A 25-key MIDI keyboard? Really? You’re telling me you did that before making a nice Accordion Dock? Missed opportunity, if you ask me.
Apple added the ability to connect custom hardware to its iPhone and iPod touch platform last year, so it was only a matter of time before someone made a music hardware interface. Ion Audio, the budget brand of Numark/Alesis/Akai, gets there first, with the Ion iDISCOVER Keyboard. It docks your Apple mobile into a case with a 25-key MIDI keyboard, pitch and mod wheels, and preset buttons for patch and octave changes.
Of course, there is a slight problem. Part of the whole advantage of the iPhone is its mobility, which a huge honking dock tends to kill. (For less money, you could just plug a keyboard into your Mac, or buy a low-end CASIO or Yamaha keyboard.)
Have you been paying attention to Renoise, the modernized tracker? You might want to start. The cat is out of the bag on Renoise 2.5’s new beta (available immediately to registered users), and it looks like it may be a dramatic leap forward. Even better, 2.6 promises to allow a level of customization, scripting, and integration we haven’t seen in any music tool, anywhere.
Two memes have gripped the underground electronic music over recent years. One has been the tracker, and its atomic, ground-up musical process, embodied in new and old software and in the love of handheld game systems like the Game Boy. The other has been the grid as a way of reconceiving and playing musical patterns, from Ableton Live to the monome.
Now imagine if these two memes collided.
And, oh yeah, imagine if you suddenly got the modulate-anything, script-anything, customize-anything, control-anything-with-anything, use OSC and MIDI and keyboards everywhere you’ve been asking for. A beta that’s about to drop should begin to answer whether Renoise will be the first app to pull it all off, with major new features coming early in the year and powerful scripting and customization later in 2010.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. We get to enjoy the sounds and sights made by chips, independent games, and Novation Launchpad-controlled Sega Mega Drives. Blip Fest hits NYC this week in a celebration of vintage and lo-fi chips and the wonderful, blippy music they produce. To get things started right on Wednesday night, we have a special edition of Handmade Music, the DIY music party/science fair/noisy racket series, in a special location — the opening of Babycastles, a new, permanent home for independent games. (Think “indie arcade,” an idea I hope spreads worldwide.)
If you’re in the area, come check out some terrific independent games, meet artists, see in person the inventions of Australia’s Little Scale, and more. OPEN CALL FOR STUFF: Visiting Blip artists and NYC-area hackers, if you’ve got a visual or musical creation related to gaming or chip music, we’d love to have you show-and-tell and make some noise with it; this is, as always, an open potluck for the things you make. (Bring cables and, if you can, portable amplification/headphones.) Everyone, if you can make it out a little early, we’ll have a “secret” workshop with Loud Objects to solder a chip music toy, even if you’re a beginner. (Sign up below; we’ll need a very small fee for parts.)
Wherever you are, Sebastian Tomczak from South Australia, aka Little Scale, is a sound artist you really don’t want to miss. For a long list of awesome, look no further than his blog, for Game Boys tuned like Japanese kotos, Max patch sequencers to download, and Game Boy Advance albums. He’s promised to bring his performance-ready Sega MegaDrive and Atari 2600 jr, a 2600 MIDI interface, and the Sega sounds controlled by new tech, the Novation Launchpad, as pictured in the video at top.
John at HighlyLiquid has been busy this year- he’s got a new kit out and one in the works that really step up the game. You may be familiar with his previous kits, which add MIDI control to Speak & Spell, Atari 2600, or pretty much every Casio. HighlyLiquid also stocks more open-ended kits which can add MIDI control to pretty much anything- I used one in my MAKE Magazine article last year to build a drum-playing robot.
Sync or swim, indeed. Synchronized swimming performance in Brighton, which itself had to sync with live music and cinema – check out the details, as they’re perfect metaphorically for this story. Photo: Greg Neate.
Computer music making can be an isolating experience. But when users try to use their eminently-mobile tools to play together in the same room, they often find that the technology resists. MIDI, as a serial protocol, isn’t designed for networked environments. Software interfaces are designed to be visible to only one user. Sharing between users rarely figures into designs. Input points are made to be single-user only.
And most importantly, just getting a couple of computers to sync can be a Herculean task — one that seems to have gotten worse with advanced computer software rather than better. In short, for all the technology we have today, we’ve actually regressed from the state of interoperability 20 years ago.
I’ve been hearing more and more frustration over sync, as people begin to collaborate with multiple computers as they would with a small ensemble of instruments. Ableton Live is the most frequent example, but it’s only one case – and I suspect part of the fault is that people are more likely to try to sync multiple copies of Live. When I spoke to Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore in the spring for Keyboard, Martin complained that they had trouble syncing his Apple Logic sessions with other band members using Pro Tools and Ableton. This weekend in Los Angeles at the DubSpot sessions, Glitch Mob’s Justin Boreta talked about the issues that group has had with multiple copies of Live.
Synchronization is, by definition, a tough thing to do. But musical engineering is replete with challenges; it’s no longer acceptable to simply say “live with it” and walk away. It seems we need both better shared knowledge about what sync is how to make it work, and better engineering solutions on the software and protocols side to support the way users want to work. And yes, we need a new sync standard that goes beyond what’s presently available in MIDI alone.
Focusing this discussion, I just got an essay in my inbox that I think focuses the issue. I will try to speak to Ableton’s engineers about the matter, but this isn’t really about Ableton alone, so I’m posting it here first. We could use more data about how you’re working with various software and hardware, what techniques you’ve developed, and what frustrations you’ve had. We have a wide community here of users and developers (and a whole lot of you are both).
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