($350 international.)

Aurora Mixer Project Site
Order Page
Previously: Aurora: Gorgeous, Open Source DJ-Style USB Controller; Details from the Creators

You don’t get that much of a price break via the kit, so I expect you’ll only want to do that if you really enjoy the smell of solder as much as I do.

Onto the hardware itself: