If you’re using Ableton Live 8, you’ve hopefully already discovered the joys of Track Groups. Track grouping is a welcome feature in any DAW, but in Live, the mixer-centric Session View can easily get unruly with endless columns of vertical tracks.

I wanted to share some discoveries about Track Groups, including what I thought was a big realization about how they worked with clips that turned out not to be as exciting as I thought.

To group tracks, select multiple tracks first (click one, then shift-click the last one), right-click (ctrl-click on Mac), and choose Group Tracks. The result – what’s basically a submix:

• You can save space by collapsing tracks in your view, clicking the triangle at the top of the Group
• You can add insert effects to the whole Group, and signal will be routed through that entire chain (making them like a quick send)
• You can control the whole “submix” Group at once using the Group’s mixer parameters

No surprise there. Here’s the surprise.

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.

Working with sound is, for many of us, the experience that attracted us to working with computers. Field recordings can be the best way to get close to sound – you’re attached to sounds you’ve found in the real world, you’ve experienced and collected, even if you transform them into something very different in production.

Nick Maxwell of the excellent Nick’s Tutorials Ableton Live production site shares some free explorations with us, complete with downloads you can reverse-engineer the instruments and play with the topics the video cover. You can also use these in your own work, royalty-free.

I really like some of the work here, from a kitchen knife to a found sound bass. Here’s Nick:

“Icy Shimmer” Effect

In this video, I use a few field recordings of a kitchen knife being unsheathed as well as a door closing as the layers for the eventual sound effect.  Basic things like reversing the waveforms, filtering , panning, and retuning are employed.  I also go beyond that into some more interesting stuff like using a grain delay, simple delay, and an autofilter to create a little effects section to further realize the sound.

Download

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.

AudioMulch 2.0 live patching screencast from AudioMulch on Vimeo.

Wonderful things come from Australia. Developer Ross Bencina has released AudioMulch 2.0, the audio patching environment, now on both Mac and Windows.

Audiomulch is all pretty in black now with a new UI. But why is it special? AudioMulch has always been distinguished in its quick workflow, its ready-to-use objects that allow sophisticated patches with relatively simple structures, and its idiosyncratic soundmakers. The Metasurface multi-parameter controller is also a favorite.

The price is higher, which may scare away some – US$189, or $89 upgrade. There’s a 60-day trial that you can try out.

But the best part of this launch is that, instead of releasing a flashy demo with pans over girls in bikinis or booming drum beats and type flying through that says something like “THE FUTURE OF MUSIC IS NOW … HOLD THE SOUND IN YOUR FIST … BE THE MUSIC … WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?”, they just released a video showing someone making a piece of music. (What a concept!)

The video at top is a live-patching video, and it really reveals how, powerful as many interactive music environments may be, having some objects that get straight to what you want musically makes a real difference. (That’s something to keep in mind even as you create macros or code in other environments, too, I think.)

I like the idea of other people doing live-patching videos that work as music and not just tech demos, not only in AudioMulch but whatever your tool of choice may be.

If you give AudioMulch 2 a try, let us know what you think.

http://www.audiomulch.com