By now you’ve all probably seen that excellent video of Kid Beyond illustrating his usage of Ableton Live. Pretty cool, right? If one had such a system, you could loop yourself playing guitar, beatboxing, etc., all perfectly in sync with programmed drum/MIDI tracks and other performers.

Here’s how to set up your own system in a similar hands-free operation style, for about US$10, without having to solder anything. It’ll take you about an hour once you gather the parts required, or less. No joke.

You will need:

• A QWERTY keyboard, preferably with a USB connector. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy an adapter to fit your laptop, which costs extra. You can get one for $7.50 at AllElectronics.com, but you can find them even cheaper at your local thrift store’s “technology pile.” I got mine for $2.
• A flathead screwdriver.
• Ableton Live. Ed.: Live is a perfect choice here, but you may find this useful with other music apps, as well — or even in a VJ set. -PK
• A free keyboard-mapping utility called Autohotkey (if you’re running Windows). If you’re running Mac, the program to use is calledIKey.

  That’s it. Here’s how to make it go:

  
  

  Above: Steps 1-2. Simple enough.
  

If you really like the idea of creating your own Logic EXS24 sample patches but end up not because it’s really, really a pain in the ass, you will love Keymap from Redmatica. The demo I saw took a single audio file of half a dozen instrument samples at different pitches, then automatically sliced them into regions, detected the root pitch of each region, mapped them to keyboard, and created seamless loop points—all in about the time it took you to read this.

That means you can do a recording in one pass that samples different pitches of your source (even in a random pitch order) and let Keyspan handle all the grunt work of setting up a basic patch.

Keymap is shipping for the NAMM show. Although there is currently no U.S. distribution, you’ll be able to get it online for 200 Euros at the Redmatica Web site.

More at www.redmatica.com

Ed: Read that first paragraph again — Keymap works from a single file of audio, not a bunch of different key samples. And we didn’t even get into surround support. Yeah, we can do some damage with this. More pics from Josh after the jump. -PK