In a world of disposable computers and electronics, making something “custom” is an antidote to throwaway hardware, a way of putting one’s own handiwork, care, and attention into the object with which you play music. Of course, it’s one thing to say it, and another thing to do it, but Nick Francis falls squarely in the “doer” camp. A jazz-focused radio broadcaster from Seattle’s KPLU, Nick says he’s been chopping up audio since he was doing it with razor blades and tape. Naturally, his digital music controller has the kind of craft in wood that you’d normally find on an acoustic instrument – and his music remixes of choice tend toward artists like Coltrane.

Nick’s work also combines resources from the Web. He says he got started because of a post here on CDM, then went to Livid’s DIY solution, the Builder DIY system, and DJ TechTools’ arcade buttons.

Nick has build details on DJ TechTools, as posted in March:
The Chopper Tone – Classic Arcade Custom Controller [DJ Tech Tools]

Updated: Livid, whose Builder series powered the guts of the project and made it possible, did an extensive Q&A.

And today, he shared his work on his own KPLU radio station site, sharing how he works with remixing classic jazz tunes on the controller.

Mix it up: KPLU music director invents ‘The Choppertone’

Nick shares some additional thoughts for CDM – and I reproduce them, really, because just as he feels indebted to CDM, I feel personally indebted to everyone who shares their work with us on this site and in this community in general:

This project never would’ve happened had I not stumbled upon your website in 2009 or so. I really love your wide-open approach to this whole world of geeks, tinkerers, engineers and artists who make up the core of your community.

Regarding the actual build of the Choppertone, I pretty much covered it in detail in my initial postings to the forums at Livid and DJTT. The whole build process was really challenging, yet extremely rewarding. Nothing beats the feeling of spending months of detailed work on a project, finally getting it done, and then seeing it work!

I basically recorded the video for a few friends who had no idea what controllers were about. I tried to find something simple enough musically to demonstrate it. One of the fun things about jazz is that historically, from the get-go, these musicians were the original “remixers”; they could take a melody, tune or phrase, and tweak it, rearrange it and make it their own. I had been lately been listening to a lot of Fats Waller, so “Honeysuckle Rose” was a good fit. I found at least 20 versions of it in the KPLU library, and chose four that were close to the original key and tempo. From there it was just a few days of chopping everything into 4 bar phrases, then finding the ones that seemed to play well with the others.

As for how I thought the video would be received by the midi controller community, I had no idea. I sensed that this project was going to come off as either really cool…or really stupid. All I knew is that it worked for me.

The positive response to the video has simply blown my mind, and the video’s reach has extended far beyond what I imagined. I could not believe my eyes when I received an email from the Ableton offices in Berlin a few weeks ago. That was so incredibly cool. I’m also quite amused by the many comments regarding my age; I have to tell you that my creative spirit is as vibrant now (at 61) as it was when I was an aspiring film student at UCLA at 21. These days, I’m quite aware that my days on earth are limited and that the present moment is to be savored. That’s all you got.

I imagine a number of the sentiments there will be familiar – and I certainly find interests in our wider community that transcend age (and other) barriers.

Nick says he’s woodshedding so that this is something he can use in live sets. He also says he welcomes questions, so readers, if you’ve got them, let’s hear!

Now that digital technology allows rapid creation of new interfaces for music and sound, the question of how to represent those elements visually has new life. But whether digital or not, practitioners of music have long been interested in applying further descriptions to music, from the Baroque Doctrine of Affectations to the involuntary association of color in Synesthesia.

Applying colors to the notes of a musical scale is one particularly common idea, but the late master composer/orchestrator Arthur Lange had a different idea: why not give colors to range? Building on ideas from orchestrators Francois Auguste Geveart and Rimsky-Korsakov, he applied colors to registers of tone across each instrument. This way, it’s possible to see, in livid color, how ranges are applied in orchestrations, even down to unisons and harmonic density.

Lange wasn’t just any composer/orchestrator: he was a four-time Academy Award nominee, head of MGM’s Music Department, a Tin Pan Alley mainstay, a bandstand and studio regular from the 1920s, and an orchestrator on everything from 20s dance band numbers to MGM’s “The Maltese Falcon.” Seeing his creative and more-than-a-bit idiosyncratic approach says a lot about the ingenuity of America’s musical Renaissance at the time.

Here’s the twist: aside from suggesting how color might be represented in digital systems, the Spectrotone Chart could even be applied to audio equalization in music production, as EQ and orchestration are closely coupled. (Tin Pan Alley’s orchestrator with a pen could be today’s mastering engineer on Cubase.)

I know some of this only by coincidence: Alexander Publishing, a major music and educational publishing house, has decided to re-release Lange’s self-titled “Spectrotone Chart” with training materials as a US$20 download. As they are selling it, Alexander doesn’t want to give away all its secrets, but here’s the basic system. Range is divided by adjective and color:

White = Brilliant
Yellow = Bright
Green = Pleasant
Blue = Rich
Orange = Golden
Red = Glowing
Brown = Warm
Purple = Mellow
Grey = Dull
Black = Indefinite

These sections are then, as illustrated in these excerpt images, applied to frequency and instrumental range, with various applications for using the resulting color system to understand orchestration and harmony.

What might this have to do with recording and EQ? From the press materials at Alexander Publishing:

The Spectrotone Chart is organized by the 88 keys of the piano with each key numbered, from the bottom A being 1 to the highest C being 88. Because of its application to mixing and EQ, Alexander Publishing added below each piano key its Hz frequency. Similar to many EQ charts, above the piano keyboard are the colorized tone colors within each instrument’s range.

With the Spectrotone Chart, an engineer sees the range of the EQ’ing along with the tone colors being affected. “For arrangers and composers not trained in recording engineering, the Spectrotone Chart helps them understand EQ from an orchestration perspective,” explained Peter Alexander, author of the Professional Orchestration™ series and How Ravel Orchestrated: Mother Goose Suite.

If you’re interested in exploring Lange’s system, $19.95 buys you a digital download with the chart (as an 18″x24″ poster, scalable to Letter, A4, and the like), plus two detailed “training guides” for how to use it.

But I’m also interested in how color might be applied to new musical interfaces and interface design, and how you use color to think about your music generally. After all, as MGM themselves demonstrated, a world in Technicolor is somehow more vivid, if a bit riskier. Just ask Dorothy.

Ask a machine to emulate human creativity, and at the very least, you’re guaranteed to learn something. Modeling creative rules and intuitive algorithms as generative code is itself an eminently human activity – think of it as interactive theory. And where the computer fails to sound like a human, you learn something, too.

Improv-Visor is an artificially-intelligent jazz improviser tool, but it’s quite a lot more. It can be used to make lead sheets, to experiment with jazz harmonies and solos, and – by asking human students to fill in their own parts – a teaching tool. It continues some of the legacy of Band-in-a-Box, but it seems to be more in keeping with current-generation software, it supports more platforms, and it’s free and open source. (Yes, it even runs on Linux.)

Rendered in low-fidelity, unaltered General MIDI soft synth sounds, I’m not sure you’ll be tossing your Bill Evans records in favor of the computer’s attempt. But looking past the superficial quality of the sounds to the musical content, the software is pretty impressive. And because it’s a multi-purpose jazz tool and do-everything lead sheet utility, I could see all sorts of uses.

Franz Keller, CDM reader and son of the developer Robert Keller, forwards a description from his father. There’s actually a bit to wrap your head around as far as how this might be used, so I welcome some constructive comments. I think the tool looks great, though; it’d be interesting to hear this integrated with more traditional jazz songwriting and practice workflows.

Impro-Visor, by Prof. Bob Keller and students at Harvey Mudd College

Impro-Visor (“Improvisation Advisor”) is a software tool designed by musician and computer scientist Bob Keller to help jazz musicians work out, hear, and record solo ideas, including studying the work of others. It provides a notation capability for lead sheets that consist of a single melody line and chord changes. Melody content can be entered by a point-and-click interface, typed text, or a MIDI keyboard. Chord progressions are entered by typing the chord names or loading from an existing text file. Using the point-and-click interface, notes are sounded with the corresponding chord background as they are entered. Visual feedback is provided by an optional coloring scheme: chord tones show as black, color tones or tensions show as green, chromatic approach tones show as blue, and everything else shows as red.

A typical use of Impro-Visor is to ask students to compose a solo of one or more choruses over a tune being studied. By working out lines for the solo, a better understanding of both the tune and of line construction is acquired. In addition to the visual and audio feedback described above, there are various ways of getting suggestions for ideas, such as using scales, cells, licks, idioms, and quotes. These are part of Impro-Visor’s vocabulary and are automatically transposed to the chord of the moment. The user can then tweak the melodies as desired or choose alternatives. Ideas can be saved in the vocabulary for later reference. In one use, students submit their solos to the instructor, who then collects them and projects and plays them in the
classroom, for mutual critique.

Another feature of Impro-Visor is the ability to generate brand new licks over a chord progression selected by the user. Lick generation is based on a specific “grammar”, and different grammars can be used to get different styles. Grammars can also be used in conjunction with Impro-Visor’s play-along capabilities to support trading fours or eights with the user playing in real time. Looping over the entire chorus or a small segment is supported. The accompaniment is generated automatically from the chord changes, and various styles can be specified. Grammars can be learned by Impro-Visor from a set of one or more transcribed solos that have been entered as leadsheets. A large collection of chord changes for standard tunes is available in leadsheet form from the Impro-Visor user group. Users can also create new styles, enter voicings using a keyboard interface, etc.

Reference links:

main page: https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/

user group: http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/impro-visor/

solo samples: http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/Solos/index.html

tutorial (translates to many languages):
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor/ImproVisorTutorial4.htm

wikipedia description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impro-Visor

What’s the biggest obstacle in music making? For most people, it’s basic musicianship. I’m not at the Macworld keynote, but the well-done TUAW liveblog tells me that Apple has in fact offered a product hoping to solve that. GarageBand ‘09 will come with built-in musical training, with add-on “celebrity” training packs for US$4.99 each. It’s great news, but it also makes me hopeful that the music education end of music technology will develop and flourish more than it has – along with music education in general.

As far as Apple’s new offerin, if I’m understanding this correctly, you’ll first need GarageBand ‘09 via iLife ‘09: that’s US$79 to upgrade, US$99 new, or free on a new Mac. You’ll then get nine lessons on the basics. (It’s actually not clear that there’s much else improved in this release of GarageBand; given Apple’s focus on incremental, specific feature improvements, this may be it.)

To get additional tutorials, you pay $4.99 a lesson. The pay-off is lovely, though: on-screen frets and keys show you what to do if you’re an absolute beginner, and the likes of John Fogerty, Colbie Callat, Sting, and Sarah McLachlan are the teachers.

There’s no question about it: this is a great way to get casual musicians hooked on music and music learning, and even if you’re not a Sarah McLachlan fan, that’s good news for all of us. But it’s also just the beginning.

Mac users are already assuming this will sell a lot of Macs, but that was the assumption with GarageBand. Not to burst the bubble here, but I think you’d probably be a little silly to invest in an entire Mac for a few minutes of video training; I’m not even sure if it’s worth $100 if you don’t have much other use for iLife. But it is a significant offering, and I think the smartest idea here is offering $5 lessons. It’s so smart, in fact, that it’s too bad that GarageBand is apparently a prerequisite. So you ought to be smelling an opportunity if you’re in the training business: inexpensive, on-demand training could be addictive, even if traditionally this sort of lesson has been sold in a bundled or subscription form.

Apple is doing informal, video-based learning in a new way. It should be great for casual users. But for real music lovers wanting to go deeper, there are already other products, and this should be an impetus for them to both step up the quality of their delivery and capture GarageBand graduates in a new way.

Three tools immediately spring to mind.

One is SmartMusic, which is an enormous, in-depth set of Mac/Windows software tools for really learning to play. Band, orchestra, jazz, method, classical, solo, the whole enchilada is in there. The concept of the tool is that you get a set of repertoire and exercises and work through them, with intelligent accompaniment following along with you as you work. I actually hope CDM can spend some time looking at how SmartMusic is being used; while it’s not exactly a household brand for music software, in education this tool has been huge. Apple’s offering isn’t really comparable, so the lesson to SmartMusic maker MakeMusic ought to be that they have a real chance to start thinking about consumer channels as well as schools.

Another good example: Alexander Publishing. In addition to music tech offerings (that bit being more common), they have titles like founder Peter Alexander’s own Professional Orchestration Home Study Program. These are available as digital downloads, and if Fall Out Boy isn’t quite heady enough for you, they analyze Ravel, Mozart, and Stravinsky string writing. Taking advantage of the online medium, you get downloadable lessons, QuickTime videos demonstrating string bowings, a booklet showing string positions, study scores, live recordings, and online library access. These sorts of things were really hard to follow in the old days unless you got to hang around an orchestra, which not all composers can – certainly not all the time, and not at their own pace. (In fact, the ones that could had an unmistakable advantage).

The other, more conventional offering is Jamey Aebersold Jazz. The soul of the Aebersold approach is a set of recordings of really brilliant musicians playing rhythm section so even something as simple as practicing scales makes you feel like a be-bop jazz star. Aebersold sells tons of other stuff, but it’s the Play-A-Longs that rightfully made them famous. The human element makes it all meaningful. I actually got to go to a couple of Aebersold summer workshops as a young student, and it was life-changing, even though I ultimately didn’t decide to pursue jazz technique. The events and the recordings both are enormous confidence boosters for young musicians, because they put people in the kind of inspiring creative environment that’s the reason we all get into music in the first place. You begin to see technique as do-able, as something you can get by practicing, and you find new respect for what’s expressive in your own music. The bad news about Aebersold is that it’s still largely sold as books and recordings. Those media work well for some things, but there really ought to be an iTunes for Aebersold, or Abersold on iTunes. (How many of you would go impulse buy a Play-A-Long right now? And I’d rather play along with Coltrane than Sting, somehow.)

Apple’s offering, yet again, reaches a big audience in a way that’s important. And make no mistake: Apple just stole the spotlight in music education in a big way. But that could be good for everyone, provided deeper tools step up to the plate. There’s no reason an Aebersold Play-A-Long – or equivalents for other musical styles – couldn’t be just as successful. We’re living in an age in which music education in general faces major challenges. Technology alone certainly won’t solve that – but it can be a part of that solution, and since we’ve got it, we can use it in smarter ways.

And if anything, it’s worth any reminder that practicing and learning music has to be coupled with music making. It’s what allows players, no matter how casual, to really feel musically expressive. I hope we can look forward to more.

This story will be updated with GarageBand info as it is published.