Here’s how interfaces normally break down. You’ve got your conventional, tactile interfaces, like a knob. You’ve got your touch interfaces, which lack tactile feedback (you touch them, but they don’t push back). You’ve got your gestural interfaces, which have you waving your hands in the air without touching anything and without any tactile feedback. (They’re generally the most challenging, because your brain has no feedback for what it’s doing.)

Syntact creates an entirely new category. It’s a gestural interface, of the “waving your hands around in the air” sort. But while your hand is in mid-air and isn’t touching anything, it does provide tactile feedback. It pushes back as you move your hand around, giving you interactive feedback. The way it pulls it off: sound. 121 ultrasonic transducers beam sound at a particular point, so that you feel something as you move.

You can see a bit of what this means in the new video, above. I’m hoping to get a hands-on (erm, hands-off) demo soon from the designer. The basic specs:

• Optical analysis of gestures, using a USB camera built into the interface
• MIDI control, for use with any live performance or music making rig (or other media)
• A control panel for selecting different sonic images and adjusting scaling.
• A built-in music solution visualizes sound and makes it easier to map to your own MIDI files.

More information:
http://www.ultrasonic-audio.com/products/syntact.html

Also well worth checking out the directional speaker tech from these Slovenia-based developers – directional sound is another huge area of innovation.
http://www.ultrasonic-audio.com/products/acouspade.html

If you want to try this in person, it’ll be at the Beam Festival in London in late June.

Side note: Yes, I’m looking into that LEAP thing, for more gestures, albeit without tactile feedback. Stay tuned.

If you’re dreaming of creating your own controller from scratch, there are certain basic elements you’ll need – and a strong case for reusing, not reinventing, the wheel. There are a range of products out there that cater to you DIYers; Livid’s Builder line is certainly one of the most comprehensive. It’s a line of hardware accessories that help you piece together MIDI controllers with all the requisite knobs and buttons and sensors you might like, and its brain just got an upgrade.

The soul of any controller is the electronics and microcontroller that read all of those inputs and let them talk to a computer. And it’s that “brain” that Livid recently upgraded, with their Builder Brain v2. Messages from controls go in, messages to devices like lights go out, all via a connection to your computer that’s USB powered, class-compliant MIDI. (That means you won’t need any drivers – not on Mac, not on Windows, and not on Linux. You could even plug this into one of those Raspberry Pi devices, if you’re lucky enough to have one!) They also operate standalone with a 5V power supply.

The Brain v2 is for some seriously large and complex controllers, with support for up to 64 analog inputs, 128 Buttons, and 192 LEDs. (Fortunately, a companion board called the Omni, and connections via ribbon cables, mean that you won’t create complete spaghetti trying to do that.) In fact, it’s so powerful I’d recommend considering something simpler for less-ambitious projects, but if you’re planning a big controller, it’s tough to beat Livid’s offerings.

New in v2:

• A Bus Board for easier control connections
• LED support up from 48 to 192, extra circuitry for ultra-brights.
• Encoders now work with LED encoder ring support, so you can make a big circle of ultra-bright lights to go around your encoder.
• RGB LED support.
• 5V standalone power is new.

Add those features to cool extras from the original, like accelerometer and velocity-sensitive surface support and programmable MIDI settings.

CDM asks Livid’ Jay Smith to tell us what this is all about.

CDM: Who is this for?

Jay: That’s kind of a loaded question! It’s really for anyone wanting to create a class-complaint MIDI device of their own. An artist, a maker of commercial products, a musician, a visualist? With Brain version 1 we’ve seen a MIDI controlled electric mandolin, Moldover’s Mojo, and The Choppertone to name a few. We’ve also powered some other pretty sophisticated commercial devices for other companies with it, so it’s not just a DIY solution.

With v2 we’ve really expanded the functionality by adding almost any kind of control you’d want to hook up to it, and made the process of doing that much easier. If you are talking about standard MIDI controller type controls, our Omni board support thousands of configurations with just one circuit board. This isn’t just for building “controllers” in terms of software controllers either. We’ve added external power so you can use it to control analog gear and other MIDI controlled devices.

Apart from those examples, what can you build with Builder and the Brain?

Anything that has a button, LEDs, potentiometer, encoder, FSRs, accelerometers, sensors, and more. Single LEDs, RGB LEDs, and “groups” of LEDs of 6,12, or 24 can be created and controlled with one MIDI note or CC or locally controlled with an encoder or pot. As a result, inventive, designs with interesting lighting feedback are possible. VU meters driven by CCs, or a clever array of LEDS that make glyphs or patterns can be arranged with your controls to provide novel, custom feedback that would never make it on Guitar Center’s shelves, but mean something special to you. The omni board provides enough physical limitation that you can think about a “chunk” of a controller and isolates parts of your project into digestible parts, and allows you to sensibly expand and modify your control surface with only 1 brain.

Why would you choose this over another platform?

Frankly there is no other platform for controller building that is this packed with features, well documented and supported, and easy to use. Since the release of Brain v1 three years ago we’ve spent a lot of time listening to our user’s requests, thinking about the features we’d like for our own use, and developing them into a platform for others to use. We didn’t spend much time looking at what else was out there, we looked for what wasn’t and tried to fill in those gaps. When it comes to building your own device, whether for creating music, controlling lights, or something else completely, there are really only other “solutions”, not platforms, which is what we intended to create.

Who is this not for?

If you are looking for an all-in-one solution for your dream controller but don’t want to do any of the labor, this is definitely not for you. We’ve really set out to create the most comprehensive platform that has the smallest learning curve. There are some other great solutions out there, but some of them either have a big learning curve or require programming to achieve results. If you have a smaller project and don’t care about MIDI, the ability to edit, expand, and have a long terms solution, there are certainly cheaper solutions out there. We tried to make the process more streamlined, feature packed, and have taken a lot of the guesswork out of it with Brain v2. With the addition of the Bus Board we’ve added things like resistors, transistors, and chips that make the building process much easier.

Quick start video:

Find out more:
http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_builder.php

Some of you are probably already sitting on top of a Max for Live license for your copy of Ableton Live. It’s there, just waiting to do … something. Maybe you’ve loaded one of the many extraordinary patches out there – good move. But as for building your own patches, you may easily have become overwhelmed by choice. Max is a blank slate, and a blank slate that can do everything can make it hard to start with anything.

It’s easy to overlook simple first steps. Max was originally built just to do simple math on messages, before it even had audio capabilities. So that means simple message processing is a great place to start. The Ableton Cookbook’s Anthony Arroyo introduces Max for Live in just that fashion, by starting you out building an arpeggiator. No fancy granular audio processing, no mind-bending processing of the event engine in Live – just some simple, old-fashioned arithmetic. You’ll learn MIDI in, MIDI out, monitoring what’s going on, basic math, and sliders. You can always go deeper after that.

This is the first of more videos to come, all promising to focus on simple devices; I’m curious to see where they go.

Not quite your speed? Here are two more intro tutorials – and one advanced tutorial – to get you going.

Ready to get a little advanced? It’s an older video, but still relevant to new versions of Live – don’t let the date stop you. Here, a serious Max for Live guru goes deep into spectral mixing. It’s not at all the simple, step-by-step approach I’ve just endorsed, but … hey, you’re still with me, and this is fun. Description:

In this video new addition to the Dubspot team Dave Linnenbank, creator of Puremagnetik’s Max Fuel collection of patches for Ableton and Cycling 74′s Max For Live walks us through his Spectral Mixer patch. It allows you to adjust the volume of the loud, medium and quiet parts of a sound and create some very interesting sounds.

Blog post and downloads: Max for Live Tutorial :: ‘Spectral Mixer’ [Dubspot Blog]

Equipped with MIDI, a phone or tablet can communicate with a vast range of standalone hardware and computer software for music. So, what to do with that power? Two recent applications show just some of the breadth of possibility, one from Japan, one from Ukraine. One provides an array of powerful tools, combining into one application a lot of functions that have otherwise been available only in separate apps. One takes a more novel approach. Each demonstrates Apple’s increasingly-ubiquitous iPhone and iPad to be a surprisingly-indispensible musical tool.

Let’s look at the more whimsical of the two first.

From Japanese media artist and developer Masayuki Akamatsu (known as aka), MIDIWriter is a bit unlike MIDI tools you’ve likely seen before. It sends MIDI notes not from a piano keyboard or more familiar musical interface, but from the key entry you’d usually use to type in messages. That means the on-screen keyboard – even, as pictured, in another language – can become a musical instrument instead of input method for SMS and the like.

Where things get even more interesting is when you add a Bluetooth keyboard or keyboard dock, for iPad or iPhone. Then, those gadgets become physical input devices. (In the oddest example, a projected keyboard even works.)

http://akamatsu.org/aka/ios/apps/midiwriter/ [lots of great documentation, in both English and Japanese]
MIDIWriter @ apps.createdigitalmusic.com [View, install; US$0.99]

It’s all quite peculiar, but I can think of one particular advantage to doing something a bit unusual: sometimes, the best way to break out of tired musical habits is to face an unfamiliar musical interface.

In the more conventional and practical end of the pool, we have Wiksnet’s MIDI Studio. With rather lovely, refined-looking interface design, the Ukrainian app treads in the competitive waters of iOS MIDI controllers. What it does that those apps don’t necessarily do, though:
1. It adds velocity senstivity, via vibration, as seen in Apple’s own GarageBand but less-commonly in MIDI tools.
2. It combines layouts into convenient configurations, coupling, for instance, knobs with MIDI keys.

And it looks nice. A future version promises editable templates, but for many, having some nice stuff up and running without any additional effort could be a draw. From the developers, a feature list:

• Essential MIDI compatibility (Core MIDI, over WiFi and USB)
• Drum pads with modulation across X/Y axes, velocity
• Two keyboards, each with a different key size, and customizable key/tuning mappings
• Built-in arpeggiator
• Easy mapping of ADSR, etc. to knobs on the keyboard layout

http://www.wiksnet.com/
MIDI Studio @ apps.createdigitalmusic.com [View, install; US$10.99]

There’s no official view, but here’s one fan-made entry:

The Ukrainian developer has done other commercial work, they say, but this is their first unique iOS music app. The next release will have, alongside editable templates, velocity sensitivity, and will fill other user requests.

In the case of MIDIWriter, there’s not a lot of comparison to be made – desktop software has often mapped standard input and keyboards to music, but not necessarily iOS apps. With MIDI Studio, of course, we’re overdue for an overview of MIDI apps.

Let us know how you use these – or other tools, including things that don’t begin with a lowercase “i” – to produce MIDI events in your workflow.

Matt Moldover takes on Native Instruments’ Traktor Kontrol F1 in a hands-on demo; NI reportedly gave him a weekend to see if the “controllerism” advocate could do something interesting with their hardware/software combo. The resulting video really gives some insight into what controllerism is all about: the fundamental notion here, whatever you wish to call it, is relying more heavily on live sampling and real-time manipulation, to make this more of an instrumental performance and not just a DJ set. That’s part of what I admired about the direction of the F1 earlier on. And here, sampling in particular comes to the fore – all within what is essentially DJ software.

Rather than comment too heavily, though, the best illustration of Moldover’s style comes from seeing both this F1 video alongside a live performance with his own, custom-designed MOJO controller. (The latter is available as a custom build from 60works – and means that Moldy himself was more or less in the business of building what NI, too, had on offer.)

I was present at the performance at STEIM’s Patterns + Pleasure Festival in the fall. The first half is a bit more experimental – and, how shall we say, STEIM-y? The jam gets going halfway through. In the end, you can do the same sorts of things with Traktor and F1 as with Ableton Live, and with these two controllers. That’s not to say the workflow is the same in the two tools; it isn’t. It’s really a matter of Matt bringing his own musical style and idiom to the two tools, which is, after all, the whole point.

I’ll be interested to see what other musical expressions may be possible. Whatever tool you choose, there’s a chance to genuinely practice. So, this is what Moldover did with one of his weekends. What will you do with yours? Have a good one.

F1 Product Page

http://moldover.com/

Jack Tramiel, who died this week, had as deep an impact on computer music for the everyday musician as just about any computing industry pioneer. While Jobs, Woz, Moore, Grove, and Gates get a lot of the attention, Tramiel’s legacy was in making computing affordable and accessible. As such, he was indispensable to the computing revolution, and his computers were early forebears of the digital music-making Renaissance. In an extraordinary microcosm of the 20th Century, Polish-born Tramiel escaped Auschwitz, served in the US army, and built the roots of the most successful desktop computer of all time in a typewriter repair business in the Bronx. And today, when you make music with a computer, you’re connected to that extraordinary story.

Take the Commodore 64. Its ground-breaking SID chip (the 6581, with three oscillators, four waveforms, a filter, an ADSR envelope, and a ring mod) remains sought-after today. It’s easy to forget, but rival computers – including, notably, Apple – were fairly tone-deaf when it came to sound capabilities. Commodore, via a design by Bob Yannes, was the first major computing hit to include high-quality sound. The C64 single-handedly transformed the sound of game music, spawning new genres of game scores, and later becoming a major part of the demoscene and chip music movement. (In fact, you might even argue that the C64, not Nintendo game systems, really produced the initial spark for what would evolve into chip music or 8-bit music.)

Or, consider Tramiel’s second leadership role, at Atari. The Atari ST’s standard inclusion of MIDI set a benchmark that still influences machines like today’s iPad. In fact, if you’ve got an iPad handy, remember that Apple’s pro music focus is led by one Gerhard Lengeling, founder of Emagic and C-Lab, whose first products were all for Tramiel’s computers: the Commodore 64, and then the Atari ST. Maybe it should come as no surprise, then, that suitably infused with Emagic DNA, Apple would make software MIDI support standard on the iPad. Ed.: Okay, I should in fairness note that the OS team at Apple is not led by Lengeling, although I’m sure he’s enjoying that MIDI support on there. Let’s at least say that *all* of us – myself included – have expectations of MIDI that were nudged along by the Atari ST. The Atari ST set the stage for a host of music software, including being the primary platform on which the “tracker” evolved (see today’s Renoise), many of today’s sequencer features (see Logic, Cubase), and, albeit to a lesser extent, graphical music notation.

Musicians who used the ST range from 808 State to Fatboy Slim to Jean Michel Jarre – and, of course, Atari Teenage Riot. In fact, I’d go as far as arguing to say the two Tramiel machines are the only desktop computers that have actually directly touched the sound of electronic music – the C64 for the SID and its influence on game music, the Atari ST for driving a new interest in sequenced sounds and the micro-editing of trackers. There’s no “sound” of an Apple or a Windows (or even DOS) PC, but there’s a personality, a style, in a Commodore 64 or even Atari ST. We love our computers, to be fair, but the Atari and Commodore might be imagined as their own instrument. (This is a debateable opinion, and I don’t want to get too carried away, so I’m happy to hear opposing viewpoints. Or just join me in singing a love song to the SID, and waxing nostalgic about the Steinberg – Emagic – Dr. T rivalry, and we’ll leave it at that.)

What’s most compelling is that the legacy of these machines is more alive than ever. Computer musicians acquire Commodore 64s the way a guitarist might a vintage instrument, and even continue to develop software for them. (When the hardware dies, I expect this will live on in emulation. Us computer musicians don’t die; we just run on a new virtual machine.)

Then, there’s what’s next. I know that Tramiel’s aesthetic of affordability, and the approach of his chips, has inspired us on the MeeBlip open source synth. Now, we can look forward, as well, to the ultra-affordable, DIY-friendly Rasberry Pi, which itself promises to become a compelling music platform. (The moment they’re available in any quantity, I know I’ll be trying that out.)

Watching as we lose our heroes, the men and women who produced the incredible technological world in which we live, could be a sad affair. But because these individuals championed businesses with real ideas and real innovation, we see instead hope. The products of their imagination, the ones for which they fought to run their businesses, are more vibrant and alive than ever. As Silicon Valley becomes obsessed with “exit strategies,” quick fixes and disposable apps, it’s heartening to think of the people who really work to put something physical in peoples’ hands. That computing power has led to the fastest technological advances in a range of fields in the history of humanity – and, boy, can it make some fun noises, too.

With that in mind, I present for your enjoyment the Tramiel machines in images and video, as seen on CDM, with a few extras. And here’s to not only Mr. Tramiel, but all the people who worked to make these machines available.

MSSIAH is still available as an actively-developed cartridge for your Commodore computer. The cart even allows you to connect a MIDI cable.

The MIDIbox SID project produced new hardware, powered by the SID chip.

Combining these projects, here’s one of my favorite mods – a gorgeous, orange, modded C64 with SID2SID expansion and Prophet64 cartridge.

Demonstrating just how significant the machine was to music composition, The C64 Orchestra transcribes classic game music back to full orchestra.

What happens when Guitar Hero meets the C64:

A Commodore 64 speaks and plays:

Digimancy: A Commodore 64 Spouts Philosophy, Plays Modular Synths

And a reminder that Commodore will never die:

Behold sequencers we use today in their early days on the Atari ST:
Main screens of Atari ST sequencers
Pictures of Vintage MIDI Sequencers

Previously:
Musical Mods of the Commodore 64, from Traktor DJing to Knobs for Prophet64 [CDM, vintage 2006]
For Love of Chips: Chipsounds Instrument and EP and the Gear That Inspired Them [this release by Plogue of a chip instrument turned out to be a window into the chip music scene - artists and equipment - as well as a way to get these sounds on more modern computers]

More:
CNET has a nice obituary, as well as an extensive look at Tramiel and his contributions

When we last caught up with the touch-less, gestural music-making of composer Chris Vik, the Australian musician was sharing his own Kinectar software and playing both dubstep and ambient scores for modern dance. Now, Vik is back playing a very substantial physical instrument: Melbourne’s four story-tall, MIDI-retrofitted Town Hall Organ. Here, the Max-powered software takes on some very big sound from some very big pipes.

He writes:

I’ve created my own software Kinectar, which allows the use of the Kinect to control MIDI devices, ie. playing notes through simple gestures and motion. The Melbourne Town Hall Organ got a referb in the late 90s adding the ability of MIDI messages to active the notes… this happened.

Controlling a 4-story pipe organ with the Kinect

Previously: From Beautiful Ambient Modern Dance to Dubstep, Gestures to Music in Kinect (Download the Tool)

You’d expect that holding the world’s largest trade show in Germany would mean some serious analog and gear love – and you’d be right. Andreas Schneider of SchneidersBuero/SchneidersLaden, the famed Berlin gear hub, was this year gathering some of the finest analog gear at a booth for ALEX4, a European distributor for some of these names.

Now, in the meeting room there was of course real business to do, but that shouldn’t stop drool from pooling on some of the equipment.

Among the highlights:
Doepfer Musikelektronik, the company that perhaps more than any other ignited the current modular fever, was on-hand with some new prototypes, including a step sequencer (video) and touch plate, all works-in-progress.

Doepfer also had a demo unit of the Dark Energy II, the new version of their lovely, affordable desktop analog synth. The Dark Energy is discontinued because Doepfer was unable to continue to stock the CEM3394 chip used in the filter. The revision, slated for availability this summer, was available. To underly the point that the filter is the only major change, you’ll see that knob highlighted in yellow. (There are some other subtle tweaks; the resulting instrument sounds really quite nice.)

Alyseum showed off the MS-812, an embedded computer board that works on an Ethernet network to provide MIDI, CopperLan (a futuristic, new high-resolution and high-bandwidth protocol), and analog Control Voltage. Just how much of it? Think 8 dedicated CV outs, 12 digital outs, and conversion between everything. If I were building a new computer lab and wanted to network a whole bunch of analog gear and computers and MIDI equipment together, or making some massive MIDI/CopperLan/CV art installation, I think I’d be looking at this.

Vermona also had a multi-MIDI, multi-CV module, pictured. (Please: whoever owns all this gear, send pictures of what your rig looks like.)

You may spot a few other gems in our gallery, including the Synchrodyne WMD recently previewed by TRASH_AUDIO. As I can walk to Schneidersladen, let us know if there’s anything about which you’re especially curious.

And that concludes today’s episode of Create Analog Music, which raises the question – will I have to start a reader campaign to see if TRASH_AUDIO will give us their createanalogmusic.com domain name?

Pioneer, that best-known brand of DJ hardware, wants you to use hardware alongside software. And they’re uttering the word “remix” rather than “DJ.” And they have something that really doesn’t look like a CDJ, so much as a remote control for a spaceship carrying CDJs.

It seems to be something of a trend. We saw earlier this week Native Instruments emphasize the word “remix” in their DJ product line, as in live-remixing music. And NI, along with offerings from almost every other DJ vendor and quite a few impressive homebrewed solutions, work with hardware/software combinations to build more elaborate live performances.

Now, Pioneer has a new horse in the race. The hardware looks completely different from what we’ve seen elsewhere – and it doubles as standalone hardware for effects and sampling, too. It might lead some to a kneejerk “toy” reaction, just because of this novel design and its preset push-buttons, but Pioneer has some very loyal DJs in their … stable. (Okay, obviously the appearance of sun and spring has me thinking about the Kentucky Derby or something. Moving on…)

Pioneer is taking hardware effects and packing them in a package you can use with software or on its own. Their RMX-1000, they say, is three devices in one. This product has so many ideas going on at once, I lost count as to what those three were, but I would count them as effects, sampling, and dedicated DJ controller.

Here’s where the whole thing gets rather fun. Because the RMX is a stand-alone hardware unit, you can use it as an effects unit and sampler, only returning to software when you’re back in the studio. Pioneer has offered impressive effects before, but the only way to get at them was in high-end mixers. Now, you can buy this unit for a price that starts to make this look like high-end competition for things like a KAOSS Pad. And that could put it on the radar of producers and not just DJs.

Europe: The product is due in May for 599 GBP/699 EUR, including VAT.
USA: June, US$999. (Actually, for once I think Europe gets the more favorable price.)

Okay, fine. But where's the drop? Images courtesy Pioneer Europe.

The whole thing is customizable, says Pioneer, so much so that they’ll also provide for download presets by DJs Chuckie, Kissy Sell Out, Kutski, James Zabiela, Doorly, and Laidback Luke, in a play to some name recognition for DJ youngsters. They emphasize “macro” controls that give you push-button access to more complex effects. On the other hand, it appears for fans of those effects, you could go in and do some customization of your own.

Now, those names aren’t going to make everyone happy, but where the box looks impressive is in the effects macro department. Specs:

• SD card storage for presets.
• Scene FX: macros for up to ten effect types. Set a type (Noise, Echo, Spiral Up, Crush Echo, Spiral Down, Reverb Down, or something customized), and use that big knob for wet/dry.
• Time and Resonance parameters.
• Isolator FX (think EQ, in the terminology of Pioneer’s DJM-1000 mixer).
• Cut/Add, Trans/Roll, Gate/Drive dynamic effects.
• X-Pad sampling with pitch controls, from the DJM-900nexus mixer. Sample right into a drum slot (kick, snare, clap, hat), then roll the samples. Overdub, roll, mute.
• Quantized sampling.
• Release FX – basically, you use “spin back,” echo, or break effects to cut out effects temporarily or for good.

And it’s a USB MIDI controller.

And it’s a controller for Pioneer’s own DJ software (VST and AU).

All of this could be a good thing. Or you can subscribe to the thinking of an anonymous commenter (under the alias Massive Double Facepalm) on the NI post from earlier this week, and instead declare:

awesome more tools for tools to totally fuck over a mix by thinking theyre actually creative producers n shit – theres so much good music out there that speaks for itself and only needs a monkey to layer and blend. Seriously, fuck this shit and the never ending legion of DJs. LOL – DJ’s – LOL

Tech specs:

Inputs RCA x 1　
6.3 mm jack x 1
Outputs RCA x 1　
6.3 mm jack x 1
Other ports USB B port x 1
Sampling rate 48 kHz
A/D and D/A converter 24 bit
Frequency response 20 Hz – 20 kHz
Total harmonic distortion Max. 0.005%
S/N ratio 102 dB
Head room 20 dB
Software remixboxTM, RMX-1000 Plug-in
External dimensions
(W x D x H) 334 x 157 x 57 mm
Mass 1.3 kg

“Spiral up.” I’m telling you: spaceship controls.

http://pioneerdj.com/

The abundance of music, and the preceived ease of producing it, comes to some as bad news – or even harbinger of apocalypse. But load up a craft with quantity, and quality is what stands out.

Francis Prève is a perfect Renaissance producer. With years of experience as a music technology journalist and sound designer, his own, signature flavor of tech-house is uniquely focused on timbre. His label, Academik Records, debuted last year at Austin’s South by Southwest, but it’s just now kicking into high gear. (If you are in Austin for the world’s best known week of music, be sure to check in on the second party, running downtown from afternoon past midnight, for free.) Sure, a city like Berlin is associated with such things, but in the Internet age, Texas works just as well – minus the vitamin D deficiency.

Academik Contest giveaway
Lanai Rooftop Party, Saturday March 17 3p – 2a

Francis has rounded up a gang of emerging and known artists for Academik, and while age range and style are loose – sometimes dubstep, sometimes tech-house – what those signees have in common is attention to detail. They’re a veritable faculty in how to use Ableton Live and Massive so that you don’t sound like everyone else who’s using Ableton Live and Massive just because everybody else happens to be using Ableton Live and Massive.

The output is nicely represented in a podcast, mixed by Francis, that very much embodies his style:

Alternatively, check out the SxSW 2012 Chart Francis put together for Beatport.

Anyway, party – if you’re in Texas, go there, dance, have a good time.

But if you’re not from Texas, or you’re avoiding it because all your exes are there (okay, darnit, I’ll stop quoting song lyrics), through The Power of The Internet, we have a bunch of music to hear and tips and techniques and samples and loops and Ableton Live Instrument Racks and Sets to download – all free.

That’s because Francis has been as sharing music and techniques for how to produce it as he has the usual label activities (remix, release). Now, disclosure: I’ve known Francis for a long time, as a colleague at Keyboard. But it’s partly because I know him that I have a sense of that quality of attention to detail – because we’ve spent countless hours discussing the fine points of synth design and production technique, because he’ll call me up to talk about some particular I happened to mention writing, because he even spent hours with me and James Grahame talking about the exact organization of knobs and switches on the MeeBlip. I figure part of my responsibility in this world is to get to know people like that really well. (It happens to be a lot of fun, too.)

As it happens, you can be in on the same conversations.

Analog+Digital, Hardware+Software

One ongoing discussion has been ways of bringing in a few, select pieces of beloved hardware into a software studio. Even before talking about sound, the motivation is clear: it can make music making a lot more rewarding. And we’re not talking wildly-expensive modular setups, either – even inexpensive offerings like the KORG MonoTribe can get in on the action.

A lot of people working with software aren’t clear on just how to make hardware and software integrate nicely. Francis wrote a really comprehensive article on that subject, using his own rig as the subject, for Keyboard recently.

He writes about the process of using Live’s brilliant – and sometimes underused – External Instrument and External Effect devices:

The first order of business was to create custom devices in Live for sending MIDI to a specific synth—for example, the Phatty—then routing its audio output back into that same device via the MOTU [UltraLite Mk. 3 audio] interface. I then saved the results as presets. Thus, when the laptop is docked, all I have to do is drag the device I’d created for the Phatty into a track, and the Phatty comes online…

The next thing I did was create an External Audio Effect device that sent audio to a device but didn’t receive any audio back … by setting it up to send audio but not receive, I can drop it at the end of an instrument chain within an Instrument Rack and send any soft synth into the Moog, SEM, Dark Energy, or Monotribe. From there, the combined analog-plus-soft-synth audio runs from the analog synth back into a free input on the MOTU, to be recorded in Live.

By doing this, I can use Operator, Razor, Kontakt or any soft synth as the “oscillator bank” for one of my analog synths. The whole of digital tone generation combined with the warmth and fuzz of analog filters and the snap of analog envelopes is far more than the sum of its parts.

Francis also describes “hybrid” devices, combining Ableton instruments like Operator with outboard ingredients like the Moog Little Phatty filter and amp — all while controlling modulation and step sequences and such on the hardware with MIDI and Live clip envelopes. (He even talks about how to tame the MonoTribe, despite its – cough – lack of MIDI.)

The full article is online:
The Integrated Synth-Based Studio [Keyboard Magazine]

Free Sounds

Apart from being a producer, Francis has long been a sound designer, working for the likes of Roland and Ableton His free-sampling, hardware-loving, sound design-addicted spirit has been gradually developing a vast selection of free sample packs on his blog. Some come from software (NI’s Razor), some from new hardware (Moog’s aforementioned Slim Phatty), and some from oddities (my favorite being the Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy).

But whereas the Academik Records music will be dependent on your personal taste and aesthetic, here these are sound packs that are versatile enough to bend to your will and needs, and to produce something very different from what anyone else might produce. And that, ultimately, is the point.

So here, all in one place, are those great downloads from Fran’s blog:

21st Century Sawtooth Pad [Instrument Rack/Live Set, Live 7+]

The String Machine [Instrument Rack and Live Set, Live 7+]

Arkade [8-bit emulating Instrument Racks, Live 7+]

Ableton Preset: Wavescraper [Simpler-based Instrument Rack using Saturator waveshaping, Live 7+]

Sine of the Times [All sine-wave Instrument Rack, Live 7+]

Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy [Drum samples, Live set]

M-Audio Venom Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Native Instruments Razor Loops [128 bpm, in Cm | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Moog Slim Phatty Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]