It’s Richie Hawtin Watch time! The latest: NI teases an upcoming DJ controller by sharing video of Richie playing it in a club. The surprise: it’s actually what he’s doing with Maschine that seems most interesting to me. And if you recall the Twitter DJ app that he promised in the spring, it’s here, ready to use so long as you have Traktor and a Mac. (If you’re reading, Richie, do let me know if I’ve gotten my facts straight…)
Nodes of musical events, arrayed onto virtual tracks, in Jakob Penca’s iLoveAcid sequencer.
Take a weekend, and make something: that’s the challenge behind the Music Hack Day, which joins a growing phenomenon of events built around collective creation. (CDM held its own tangible interface hackday online, which I definitely hope to follow up soon!) Initiated by Dave Haynes of music sharing service Soundcloud, the Hack Day has already hit London. Many of the events were Web app-based and focused on consumption rather than creation of music, but we also saw a chordal synth plug-in and beer bottle percussion instrument.
The Berlin Hack Day, which wound up earlier today, offers still more projects focused on the creation side of music hacking. Having Ableton and Native Instruments as sponsors likely helped the mood. And as you’d expect from one of the world capitals of creative hacking, Berliners don’t disappoint.
Among the projects: a beautiful, elegant 3D sequencer, a fun bird-and-sky multitouch soundmaker with multitouch trackpad input, and a robotic xylophone controlled by monome. Someone even worked out a way to turn NI’s Maschine into a rhythm game, complete with Street Fighter sounds.
Monomist Rob Böhnke and Ramsey Arnaoot created one of my favorite hackday projects so far: a monome-controlled robotic xylophone. The ingredients: one monome grid controller, one Java application for step sequencing to the output, one Arduino open source controller board, and one terrific xylophone “robot” made of an array of servos that strike the bars of the instrument. Oh, and some hot glue and wood, of course.
I was one of the first people outside Native Instruments to lay eyes on Maschine, and immediately I saw something with real potential. Here was a software drum machine that was different: it was a real attempt to fuse some of the advantages of a software interface with some of the working methods of hardware. Software and hardware had really grown up together, instead of the latter simply being fitted to the former. And, of course, it had NI-style effects and UI look-and-feel, for fans of the software house’s style.
But 1.0 releases are a funny thing. As someone who spends a bit of my life developing tools, you always wind up with a choice of delaying the release, implementing something partway, or choosing not to implement it so it can be done properly later. And Maschine 1.0 lacked for me the one thing that was really essential to workflow – proper MIDI input and output support. Without that, I felt it was difficult to even give it a fair test. You’d wind up getting hung up on what was missing.
Well, good news: Maschine 1.1 gets all the little features I feel are essential to making it a viable and valuable part of the production workflow. It’s in public beta now, and I’m giving it a proper test. But here are the current changes in the present build, which includes all of the major items on my must-have list:
Pronunciation of some common music tech terms has been a source of debate. Generally, though, there’s only one right answer. I had hoped to kick off a pronunciation guide yesterday or today, but now I really can’t resist – not with none other than Tegan & Sara getting together to debate the right way to say Moog.
Don’t get me wrong. I love cows, and the sound “moo.” I suggest if you have something you want to name Moo, you should, like your own MooVerb max patch or something. However, here goes, a few of my favorites:
Moog: Rhymes with “brogue” or “rogue,” not the sound a cow makes. Don’t say “Moooooog” unless you want to get funny looks from synth nerds, or if you’re teaching synthesis to livestock in a dairy.
Monome: The community-based, (partly, at least) open-source controller rhymes with “MA gnome,” not the Spanish-sounding “Ma gnome ME.” You should not be able to use it in a couplet with paper mache. Get it? Two syllables. Sure, this pronunciation varies, but the two-syllable version is what the device’s co-creators call it.
OSC: Pronounce the letters of the open communications protocol, as in “O.S.C. / oh ess see”, not “osk” – though that would have been kind of cool. Think, “Rah, rah, rah, Give me an O! Give me an S! Give me a C! What’s that spell? Better than MIDI! Time-based messages, higher resolution, transport-independent high-speed networked communication with auto-discovery, gooooooooooOOOOO O.S.C.!” (People sometimes say this site is geeky. I have no idea what gives them that impression.)
And for now, O.S.C. stands for Open Sound Control, even though in one spot on the JazzMutant website it’s called “Open-Source Control.” Just get ready for this to change – because OSC really isn’t specific to sound, it may need a new name, like Open System Control. (A recent paper suggests dropping the “sound” in the name.)
MIDI: Rhymes with G. Gordon Liddy, or P. Diddy, or Tweetiebird saying “Piddy.” And, actually, it occurs to me I’ve never heard anyone mispronounce this. Fascinating – an acronym that’s actually intuitive. Oh, but “C.C.” stands for “Control Change,” NOT “continuous controllers” — look at the CC specs; most aren’t continuous. There. I got to be anal about something anyway. Updated: consensus is actually that “mee-dee” is a mispronunciation for native-English speakers, but likely makes more since than “mi-dee” in other languages — particularly if you speak French. So, in other words, it’s an acronym, and makes the most sense to pronounce in the natural way you would in your native tongue. (For English speakers, who knows what vowel sound is appropriate given how screwy our language is, but the creators of MIDI all say middy.)
Maschine: Native Instruments’ drum machine software and controller is German-engineered, so say “muh SHEEN uh,” three syllables, as if you grew up in Berlin. Now, granted, Maschine’s own promotional videos — outsourced to the US — anglicize this to “machine” / “muh SHEEN”, but the engineers and product folks who built the thing use the German pronunciation and think you should, too. And, anyway, it sounds cooler, just as I have to admit a currywurst is tastier than a Nathan’s dog.
I’m sure this is only a small selection of potential mispronunciations. Other candidates? We’ll have to release a full pronunciation guide soon.
Can a software/hardware combination be as tactile as standalone gear like the MPC, but do, you know, computer-y things, too? That’s the question posed by Native Instruments’ new Maschine.
My Maschine just arrived in the mail, but one look in my inbox and I find that the folks at AudioMIDI have beat me to shooting a hands-on. What you see immediately is that you have immediate, hands-on hardware control of everything. With software behind that, that could lead to a lovely melding of hardware-style manipulation but software-style flexibility.
Conclusions of the AudioMIDI vid:
Feels great; feels not cheap
Roland-style step mode
On-the-fly sampling
Performance-style controls
Since AudioMIDI did shoot their video first, here’s your chance to say what you’d like in the CDM video. What do you want to see? What questions do you have?
And MPC fans, let me put it a different way: what would you have to see to be impressed by this?
Update/Clarification: Since this seems to be a point of confusion for some readers, both NI and AudioMIDI have confirmed that this isn’t an official review or special NI-sponsored promotion. This is a retailer excited about a box they got in the mail grabbing a camera and showing some initial impressions as they started using it. I am glad we put this up, though, because we’re getting some great feedback from all of you as far as what details you care about. So keep that coming, as I think I’ll be able to answer all those questions.
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