There’s a special love among certain Ableton Live users for the Korg KAOSS Pad KP3, Korg’s lovely and capable sampling/effects box. Al, aka DJ Chinkial (see his trippy MySpace page) has a free VST for free as a holiday gift to us all (Windows-only). The basic idea: make a beatbox plug-in for your computer, using the KP3 as outboard controller, complete with visual feedback. (If you don’t have a KP3, you can use any controller, minus the blinkie lights – monome hack, anyone?)

The results are very wonderful: the KP3 becomes a synth drum machine. The only problem: some bugs may yet need to be ironed out, as the plug-in eats some CPU resources and this is a first version.

I don’t have a KP3 to try out that aspect myself, so if you grab it, let us know how it goes. (Your mileage may vary.)

Al writes us:

the info u posted is on one of my first attempts at a vst version of my reaktor beatbox live machine

kaoss64 is a 16 step 64 part sequencer
that triggers the slices of two bar
loops like a sort of rex file player for wavs

oh and if you’d like to try it out
it would work with any old midi controller just wont have the visual interaction

x position is cc10
y position is cc24
pad trig is cc25 but thats just used for visuals

the abcd buttons are the lowest register keys on a keyboard

cheers again and have a good christmas and new year al.

Description

Direct download link Link not working; exceeded bandwidth

Updated: CDM is now hosting the file as kaoss 64.rar

PLEASE don’t link directly to the file without linking to this post! Thanks!

More from MySpace:

kaoss box 1 vst plugin for kaoss pad 3

my vst beatbox for the kp3

pretty much finished this version
4 part synth record
4 part external control mode
for synth parameters
every synth part has 8 faders each
controling lfo adsr vibrato phase mod and somthing else by selecting the
a b c d buttons
in xy pad mode the a b c d buttons
set which synth part gets recorded
pitch for pt 1 2 3 pt 4 is the octave
the drums are 8 part sample players
select a part using the fx depth knob
in external mode
then the 8 buttons trigger the steps
in pad mode
the fx release slider is the shuffle
in extr mode its used for loop size
the hold button

Okay, getting a bit off-topic here. The big news is, Zoybar is a whole platform for creating your own superguitars. Here’s what the creator had to tell CDM about his vision – and there’s yet another contest in it, too:

Zoybar is a modular hardware platform for creating custom electric string instruments and effects.
The basic Zoybar kits enable you to assemble a variety of electric string instruments that could be mounted with different sound effects.

You can learn more about the project at my blog post http://www.zoybar.net/profiles/blogs/from-the-begining

I was inspired [by] the open source movement. In the virtual world of software production, every individual programmer can be a powerful autonomous production unit (provided with a web connection and a computer) whereas in the physical world materials, energy, production lines, storage and marketing takes much more time, money and risks to become a reality.

The Zoybar components provide research and development tools as a sustainable, playable prototype platform.

The same modular parts can be assembled as different instruments, can be change during the performance and also be mounted with numerous special effects, just by adding and changing their position across the profile groves.

My vision is to found an open music instruments hardware community. Every new effect or feature that would be created by an independent developer could become relevant to the whole Zoybar users and community.

Almost any application can be easily attached to the Zoybar platform, just by adding and changing its position across the profile groves with common bolts and screws.

One last thing – we are giving Three First Edition Zoybar Hardware Kits.

The project is scheduled to be launched at December 2008 with a contest for music instruments and sound effect developers. Entrants shall submit a video clip performance of their new instrument to demonstrate its musicality, design, and engineering features. Performances may include new self made sound effects, synthesizer or electronic instruments.

Three First Edition Zoybar Hardware Kits will be given to the three videos with the highest number of views received through the video interaction at Zoybar.net.
http://www.zoybar.net/contest

So, modular builders, let us know what you make of the site, and if there’s useful stuff there for you. We’ll be watching.

Just be prepared to try to read chinkial’s massive run-on sentence describing the project. He writes:

just thought id let youse know im making a reaktor ensemble at the moment to utilize the korg kp3s 8×8 grid as a seq its going pretty well managed to get the kp3 to trigger the steps on an 8×8 event table and ouput them im also getting visual feed back from the kp3 aswell so u can make beats and not look at the screen just like the monome this is just a test to c if it could b done as i plan on porting it to a vst plugin in sythedit somehow that was my initial idea as not everybody uses reaktor that has a kp3 u know so let me know what youse think about my project

More power to you, man — I think you’ve learned to speak better to the Reaktor than to us, but keep on rocking the KP3. The project looks really cool, from what I can see through blurry cameraphone footage. Anyone in the UK who wants to go shoot this with a real camera, let us know!

It’s like a spy video. And 69 views, plus two tips from CDMers, which means basically you guys see everything before the rest of the universe, even if it’s barely capable of being seen.

chinkial also wins bonus points for plastering his MySpace page with marijuana leaves, being the first and only person to create a stoner mystique for Reaktor. (As opposed to, you know, basement club in Berlin and Red Bull or, maybe more like a lineup of espressos and cigarettes.)

The project looks great, though, so you can bet we’ll stay tuned to the chinkial YouTube channel.

“Ah,” you said. “But that sounds suspiciously like the music of Toshio Iwai, the Tenori-On’s composer-inventor. And it costs a lot of dough. And I have to live in the UK to buy it.”

Enter our friend Gary Kibler. He’s also a huge fan of the Tenori-On — he did cover the UK launch event for us, and then lauded its innovative design. But his creation uses a decidedly more accessible instrument: the Korg Kaossilator, which can be yours for a mere US$200 street — about US$1000 less than the Tenori-On.

Here’s the surprise: the sound-packed Kaossilator can do just as much as the Tenori-On, arguably more. And Gary really didn’t need anything else. The Yellow Album is –

Produced and performed exclusively on the Korg Kaossilator. No other effects, EQ or sounds were added other than those incorporated in the original device. Audio was recorded directly off the unit and the only edits performed externally were simple volume balancing.

The Yellow Album (free MP3 album from Gary Kibler) Updated: New link from ReverbNation, to save Gary’s bandwidth!

There you go. All you need is a Kaossilator. You can now cease lusting after anything else.

Okay, that wore off fast.

All Monome, All The Time With Something Else: Meanwhile, while I got distracted by turkey and stuffing and neglected to post this back at Thanksgiving, the Monome got an album of its own. Matthew Davidson, aka Stretta, did an “all-Monome album” called Grids, and made it fully free and Creative Commons-licensed. Like Kibler, Davidson has some significant credits as a composer (Davidson did the only-ever live performance of Switched-On Bach with Wendy Carlos — that being the original and greatest “entirely made on xx” synth album.)

So, what is the sound of one Monome playing?

You got it: silence. Yes, unlike the Korg and Yamaha instruments, the Monome has no sound generation facility of its own, meaning Matthew “limited” himself to a Doepfer modular, Prophet 5, and MOTU’s MachFive 2. In other words, it’s not really an all-Monome album. But it is quite good, and the Max patches used to make it are available free. (Wait, that’s yet another thing that’s not a Monome used on this album, if you’re still bothering to count.) Matthew, to his credit, admits “the notion of an all Monome album is somewhat of a misnomer.” But he does put forward the idea of a Monomist quite effectively.

Grids – The All-Monome Album (also on Audio News Room, LadyC]

I’m waiting for someone to hack some internal sounds into the Monome. Get back to us if you have. In the meantime, yes, the whole appeal of the Monome over something like a Kaossilator is that it’s just a controller, ready to be connected to whatever you desire — even visuals, or robots, or a giant space laser that blasts pretty patterns into the moon.

Monome, Unplugged — Erm, Live: Part of the cult popularity of the Monome phenomenon can be chalked up to the fact that the talented electronic artist Daedalus was playing out with an early prototype before anyone had even heard of a Monome. Daedalus has an album of his own — live at the Low End Theory event in LA. His live show is simply fantastic, so an album version sounds great to me — and it helps bolster the cause of genuine live electronic performance. I’m very much looking forward to this one. It won’t be free, but I like paying for music. On January 22, you can pay for his music, too.

Daedelus Readies Live Album [XLR8R]

Alpha Pup Records