Editing drum patterns in RjDj/Pd from Frank Barknecht on Vimeo.

If making your own musical tools seems like a lot of work, you’re not wrong. The beauty of making your own stuff is all about making your own reusable modules that help you build musical solutions more quickly. Finding those useful modules can also help people new to programming or patching.

In Pure Data, the free and open source cousin of Max/MSP, one form of these reusable modules is called the “abstraction.” It’s an object that you can stick into your creations to help build what you need without a lot of fuss.

Translation: even if you’ve never patched before, you can start making fun drum pattern makers quickly using all-free software. The folks at RjDj, who have been creating mobile interactive toys for the iPhone and iPod touch (see our interview, recent story) have also been building a library of useful abstractions. Because that library is also free and open source and built for Pd, it works with your Mac, Windows, or Linux machine.

Here’s a great starter tutorial, useful for even newcomers:
Editing Drum Patterns in RjDj

For more Pd learning (see additional tips in comments):
Be a Music Geek Ninja with Electronic Music Programming in Pd: New Book

If you create stuff with this, be sure to share with us! And it’s brand new, but feel free to come join our Pd group on the in-alpha/beta Noisepages:
Pd Group

I wish I could be in London in July, but since I can’t, hopefully some readers of this site can make it to the upcoming Music Hackday, which features RjDj and lots of other online music projects (Soundcloud, Last.fm, the music API for The Echo Nest, 7digital, more):
http://musichackday.org/

Want to reignite interest in DJs who actually use their hands and fingers to slice up and juggle sounds? A cavalcade of “laptopists” is the ticket. Suddenly, at least in some corners, people are again interested in turntablism. It’s nice to see how a controller can integrate digital loop and cue points with a setup that still focuses on scratching. And Stanton’s SCS.3d turns out to be scriptable in the open source DJ software Mixxx. As some live PA musicians revert to a “push play” mentality, DJs can keep it interesting.

SuperCollider, super fast: UK-based experimental musician mcldx has produced a 60-second intro to SuperCollider. Naturally, you won’t learn SuperCollider in one minute, but what’s nice about this is it does explain the very first steps you would take to get SuperCollider running – and because SC doesn’t have a single-window, “do everything here” interface, that first step actually confuses a lot of people.

Have a look, and you’ll at the very least understand step one. From there, you can start diving into tutorials and making other sounds. SuperCollider will repay an investment of time: it’s an elegant language, runs a really efficient synthesis engine, works with OpenSoundControl natively (and now even builds its UI in Java’s Swing for cross-platform compatibility), and has some incredibly powerful tools for things like manipulating live sequences.

You’ll find additional help built into the tool. Some quick platform-specific notes:

• Linux: On Ubuntu, check out the nice integration with gedit, the default GNOME editor. It makes SuperCollider feel a little like Processing.
• Mac: Apparently Safari 4 beta is causing trouble with the online help editor if opened from the menu.
• Windows: I couldn’t get any love from the 3.2 build on Vista (sound driver problems), so I tried 3.3 “alpha” – and found the alpha perfectly stable, and an easier install.

http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/

Via fritcrate’s hackday blog.

Now, I think we should apply this to other things, but even faster – like ten-seconds:

• Ableton Live: Okay, see those rectangles? Put things on them! Trigger them!
• Sibelius: Just keep clicking “next” on the wizard, then eighth note, then type note names look for the blue arrow click and keep typing!
• Max/MSP and Pd: Quick, add a – box and connect to other boxes. Toggle bang metro 30 now you have a metronome!
• ChucK: Ummmm…. “SinOsc s => dac;”?
• Processing: setup, draw, size 800 by 600, and erm, line(0,0,mouseX,mouseY) and screw around for a while.
• A Yamaha DX7: Okay… plug this in and… jeez, I don’t remember button sequences. Try to find presets? Play something?
• A Moog Modular: Jacks. Knobs. Cables. Now go. It’ll sound awful and you’ll run out of cables. But you’ll have a great time.

Other suggestions welcome.

The mda-vst collection of effects has been a long-time favorite for me. It’s a set of no-nonsense, unique, simple effects, just useful stuff that doesn’t have any unnecessary bells and whistles. Oh, yeah – and it’s free, making an easy way to fill out your effect arsenal. But until recently, the collection was proprietary freeware. Now, it’s GPL-licensed open source for Mac and Windows.

Included: multi-band distortion, drum replacement, amp and speaker simulators, de-essing, degrading, delay, detune, dither, dub delay, compressor/limiter/gate, envelope following stereo imaging and simulation, a Leslie simulator, multi-band compression, an overdrive, a really insane pitch changer, a 3D panner, a sub-bass synth, a couple of vocoders with different numbers of bands, test tone creator, flanger, pitch tracker, and more.

I imagine the access to code for these things could help people launch their own effects projects. And as Windows VSTs, it can run easily in Linux hosts that support that format, too.

http://mda.smartelectronix.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mda-vst/

Thanks to Marc Resibois for the tip. And you budding C coders out there, if you dig into the code, let us know.

Welcome to the alt-DAW scene. Last week, not only did Renoise continue its rebirth of the forgotten “tracker” genre of music making software with ReWire support, but we saw a big new version of REAPER, the beloved lightweight audio production tool from the original creator of Winamp.

What makes an “alt DAW”, or “indie” production software? To me, it’s:

• small development teams of a few people
• tightly-integrated communities directly involved in feature requests
• trusting users instead of adding significant DRM, returning to the traditional “shareware” business model of old
• affordable pricing

That’s not to take away from some of the bigger players – I was struck this week with the (unsurprising) ubiquity of Ableton Live at MUTEK; it’s a real testament to what they have accomplished. But choice is essential, and looking at the history of music technology, it’s in the periods of real choice that the most interesting things have happened. It makes everything better when developers really have to compete.

Cockos REAPER has spread almost virally as an underground DAW, partly because you can download the thing and get started with without any restrictions, then buy it for as little as US$60 for personal use.

http://www.reaper.fm/index.php

It’s not just for Windows people any more, either – the Mac version is now officially supported. You can run on Windows 7 or Windows 2000 or even 98 (with limited support). You can run on 10.4 Macs, or even PowerPC (though Intel is recommended). You can even run on Linux with official WINE support, though I’d still like to see a native Linux version, especially as Linux on netbooks is getting so lovely.

Version 3.0 came out this week. There are a huge number of improvements: