For the lover of musical instruments and technology, southern California’s NAMM show is a giant toy shop. It’s work for many of its attendees, of course, but we know many of our readers dream of the objects that will make their next creations. And sure, inspiring lust is not our aim; on the contrary, there is some love that goes into these things. In the ideal, that’s the relationship of creator and consumer. These are things not to be bought and discarded, but kept and really used.

So, we have a different look at the NAMM show, through the lens of CDM contributor Marsha Vdovin, who has been at this show more times than she might like to count. I’ve added some comments about what these devices are and why they’re important. And the next time we see them, these inventions pictured in silence here, we expect them to be working hard on music far from the din and flourescent glare of the trade show floor.

As always, click for larger images. Photos by Marsha Vdovin; words by Peter Kirn:

Roland’s V-Guitar marks a surprising collaboration, bringing the famed American guitar maker Fender together with the Japanese electronic maker to make an “electronic guitar,” merging the two company’s tech on a digitally-augmented Stratocaster. More on this soon – but the extended playing techniques won over many guitarists.

The Danish design aesthetes of AIAIAI have improved upon their TMA-1 headphones with a studio model. Same drivers, same basic design, but a “flatter” response to sound (rather than beefed-up, DJ-ready bass) and closed ear design. It’s impossible to hear anything at NAMM, but I can attest that the new design is far, far more comfy to wear. Actually, if I could have kept these on the whole show to drown out the sound, it would have been great.

An easy place to spot a talented celebrity was at the Dave Smith Instruments booth, at which artists clustered around Dave and Roger Linn. They were on-hand with plenty of tweaks to their stellar Tempest drum machine.

Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 grew up, with new features (drum sounds! MIDI sync – at last), and grew out, with a companion product for connecting sensors and USB host mode that could be a boutique item for music DIYers. We’ll go hands-on with each this year, and while readers were disappointed on a lack of some details (will the OpLab be open source?), we expect to get more details from the Teenagers when the product is ready in the coming months.

Readers of tech blogs (ahem) may miss out on the fact that the vast majority of NAMM is really for guitarists, drummers, and traditional instrumentalists. And yes, that includes glittery, pink products from Daisy Rock Guitars. We’ve concluded this model will be perfect for Sparkle Pony. (And really, if you’re not watching Portlandia to get that reference, get on it. Also, Jenny Conlee is crazy awesome.)

Thin, responsive, and expressive, the QuNeo from Keith McMillen – funded on Kickstarter – proves it’s really happening. With continuous pressure response on its touch controls and bi-directional control, it could be the most anyone will ever have gotten from a US$200 controller. Yes, we’ll be watching.

Pioneer wasn’t showing anything new at this show — they timed those launches over the fall with new controllers like the Ergo. But they did have a glossly all-white lacquer set of limited-edition devices that looked absurdly gorgeous. Now if I want to do my flat over in the style of a Stanley Kubrick set, I know what DJ gear I’ll be buying. (If you don’t know what I mean, watch the end of 2001 again – or the living room in Tron: Legacy, which is more or less a copy.) White is the new generic-dull-charcoal.

Akai’s MPC Renaissance is unlike any other mass-market controller we’ve seen. It’s actually substantial, something that feels like a vintage MPC even though it’s designed to work with software (pictured). The audio circuitry is straight out of the modern MPC, but there’s a switch for “vintage” modes – think 12-bit output when the MPC60 is enabled, for instance. Akai told CDM they built the software in-house, but we also learned at NAMM that they licensed time-stretch tech from iZotope, giving their upcoming MPC software generous audio-manipulation abilities.

The Renaissance will cost you, with a street expected well over a grand, but that makes it even more welcome that the same superb pads and response curves are also on the maker’s MAX49 keyboard and cheaper MPC Model.

Just expect to wait: these were prototypes, and there were still some bugs to work out.

The Renaissance is for the MPC die-hard; the MPC Studio is the model that will directly take on Native Instruments and Maschine. It’s slim, sleek, and still has great-feeling controls. And while that makes it compelling competition for Maschine, I’m gratified to see this whole market expanding, new workflows for performance and production, and a push to better quality in the controllers. The days when computer gear meant “cheap and plastic-y” are mercifully at an end. Speaking of which –

Akai’s MAX49 keyboard could be a new model to beat. The keyboard action is satisfyingly springy, with a new keybed not seen in previous models. The pads are identical to those on the Renaissance, and feel more the way proper MPC pads should. Not everyone will love the light-up, touch-sensitive resistive faders, but I found with a bit of pressure, they worked well – and that means never having to worry about a fader catching up with the value in software. You also get serious features: Control Voltage, a full complement of MIDI ports, and aftertouch. Did I mention Control Voltage? It’s nice to see a controller keyboard with a slightly premium price, build, and features.

The last surprise from Akai was this MPC DJ. The company says it’s a prototype only, and had little more to say about it, but it’s fascinating to see the MPC and turntable controls converge.

Moog’s Minitaur was my favorite synth of the show. It just sounds consistently brilliant, no matter which way you turn it or play it – and I accordingly noticed it was the synth the most people were actually playing on the show floor.

This is what a 24-karet KORG MonoTribe looks like, alongside a silver-plated model. There’s little more one can say. It is, of course, one of a kind — and already spoken for.

The other thing of beauty at the KORG booth: a limited-edition reverse-key SV-1 keyboard.

iOS accessories were numerous, but a few were genuinely useful. IK Multimedia’s iRig Mic “Cast,” for instance, is coupled with handy software for podcasters, as a quick tool for interviewing or podcast recording.

It’s not a new product, but one of the reviews to which I’m most looking forward is this Eers product. It promises custom in-ears you make yourself, rather than the enormous cost of getting them custom-made. Stay tuned on this one – protecting your hearing and making on-stage gigs go well is perhaps as essential as gear can get.

The just-intonation Hymnatron from the Dewanatron crew was one of the most compositionally-compelling instruments at the show, with a unique sound, tuning, and key layout. And it looks mighty handsome in this one-off wooden case.

LiveWire’s modular was among the many dreamy modular rigs at Big City Music and Analog Haven, two Los Angeles hotspots for analog modulars. Did we mention space was more plentiful and inexpensive, and gigs more generous, in LA than in NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco? Funny coincidence, that.

Many modules graced this show, but the most intriguing was not analog, but digital – think digital algorithms in an analog, patch-cord-modular hardware workflow. Tom Erbe, maker of long-beloved SoundHack (the app, and then more recently the plug-ins) put some of his sonic wizardry into a module, collaborating with one of our favorite modular builders, MakeNoise. The result: the MakeNoise Echofon. As such, it’s a perfect emblem of our Create Digital Music, Create Analog Music philosophy. Dear Berlin friends: let’s plug this into your monster modulars, okay?

Big City Music is a wonderful place. The other candidate for best new module: brilliant creations by Metasonix, as previewed here. We’ll be watching for these to be patch-able, too.

Casio had its classic CZ-1000 synth on-hand at its booth. The Casio XW isn’t quite a successor to the CZ, though it does include some of those waveforms and phase distortion sounds. What it does appear to be is a very affordable, do-just-about-everything workstation at a fraction of the price of any of its rivals. For someone who wants a jack-of-all-trades gigging keyboard, this could very much be a contender.

Our friends at Beatport are evidently getting into the hardware business. The most interesting launch wasn’t a set of TMA headphones with Slimer-green cords (I’ll take the Studio model, thanks, or just a non-Danish set of studio cans). Instead, I was intrigued by the eminently-practical line of gigging cords Beatport is working on with Hosa. They include features live digital musicians and DJs badly need, like color-coded cords you can find easily at a show, and hinged USB cords you can cram into tight spaces. More on those soon.

Thanks, all. Lastly, I want to thank everyone I got to spend time with at the NAMM show, and particularly Marsha Vdovin, who is responsible for these photos and keeping our schedule together. NAMM is always too crowded and too short, but it can lay groundwork for a whole year. And I’m excited for this Year of the Dragon. Be seeing you.

For the rest of our NAMM coverage:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/namm/

Photos by Marsha Vdovin / Words by Peter Kirn.

What should DJing software look like, anyway?

It’s just a teaser, but for once, the idea is simple, straightforward, and clear. Native Instruments have taken their DJ software, Traktor, and combined it with a grid of pads for sample triggering and loops. The upcoming hardware/software combination we expect later this spring.

At the risk of stating the obvious, what’s significant about adding loop triggering to any DJ set is that you can more easily move beyond playing and mixing tracks. Even without drum machines, this kind of manipulation is part of the grand tradition of DJing, made all the more impressive when ground-breaking DJs were able to accomplish it using only a turntables. (It’s perhaps a triumph over the linearity of recorded music in the 20th Century that, at last, artists found a way to subvert recorded music’s permanently-frozen state and reclaim the playback device as an instrument.)

What the upcoming product does is to take the virtual deck metaphor of Traktor and makes each deck a sampling machine. Each deck can trigger one-shots and loops, coupled with the mixing, cueing, and effects possibilities of Traktor as a DJ tool.

The obvious comparison will be to Ableton Live, but here, it’s as significant what is different as what is not. This wording from NI’s description will admittedly sound a lot like Ableton Live and colored renditions of the monome: “Stylish multi-color pads trigger loops and samples, allowing for on-the-fly remixing.” There’s definitely some influence there.

But the grand-daddy of all these things is sampling drum machines, the first instruments to popularize triggering one-off or looped audio content from a grid. (Tip of the hat here to Roger Linn and his designs.) Ableton’s breakthrough was taking that sample-triggering grid metaphor and cross-breeding it with the DAW, the all-purpose studio workstation with its channel strips, tracks, and arrangements. In Live, the track is king.

NI’s breakthrough here promises to be seamlessly making each deck – not each track – the focus for sample triggering. And their hardware literally combines the DJ mixing and effects functions with those pads. In the future Traktor tool, the deck, not the track, is king. And that makes all the difference. The deck will behave like a deck for cueing (a common complaint about Live), for one, but it’s also important that whereas Live gives you as many tracks as you want, you’re forced into the limitation of four decks in Traktor. That limitation is neither positive nor negative, but rather something that will influence every other decision you make. (Having looked over the shoulder of Richie Hawtin’s impossibly-enormous Live set recently for Plastikman, with tracks that scrolled on seemingly endlessly, I can tell you this isn’t a minor point.)

Of course, the other amusing point is the timing of when NI is tipping their hand. NI already makes a popular sampling drum machine, Maschine, combining a dedicated controller with software. Akai has just entered the ring with their own revision of the MPC – combining a dedicated controller with software to make a sampling drum machine. NI, for their part, here reveals that their next move is a new dedicated controller/software combo that also adds in DJing.

Anyway, for now, it’s just a video, so everything else is speculation. Feel free to have a look and let us know what you think, which, knowing comments, I’m certain you’ll do in no uncertain terms.

Side note: My brain is fuzzy; can anyone remind me of the capabilities of 4decks? This was, as I recall, a Reaktor patch that combined looping and decks.

Guess who’s gotten really bad at keeping a lid on upcoming product announcements? The manufacturers.

We’re suddenly utterly awash with teasers. Yes, it seems from intentional leaks to advance campaigns, we’re now destined to see every significant new piece of music gear before we see it, cast in shadows and partial photos and more. Apparently, the folks doing publicity think that this will cause people on the Internet to talk about them. They’re … right, in fact. And with the biggest American trade show for music gear landing next week, we’re in a flood of stuff.

I would willfully ignore such things, but I think it’s worth a quick round-up just to remind ourselves which booths we should visit next week in Anaheim at NAMM. And amidst more predictable teasers, the other good news is, the synths just keep on coming and coming. Who would have thought it? 2012 could be the year of the synth – again. (Even with MIDI DIN, no less!)

CDM is proud to bring you all this news, last. (I made the coffee and everything, but then seemed not to actually post this stuff when it arrived.)

Let’s take a sneak peak.

The best teasers:

NI tipped me off to their new @Traktor feed. There, we see, curiously, something resembling the colored buttons on color-mod monomes. And that’s all I can see, but I’m told we’ll see more from NI soon. (Note that NI doesn’t have a NAMM booth, so I don’t necessarily expect a NAMM announcement.)

Oddly, after I made a reference to the StealthMountain account, I see that tweet reads “Sneak Peak.” I’m going to assume that either that was a cheeky attempt to attract the ire of snarky grammar-correcting Twitter bots after I made mention of them, or that I should shut up as a lot of 2012 will be about me utterly butchering the beautiful German language.

Ken MacBeth takes the wraps off his MicroMac on The Facebook. “Micro” for Ken means basically “normal size” for the rest of us – the guy designs Paul Bunyan-style modulars. The Micro looks nice, indeed, three oscillators, loads of CV, and a VCF, plus Ken hopes for portamento and glide. This is still a prototype, but we hope to catch it in person. Compare the earlier proto design, second from top (which I actually quite like – anyone else?):

French synth maker Eowave is definitely on my must-visit list, with not one but two compelling new synths. The Domino (top) is a little more in the meat-and-potatoes category, a lovely, minimal analog monosynth. Koma (second top) is a bit more modern-looking and different, combining an analog bassline synth with a push-button step sequencer.

Koma @ Eowave
Domino @ Eowave [rattle your floors with the sound that autoplays]

More has leaked out about the upcoming Casio XW-P1. And yeah, basically, it sounds like what we’re getting is a general-purpose workstation, more along the lines of what Roland and Yamaha offer than the personality of the beloved CZ series. (SonicState does the math, too – it’s been since 1988.) The bad news: it’s a big workstation keyboard rather than something a bit more unique. The good news: coming from Casio, I’ll bet we see some serious value pricing … and you can still get your CZ on via eBay.

SonicState quotes Keyboard:
“A Mono solo section with up to six oscillators: two virtual analog, two PCM, noise, and external audio. Poly section with wide variety of gig- ready sounds. Drawbar organ mode. Six-way HexTone multis. Nine-track step sequencer with dedicated drum track.”

We’ve also got more details on Akai’s second controller-plus-software combo offering, the MPC Studio. (Curiously, if it’s small enough to carry with you, it’s called “Studio.” If it’s so big, you have to leave it in your studio, it’s called “Renaissance.” Got it?) As with the MPC Renaissance, the big story here is that you get a “dumb” hardware controller that doesn’t produce sound, and the operation itself all happens on your computer via software, a la Native Instruments’ Maschine. Unlike NI, though, Akai doesn’t really have a track record to speak of in software, so the big variable is how well their software works.

The MPC Studio, meanwhile, looks far more luggable and is presumably more affordable than its nonetheless cool-looking, monster truck-style bigger sibling.

It does look very, very slim. Unfortunately, with all those buttons crammed on the right side, it looks like a remote control for a home theater. I’ll be interested to try it in person and see if that’s usable in real life.

http://www.akaiprompc.com/mpcstudio.php [yup - URL still looks like "Prom PC" to me]

I’m probably most intrigued by Livid’s latest controller, the CNTRL-R, made in collaboration with M-nus Records and Richie Hawtin. That collaboration is interesting just because of the amount of live parameter control Rich and company are doing live. And Livid and their booth-mates should have loads of good toys. Livid’s Peter Nyboer writes in comments:

We (Livid) are showing with Mode Machines at E1009. We’ll be previewing some eurorack MIDI+analog things that we’ve been working on, the CNTRL:R that ships next month, and all our other controllers and DIY parts. I will also stand in the acoustic center of all the electric guitars and attempt an air guitar performance mimicking all the simultaneous shredding.

http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_cntrlr.php

Nord has a new organ and a new drum module coming. Sweet. I’m holding out for a Nord Virginal.

“The drums of the future come from the past” is the tagline.

Or to put it another way, “The key to saving the future, can be found only in the past.” [1]

Or to put it another way, “The future is history.” [2]

Or to put it another way, “He will erase your past to protect your future.” [3]

Or to put it another way, “Fight the future.” [4]

Or to put it another way, “In the future, one man is the law.” [5]

Or to put it another way, “The people aboard Flight 35 are about to land 1,000 years from where they planned to.” [6, and I hope that doesn't happen during my Delta connection in Atlanta on the way to LA ... again]

If you want to hire me to do your next PR campaign – yes, conflict of interest, blah, blah – give me a call. Several commenters have said I’m a great shill. I think that’s a compliment.

Answers below.

[1] Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

[2] Twelve Monkeys.

[3] Eraser.

[4] X-Files: Fight the Future.

[5] Judge Dredd.

[6] Millenium.

Show of hands – how many of you got them all?

Also on our teaser tracker:
bodo notes:

Loads of new Eurorack by the likes of Pittsburgh Modular, WDM, Syntech, LZX, but the most eagerly awaited modules will probably be the Make Noise Oscillator (yay!) and Echophon (basically +pitchdelay http://soundhack.henfast.com/freeware/ in a Eurorack module)

We know Teenage Engineering is bringing something, and they win the award for most obscure teaser video. (TV dinner, suggests one reader.)

I look at 10 things I’m excited about at NAMM, though I think I may have to remove the one about “surprises.”

See you from Anaheim.

The MPC name and MPC legend are as big as ever. But the current products? Not so much. Let’s face it: Akai could use a bit of a renaissance. Users these days put just as much stock in the MPC as a concept, and the MPC hardware still attracts users, but other products are stealing Akai’s thunder (Ableton Live, Native Instruments Maschine), and the human faces beloved by users aren’t at Akai (from the hacked JJOS firmware to Roger Linn off working on the Dave Smith-released Tempest). And while it doesn’t have the same mass appeal, hardware from other makers – the Tempest or the Machinedrum and Octatrack – have more street cred these days. That isn’t to say Akai isn’t doing well, but ironically, most of the Akai users I run into these days are using the APC with Ableton, or a treasured MPC from some years back.

This week, we get a glimpse of Akai’s strategy for changing that. The surprise: all three products are controllers for software, not the all-in-one, integrated hardware that made the MPC famous.

To many, it may be more the sad end of an era than the beginning of a new one. With plenty of software tools on the market, Akai was in the eyes of a loyal user base the go-to name for integrated hardware. But we’ll see if the MPC can win over those same folks with greater flexibility, as an apparent concession to the reduced development cost and expanded capabilities of relying on a computer for horsepower.

The MPC Renaissance is a larger controller with integrated audio and MIDI interface. It has a “Vintage Mode” said to emulate the sound “character” of the MPC3000, MPC60, and other units. And it comes with a fold-up LED screen and backlit pads. But the actual sound generation relies on the computer; it’s an interactive controller. We’ve, of course, seen this notion before, in Native Instruments’ Maschine. Whether that direct comparison is ultimately fair or not, the popularity of Maschine and the fact that it came first will make such comparisons inevitable. The major difference in Akai’s approach is that this is a big controller, complete with vintage-style palm rests and loads of I/O. It’s a Cadillac Escalade to NI’s Volkswagen Jetta. And with that extra space, you get more controls, like a stunning 4×4 array of encoders with LEDs, as popularized on Akai’s APC.

And the hardware looks far more elaborate than what we’ve tended to see, even from Akai. It’s the first controller that seems like it’d look at home next to an original MPC.

I like that the controller won’t be mistaken for anything but an MPC. The big question is, is Akai any good at making software? The first screenshot isn’t exactly pulse-quickening, though it does have plug-in support out of the gate. I wouldn’t judge on a preview, but I’ll say this: I think the software will make or break this product, and that’s what I’ll be asking about when I visit Akai at NAMM in Anaheim.

The other two products are teased now and coming soon:
MPC Studio is a “slimline” controller. (Well, almost anything would be more slimline than the massive, wide-load Renaissance, so we’ll see what that means.)

MPC Fly is a controller for iPad 2. If you can get over the name and the latest leap on the iPad bandwagon, consider this – there’s some seriously major consumer appeal here, and of the three, the Fly is the one where Akai is first to market. That makes a big difference. I can see why they kept it for last, even if it may be the least appealing to MPC loyalists.

I’ll reserve judgment on any of this, as I have no idea who worked on these products at Akai, or what the quality will be. My concern is that the appeal of the MPC is really integrated hardware, and mixing the computer into the equation is something other products already do reasonably well – ironically, including Akai’s own APC coupled with Ableton. It seems a huge test for Akai going into this generation of music production.

Now, I’m willing to accept the possibility that this will be a flexible, functional approach. But first, I’ll just wait through what I imagine will be a hailstorm of angry MPC purists. After that settles down, we’ll finally see if Akai is, as they’re putting it, “changing the game” – or if they’re in the same league. What determines that may be just how much the game has changed already. (And from the Ableton side, it’ll be a big test of the partnership with Akai for integrating hardware and software.)

Video below, with some artists onboard already – AraabMUZIK, Sean C, and LV.

Product specs and full info will be available week after next, coinciding with the massive NAMM trade show in California. We’ll be there with Akai.

Early spec highlights – basically, think MPC-style sound samples and features, and lots of audio I/O, as the two things missing from most rivals:

MPC Note Repeat, MPC Swing and MPC transport controls
MPC software for Mac or PC with 64-track sequencing capability
Two XLR-1/4” combo inputs and dedicated turntable input
Four-channel USB 2.0 audio interface and two-port US B 2.0 hub built in
Up to eight pad banks
Two MIDI inputs and four MIDI outputs
Stereo 1/4” out, stereo assignable mix 1/4” out & S/PDIF I/O
MPC SOFTWARE
64-track sequencing capability
6GB+ sound library, including all of the sounds of the classic MPC3000
Instant mapping and real-time adjustment of VST plug-ins
Record each track as an MPC drum program, Keygroup program or VST plug-in
Runs standalone and as VST, AU or RTAS plug-in
Supports WAV, MP3, AIFF, REX and SND
Supports samples and sequences from any MPC ever made
Mac and PC-compatible

http://www.akaiprompc.com/
http://www.akaiprompc.com/mpcrenaissance.php

Something has happened to the mystique of the musical artist, as the superstars have faded. It seems people are increasingly interested with understanding process, in understanding what’s inside the magical black boxes of sound.

Jess Gitner hosted Derwin Panda, aka Gold Panda, at National Public Radio’s studios for Morning Edition. She talked to the artist about the basics of how he constructs music from samples. It’s actually quite nice to me to see a story that’s elementary enough that it could be understood by non-specialists — it’s all to easy to forget that for the vast majority of even the music-loving public, a lot of what people do is a complete mystery.

It’s also worth watching Gold Panda in a live version of “You” for KCRW (a US public radio affiliate in Los Angeles). He uses the tried-and-tested Ableton laptop-plus-MPC combination. We spoke to Gold Panda at length about his process back in October, just before his debut album really blew up (entirely and unequivocally having nothing whatsoever to do with CDM):
Gold Panda Interview: Inspiration from Samples, Loved Ones, and Distracting Dogs

Listen to the whole NPR piece:

Gold Panda: Breaking Down Found Sound [The Record with Ann Powers / NPR]

In other news, Rick Moody, himself a novelist and musician, does a wonderful, intimate interview with Moby for The Rumpus. (Thanks, Paul Artz!) It’s ironic that Moody is conducting the interview, as he has been crafting an extended manifesto about why not to use drum machines (though he claims it’s only “rhetorical.”)

SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #29: The Museum of Broken Things [The Rumpus]

There are some insightful moments; I like this quote:

Not to get too odd and esoteric, but there’s the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Do you know what wabi-sabi is? The more entropic something is, the more endearing it is. A bucket that’s forty years old that’s been used by a lady to clean the floors of a house she’s been working in is way more interesting than a brand new bucket from Walmart. A broken down, crummy Wall-E is way more interesting than a brand new robot. And that’s part of my love of these guys, they’re all about entropy. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. They’re all dusty, they have pencil scribbles on them, none of them is cool, and the ones that sort of pretend to be cool are the least cool.

I’m not entirely sure Moby’s history of the drum machine is completely accurate – for one, I’d question whether it’s true that no one makes or is interested in drum machines any more. But it’s worth it for the massive gear lust geek-out.

In fact, if you read just one line of this rambling article I’m writing, read this one:
What would we need to do to resurrect the PAiA 7701 Drummer Boy or some similar design?

Where’s my blink tag when I need it?

Also, if you read only two lines, what’s Moby’s account name, so we know the next time he snipes us on eBay?

As for this business of drum machines:

I can’t stand drummers, and sometimes, other people, generally. I grew up loving the flavor of grape bubble gum, which is clearly an entirely-synthetic flavor barely resembling the taste of sugar, let alone a fruit. So I must be cut out for 80s drum machine collecting. But I’m just saying that rhetorically.

Also, internal combustion engines? So much more awesome than the horse. So much more.

Despite being a musical technology enthusiast, I really do think of my Android phone first and foremost as a communications device. I imagine I’m not alone, just as I’d guess that people who want a mobile music maker may look first at the iPhone. But that raises the question, are there tools you’d install on an Android phone purely because they’re genuinely useful? What tools would you use in your music, or even refuse to be without?

There are actually a surprising number of tools out there on Android for music-making, though quality can be quite variable. So here, I’ll look at ones that are not only impressive to look at, but which I absolutely make sure are installed on my phone and come back to over time.

The timing is relevant – one of the most significant Android music production apps was released this week.

Quick side note – if you’re in New York City tonight, libpd developer Peter Brinkmann and I will be talking about using Pd on Android, with a little cameo of Processing for Android, at the NYC Android developer meetup.

A New Sampling Sketchpad

“Mobile” to many people means sketchpad, the musical equivalent of carrying a little steno notebook. It’s not the place where music gets finished, but a place where electronic ideas might start. So, it’s fitting that the newest tool from developer Mikrosonic, SPC, is described as a “music sketchpad.”

SPC is, as the name implies, an MPC-style sampling machine. Features:

• Edit samples in a waveform view, up to 24-bit/96k, with envelope controls
• Create variations for each pad, played either in sequence or random
• Use steps to sequence and combine different audio slices and samples

Working with loops can often produce monotony, so something that can slice up samples, randomize or sequence playback of variation, and combine different loops is a welcome change of pace. The workflow is simple and touch-friendly, but focused on variation.

SPC also has some key features that separate it from mobile toys by allowing you to do something you can actually use on your (cough) “real” computer. You can share files and export to lossless WAV. You can load the app itself, and its data, on the SD card to save internal memory space. And you benefit from one of the key benefits of Android. While iOS apps rely on iTunes for sync, plus a cobbled-together, unpredictable selection of cloud services (maybe you get Dropbox, maybe you don’t), SPC’s files save on the SD card and can be loaded directly from any connected Mac, Windows, or Linux machine. You could even theoretically connect the phone or (with an adapter) the SD card to sampling hardware without a computer.

At US$4.99, it’s a steal. And in another advantage to Android, you can download a free demo before you even part with the five bucks.

http://www.mikrosonic.com/spc

That’s not to say it’s all sunshine and happiness on Android. Microsonik have faced extra testing challenges to ensure their software works properly. They also tell CDM that they’ve been frustrated with the “sadly limited” number of music creation apps. (Yes, even though that’s competition for their work, they’d like more choices.) They also say they’ve been frustrated with persisting latency issues and the absurdly slow rollout of the updated Gingerbread operating system to handsets. (I feel their pain on all of this. My research, and information from Google engineers, suggests the latency problem is largely an issue with audio chipset and firmware on the hardware itself, not, as is commonly believed, Java or the OS, though that’s a topic for another story.)

That said, the software is eminently useful, and can be a great starter for sounds you work with on your much more powerful, lower-latency computer.

The developers have also integrated with their own groovebox app:

303-Style Groovebox

RD3 is a 303-style bassline synthesizer and drum machine with step sequencer. Controls are big and touch-friendly, without any excessive amounts of UI chrome, and you can work with three live waveforms for the bass and plenty of sampled drum kits for percussion. You even get eight lovely sampled drum kits: 808, 909, 606, CR-78, Linn, KR55, RZ1, and DMX.

You can cut, copy, and paste patterns, and export to audio loop. With integration with the SPC, though, this really starts to get interesting: put the two tools together, and you can build patterns and then sample them. That looks perfect for long bus rides or waits at the airport. It’s US$4.49, also with an available demo.

http://www.mikrosonic.com/rd3

Music Notation

GUIs may be more widely-used in notation, but because of the nature of engraving, I find simply typing in notes can often be quicker and more accurate. They’re also a natural on a phone screen, which can’t easily fit a full score view.

Enter Zap’s abc. Using the Abc language, which lets you use standard characters to reproduce notation, you can type in simple or even advanced, page-formatted scores. You can convert to MIDI and PDF scores. Oddly, the conversion itself is actually done in the cloud via your network connection.

It could be pretty painful on a touchscreen, but if you have an Android with a keyboard – the Droid line, etc. – it could be terrific. (I’m using a Droid 2 with it and have managed to bang out some snippets, at least. It’s the best mobile notation solution I’ve used yet, which is handy if I forget to stash a manuscript notebook in my bag.)

Make no mistake – this is a very powerful solution. I just wish there were an easier way to import ABC notation into Lilypond; open to suggestions. (That’s not this tool’s fault – ABC is simpler and makes far more sense on mobile – but it’d be nice to then take ABC and use the more powerful Lilypond engraving language.)

I was also lucky enough to meet developer Jonas Petersson at an Android developer conference in Stockholm, so Jonas, hi!

http://home.petersson.se/android/abc/

Musical Pro: A Bunch of Stuff You Might Need

The Swiss Army Knife of music-making on Android, Musical Pro is full of simple but useful tools. Even if you’re a skeptic when it comes to handheld production, it’s hard to argue with this feature set. The metronome and pitch pipe are worth it on their own. Touch-ready piano, keyboard, piano practice mode, drums, and MIDI over WiFi are just a bonus. The “Pro” version is just US$1.99, and the Lite version – which has the esssential metronome and pitch pipe and basic piano/keyboard – is free. The free version absolutely suits my needs; I think the main reason to buy Pro for many may be to support the efforts of developer Christopher Souvey.

Cutest feature that’s also handy: you can blow into the mic for the pitch pipe.

http://www.androidmusical.com/

(Sorry, that domain name makes my head go someplace entirely different. I hear a chorus of people singing “Fragmentation…”)

Jasuto, a Deep Modular Environment

Christopher Wolfe’s Jasuto is a mind-bending, touch-centric modular blank slate designed for mobile. It’s not for everyone – there’s a learning curve as with any fully modular environment, only here you’re doing it on your phone – but it can be rewarding. It’s also one of the most ambitious mobile projects I’ve seen. It runs on iOS and Android alike, but on Android, the order’s even taller: support a wide range of devices. I recommend only using it on a fast processor, and unfortunately, it does indicate just how hard it is to do this kind of development on the platform.

On a fast phone, it can be extraordinary – and it might be the only mobile music production app you need.

Best of all, you can take your work with you, with Windows and Mac plug-ins that let you bring your resulting creation into your desktop environment.

See previous coverage.

http://www.jasuto.com/home/

Samalyse TapeMachine

This mobile recorder is darned near perfect. True, the mic on your phone is probably not perfect, but for (intentionally) low-fidelity field recordings or practice sessions – or attaching an external mic – TapeMachine is terrific. Despite the name, there’s no silly faux-tape interface; instead, you get a waveform view with cropping and undo. There’s Dropbox support for sync and email, plus the aforementioned ability to load directly off an SD card. And you get terrific codec support, including lossless WAV, AIFF, and FLAC, which I find a must. You can even record in the background.

As with most of the other options here, you can try a free demo.

http://tapemachine.samalyse.com/

Pd, SuperCollider, Processing

If you are interested in hacking your own instruments – or using increasingly-powerful, portable gadgets as pocket-friendly containers for your work – you’ve got options.

libpd takes the insanely-powerful, mature Pure Data patching environment and makes it run on phones. You can even use externals (with a little effort), and there’s a scene player for RjDj patches. Learn more and discuss with a group working with this environment not only on Android, but everywhere from Python on the desktop to iOS, too.
Pd Everywhere [Noisepages]

Platforms like iOS don’t allow the distribution of GPL-licensed open source software, but Android does. As a result, you can get a full port of SuperCollider, the rich synthesis coding environment. The best place to get started is on GitHub:
SuperCollider-Android

Because Android is based on Java, Processing has now been developed to run natively on the mobile platform. It’s simply astonishing what you can do: connect a device, hit “play,” and your code is instantly up and running, something almost nothing else can do. Performance is striking, too: a new OpenGL render pipeline does hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics. And you can mix and match Processing code with Android APIs.

Processing for Android isn’t out yet, but there’s a very stable version to try, and it will be fully integrated with this lovely artist-friendly sketchpad for code with the upcoming 2.0 release. That’ll mean that, for Android users at least, going from desktop to mobile will be as easy as flipping a switch.
http://wiki.processing.org/w/Android

Wireless Control

I can’t recommend the crippled TouchOSC port for Android, but perhaps that’s just as well – it’s worth trying out new ideas on a different platform.

FingerPlay MIDI is a simple but effective controller that sends MIDI over WiFi, and is a good choice right now.

I’m personally most eagerly anticipating tools that aren’t out just yet. The promising, Web-based, open-source Control is bound for Android, for one. I think the widespread availability of tablets will make control apps more interesting; phones are a bit limited in this regard.

Listening and Productivity

As I suggested earlier, creation is hardly the main application for most people of their phone. So, many of my must-have apps fit other categories. And quite a few offer options not available on iOS, lest this platform rivalry feel lopsided.

Winamp: Winamp is simply my favorite mobile music tool, full stop. You can sync wirelessly via WiFi (including if you’re a Windows Winamp user), or sync to iTunes, or simply drag and drop music to the SD card. (I’ve found the latter ideal when I want to keep listening to a mix I’m working on.) There’s even Shoutcast radio support and Last.fm scrobbling.

I oddly sat on the plane last week next to the guy who runs this division, and sir, if you’re reading this, I, uh, hope you didn’t catch my cold.

I think Winamp is the best option for Android, but music enthusiasts also get something on this platform they don’t elsewhere: choice. With a variety of music apps from which to choose, you can select one you really like.

XMP Mod Player: Tracker fans will like this one – this omni-platform player (BeOS and Apple II and OS/2 are all supported) is now on Android. Mod files are tiny, so you can now have fairly unlimited music on the go. It’s also a neat example of what you can do with native development on Android.

Todo.txt Touch: My favorite to-do application now has a terrific, community-build, Android-exclusive tool. You sync to text files via Dropbox and can then use a command line to manage your to-do list on any platform. It’s simply the most productive task management I’ve ever done, leaving your mind free to focus on music when you can. The app is $2, and free elsewhere – only a Dropbox subscription is needed for cloud sync.

Dropbox for Android. A life-saver – instant file sync.

Google Listen: This lightweight podcast manager syncs directly to the cloud, as it should. Google-powered search makes finding your favorite podcasts easier, as well. I use it to keep up with music podcasts from XLR8R, Bleep, KCRW, the Bunker, NPR, and others, which remains a great way to discover music. And it’s free. Early versions were a bit … twitchy … but recent builds have been rock-solid in my experience.

Evernote for Android: The ability to capture photo notes or type in notes is key. Also, Android makes it easier to clip materials between applications: share buttons will connect to any aware installed app. This can also be a great scrapbook for ideas and inspiration; in addition to the more utilitarian notebooks, I try to keep a couple that tend to the creative.

Last but not least, Soundcloud for Android is a must-download, providing both mobile recording and sharing capabilities and the chance to keep up with discovering music on the service. You even get widget support so you can keep it on your homescreen. I just wish TapeRecorder supported SoundCloud, too.

Did I Miss Any?

To me, the above selection of software is more than I could ever really use on a phone; I feel happily spoiled. I’ve largely ignored flashier, more experimental tools – these are all chosen with productivity in mind. But there are some gems there, too. Ethereal Dialpad is an exceptionally good, experimental soundmaker, and its developer had lots to say about the platform when he spoke to us last spring:

Ethereal Dialpad Touch App, Development Experience on Android and Beyond

Rhodri Karim’s student project Spectral, developed at the University of Cambridge, is also fascinating, turning images into spectra into sound. (See the Android Market.)

And lastly, MusicRadar has done a terrific job keeping atop music apps on Android as they have on iOS; you can read about their top picks, updated regularly:
The best Android music making apps in the world today

We haven’t really seen tablet-specific tools, as the first Android tablets worth using are just now hitting the market. I’ll be pleased just to get a good tablet workflow with Pd, myself.

But if you’re an Android user (or developer) and have feedback, I’d love to hear from you. And beyond that, do stay tuned. No OS, no machine – not even the Apple IIGS – goes unturned here.

Owing to a tradition that goes back to the first samplers and hip-hop pioneers, sampling and digital performance have become a kind of instrumental technique. You might play well, you might play poorly, but even working with samples, you can actually play.

You can look at the simple design of the monome as the hardware embodiment of digital, a reflection of an array of pixels. You can see it as an extension of Roger Linn’s MPC and other drum machine concepts. It’s probably both those things. But since the monome itself makes no sound, it’s been software that has made that design musically relevant. While the original vision of the monome was as a blank canvas that could perform any function, ultimately a community of musicians focused their efforts on expanding a single patch, creator Brian Crabtree’s original mlr. Talk to these monome players, and they’ll very likely tell you about some little modification they made last night to use in a set they’re playing tonight, because they wanted some feature or another, or a little subpatcher they borrowed from a friend to solve a problem. Add up all those little hacks, and you get evolution.

Now, descendant mlrv has evolved into a live music-making environment of its own, and not just for the monome. Version 2.0, released this week, supports monome-like controllers such as the Novation Launchpad, Akai APC, and Livid Ohm/Block, but also conventional MPC-style grids like the Akai MPD.

The word the creators use to describe the playing technique: “hypersampling.”

mlrv is built in Max/MSP, so if you have a Mac or Windows and version 5 of the software (or Ableton’s Max for Live), you can edit the patch. Otherwise, you can download a free runtime and use the patch itself for free. Pay US$18, and you get your name on the startup screen and special email news and downloads. Pay US$80, and you get limited edition vinyl from artists galapagoose and ‘%’.

The project is the work of Trent Gill, Michael Felix, and parallelogram; check out developer galapagoose playing with it live in the video at top. (I will say, though, even as I am writing on a Website, you get more out of being in the same room with a live performance.) All the details:
http://parallelogram.cc/mlrv/

The software will be available February 1, with a release party that evening for the software and music. Also, while we’ll have details tomorrow, Handmade Music will host performances by galapagoose, %, and other monome artists (alongside chip music, MeeBlippery, and laptopism) on Saturday February 5. Both events happen in New York City at Culturefix.

On February 5 with CDM, you can come at 3pm and check out an open lab to get your hands on mlrv and talk to its developers. Then stay for the party Saturday night – US$20 buys you admission, supports the artists, and nets you a two hour open bar of beer and wine recently celebrated by the NY Times’ drink critic, Frank Bruni. Full details coming in a separate post, or in the meantime, RSVP on Facebook.

Tuesday night launch party details, NYC
http://bit.ly/hmfeb5 = Handmade Music party Saturday night, complete with hands-on during the day, more live performances at night!

Finally, here’s the obligatory, somewhat amusing, preview vid:

In songwriting, there was Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan. In music gear design, it’s hard not to assign a similar degree of expectation to the pairing of Dave Smith and Roger Linn.

Between them, these two designers have been a major part of what music technology is today. Dave Smith pioneered MIDI (even giving it its acronym), the first microprocessor-based instrument (the Prophet-5), the first programmable polyphonic synth, and other innovations at Sequential Circuits. Add to that landmarks in physical modeling research (at Yamaha) and the first PC soft synth. Roger Linn built the first programmable sampled-sound drum machine and with the LM-1, LinnDrum, Linn 9000, and his work on the MPC60 and MPC3000, introduced workflows and ideas in drum machines we now take for granted. It’s not easy to overstate the contributions of either designer.

Putting two minds like that together can easily raise expectations, but it can’t magically create a product. And so as these two embarked on a collaboration on a drum machine four years ago, the resulting project didn’t immediately get off the ground. But at NAMM 2011, the first real, functioning product – complete with a ship date this year – finally sees the light of day, thanks to a reboot that re-calibrated the designers’ own expectations and process. As Steve Jobs once infamously said, “real artists ship.”

So, with shipping in sight, what happens when a MIDI-fathering pioneer of synthesis and the pioneer of the modern drum machine work together? And what do they view as important to design? The answers were, to me, insightful, even if you don’t expect to pick up the new Tempest drum machine.

Indeed, they had so much to say, that I’m going to largely let them speak for themselves, unedited. These really speak to the core of how Roger and Dave have thought about their creation; there’s no marketing filter. Either you’ll find these ideas appealing to you musically, and it’ll be something you want, or you won’t. And unlike at NAMM, you don’t even have to hear them shout over the din of a trade show hall to listen to their story.

First, be sure to read up on the specs of the Tempest:
Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official

Concept behind the Tempest

Roger: I think the things that have carried over [from the original collaborative design] are the real-time performance instrument aspects. I always saw the need for something that was not just an off-line editing machine, but in which the idea of composition was tightly integrated with performance. So that’s what the operating system is about on this one – to try to do that with as few controls and as a tight a package as possible, and to have those controls work in multiple modes.

Dave: There are two purposes of this instrument. I think one purpose is what Roger covered, which is usability, and what a drum machine should be doing these days. But the other half is sound. If you’re happy with samples, we can’t compete with a free piece of software that gives you a billion samples and a full-screen interface that lets you program it however you want. That’s not what this is about. This is a musical instrument, and the sound is tightly coupled with the operation, and it gives you a much wider palette of sounds because of the analog side. But you can use samples when you want to, and you can combine the two to come up with all kinds of new sounds.

From my point of view, if it didn’t sound new and different and better, then there’d be no reason to do it. I certainly wouldn’t have done an all-sample drum machine, because my interest is always in the sound area. If the sound is like everything else, it kind of bores me, and there’d be no reason to do it.

The collaboration:

Roger: Basically the entire user interface, data structures, file types … as far as the interface and the way that the machine works as a drum machine, that’s entirely me.

Dave’s really a hardware guy much more than I am. I’m not a real hardware engineer; I’ve put products together, but under duress. I can’t really design a circuit very well – I did circuit design on my earlier machines, but it’s always harder for me. And it’s just not fun for me.

I live in Plato’s world of ideals. Dave loves to live in that world of imperfect copies on the surface of the Earth. It’s just a matter of what makes you happy, what’s fun for you. The truth is I’ve never really liked hardware, it’s just that when I made products earlier on, you needed hardware. I prefer to live in the computer, the efficiencies of the computer, the connectivity, the screen, the ease of writing software. The only reason to have hardware is for the human interface.

I like design, and I like to be close to the musician’s experience. [Dave] likes to be close to the circuit. On this, the first thing he did was design the voice board. He didn’t really care about my 3D models or drawings; he had to touch and feel it. He has the physical gene turned on and I have the virtual gene turned on.

It’s actually very nice, because we cover opposite ends of the spectrum, and I think it’s what made this product work is that we’re covering both those sides. I agonize over the user interface and the data structures and the files and the interactions of the controls. I like solving multi-dimensional problems where you’ve got time involved, as you do with the sequencer, and imagining myself playing the device before it exists. He likes the circuit boards, and he likes writing the low-level firmware.

The synthesis engine

Dave: Large parts of [the Dave Smith Tetra] are in that there are the same two analog oscillators and low-pass filter and one sub oscillator, and we have feedback like we did on the Tetra and the Mophos. The additions are that each voice has four oscillators — two of them are analog and the other two are digital. The digital oscillators are really samples as opposed to oscillators, but they can go either way. We’ll probably be putting the Prophet VS waveshapes in there also. So you basically have four different sound sources per voice. We also added the high-pass filters which none of our other synthesizers have.

[The high-pass filter] gives you a lot more control when you’re mixing analog sounds with samples. Sometimes the analog stuff gets a little bit too bottom-heavy. If you’re not careful, it’ll get a little muddy after a while. But the high-pass does a great job of letting you tweak that when you need to.

Sequencing and real-time control

Roger: The sequencer is event-oriented. In each note event, you’ve got four bytes that you can feel with four different pieces of information. For example, for all notes of the snare drum, byte one could be pitch, byte two could be the filter, byte three could be decay, and byte four could be pan. People who are not very technical can just touch it.

The touch strip lets you override parameters as it plays, or record parameters. This is something that I first made on the MPC60, the variation slider. So it’s not really new, but it’s turned out to be an effective thing. Instead of one, we have two, and each of them as two different sets of assignments, so you can toggle between them.

The idea is that all the changes you make in real-time are recorded into the sequencer if you’re in record mode, or changing them live if you’re playing live.

The way we designed these, they’re both position and pressure-sensitive FSRs (forse sensing resistors). It’s a two-dimensional sensor.

An instrument you can play

Roger: What is cool about this is, with these sixteen beats, you can go in and out of record on them, do any editing that you want, use any sort of pad mode for your recording or play live with the tunings or adjusting the voices or adding and recording note effects – and note effects you can also save beat-wide parameter changes – and do all that, and you never have to stop. The only time you have to save is when you’re saving to flash [memory], but I think that’s the only thing. I think even the edits can be done as a background task. And of course you’ve got real-time erase and all that stuff and single-level undo.

You can actually do real-time creation, and I think that’s the nature of working today, is that a DAW as an editor is kind of an old-fashioned statement. Editing and performance are ideally the same thing.

That’s what I’ve tried to do with this is to try to say, what’s the virtuosic music instrument that we could create if we’re trying to make a drum machine?

What differentiates the sound

Dave: lot of it is a matter of how you program it. A lot of people have already found that on a Tetra, because it’s multi-timbral, you can get some pretty interesting drum kits going. And on this one, we went just a little bit further with the high pass and the samples and a few other little things here and there. We have five envelopes per voice, because envelopes are pretty important when you want to tweak a percussion sound. The LFOs go up a lot higher in frequency, so you can actually use them to do some FM-type effects with the oscillators. And then just the programming, people approach it more like a percussion instrument, so it takes more of that flavor.

Groove and voodoo

Much has been made by MPC users of that instrument’s groove, but Roger – the guy who actually made the groove – routinely discounts it as being anything special. I raised an eyebrow when Roger mentioned in his copy for the Tempest that he used his “bag of tricks.” He explains here precisely what he means – a must-read, incidentally, for MPC fans.

Roger: There’s a lot more voodoo in the press than actually exists. Even on my earliest drum machines, all I did was make sure my samples were trimmed tightly and wrote my software so that the software responds tightly. Swing is just a matter of accurate percentages.

My bag of tricks is basically taking away all the stuff the software sequencers give you — options for that no one knows how to set. Back then, in the earlier days, sequencers just weren’t very good for timing because the OS would always get in the way. These days, you can get great swing if you know what yuo’re doing. The problem is the software interfaces make it so hard to get what you’re trying to get.

For swing, what I do is I use my percentages. You can do fifty percent up to seventy-five percent. And what that means is, for every eighth note, it’s the percentage between the first sixteenth note and the second. 50% means straight time, 66% means falling on triplets, 75% … is going very slow for a jazz groove. It actually falls on 32nd notes. Most of the time it’s 50%, 66%.

There’s no other trick than that. The thing I think made a lot of my early drum machines sound good, at least starting with the 9000, was that you had the pressure-sensitive pads coupled with the note repeat feature. I called it note repeat, people called it rolls. It was mostly not for doing rolls, but just doing good … sixteenth-note grooves. If you just play it by varying pressure, it’s pretty easy to get it right. You couple that with nice swing percentages – something around 58-60% is really pretty cool. I think it’s pretty easy for most people to get a good groove.

The Tempest and its place in drum machine history

Ask a marketing person about a product, and you’ll get a fairly dull answer. Ask someone who’s been around the industry as long as Dave has, and you definitely get an answer with some personality.

Dave: When you say analog drum machine to people, it can mean almost anything. A lot of people instantly think of the old Roland stuff, and already a lot of the people who have been playing with this machine have programmed a lot of the classic 808-type sounds. So we can cover that kind of analog.

And then we can also cover the poly-synth kind of analog, because it is a real programmable analog voice. It’s not the stripped-down Roland version from way back. And then you get the samples, so between all of that, you get a pretty wide palette to work with. It sounds a lot different than if you did the same thing on a Tetra or a Prophet.

The old style analog drum machines – there’s the Roland style, which nobody bought when they first came out because they didn’t sound very good compared to the drum machines at the time, and it only became fashionable much later. But the earlier drum machines, like the ones we made at Sequential, we were basically just taking samples and running them through analog filters. They weren’t really configured like this as a fully-programmable analog voice.

We’re trying to cover all of the bases. Operation-wise, you can program it Roland-style, you can program it MPC-style. From a sound point of view, if you want to stack oscillators to make a big sound, which is what people tend to do a lot on the MPCs, to make it sound thick because you stack a lot of voices, we’ve got four oscillators per voice, and two of them can be samples, and if you want to throw in some low-frequency triangle waves or something you can do that, too. So we don’t need the huge voice counts of the MPCs to do the same thing. The idea was kind of a one-size fits all instrument that can cover all types of musical styles, so it’s not shoehorned into one or the other — I guess what you’d call the two different camps.

It’s been so long since there has been a new drum machine out there of any kind. Even the monomachines have been out for a while, so it was time for something new — and a different take on it.

Price and value

I mentioned to Dave that, given the ability to use a Tempest as a synth module as well as a drum machine and take advantage of genuine analog signal path, the price would make sense to at least some prospective buyers.

Dave: You can already plug in a keyboard and play it as a six-voice analog poly synth. It is definitely dual-purpose in that sense.

The street price on a Prophet is a little more than this, and this has a more complex voice than this does. If we took the pads off and sold it as a six-voice synth, it’d probably cost about as much as it does. I think it’s a good price for what it does.

Roger: The thing can actually double as a six-voice keyboard synth. It has all the same voices that the Tetra has. I guess it’s like a Hextra.

The pads and their layout

Roger: I really like the two by eight layout; I find it really cool to work with. All the pads are right on the front between your fingers. It’s the ideal compromise between the 4 x 4 and the 1 x 16 layout. And since this does both step time and real-time programming, it makes it very nice. The other thing is, when you’re using the pads for tunings, you can select a number of scales – it can be two octaves of major, two octaves of minor, chromatics, two bass strings, two octaves of pentatonic minor, pentatonic major – it actually works out very nicely for doing pitch parts.

Who’s it for?

Dave: I think anybody should like this. The old synth guys from the 80s should like this, because it’s a good, old-fashioned poly-synth drum machine. The electronic guys should like it – a lot of people already use our stuff, because if you want an analog poly-synth these days, there aren’t many choices. The hip-hop guys will always appreciate a new sound, and they always love anything Roger did, for that matter. It’s funny, I’ve been through this cycle so many times. And it’s really hard to predict ahead of time, because so much of this is just a fashion thing, where if the right people decide this is the thing that everybody has to have right now, then it will go crazy. If that doesn’t happen, we’ll still sell a lot, but it can make a pretty big difference. And those are the kinds of things you can never predict

So far, the handful of people who have played with it have liked it a lot, which is a good start. We won’t know until after we start shipping.

Philosophy of design

Dave: Concise instruments to me are very important. A Prophet doesn’t do everything a synth can possibly do, but it has just the right number of knobs for direct control, and the right number of features that make it easy to get your head around it. At the same time, it’s incredibly versatile. People who go too far down the software path where every year there’s a new version and new submenus — it’s more features, you can’t argue, but it just gets silly after a while. So I try to avoid that. Ed.: Since this line was misunderstood in comments, part of this came out of Dave not particularly liking software – which I found especially amusing, as Roger describes not particularly liking hardware. I think these two are yin and yang, Bert and Ernie, in a good way. -PK

For me, an instrument should be concise, it should have a lot of personality. Software never has personality, if you ask me. And it should be fun to play. Software often isn’t fun to play.

Photo courtesy Dave Smith and Roger Linn, circa five years ago.

Barcelona-based, Los Angeles-edited PublicSpacesLab is an example of what a netlabel can be. Instead of just another dumping ground for sounds, it feels like a well-curated cafe, pairing regular but thoughtful releases with reflections on music making. Everything is Creative Commons-licensed, free music, from a variety of artists spanning geographies and genres.

If you’re in the mood for reading, recent thought pieces from the editor cover a range of topics:
Expansion, the lesser known dynamics tool (Amen, brother)
The demise of an indie radio station in LA (with some harsh words for the town – sorry, Los Angeles)

For listening, there’s a bit of something for everyone there in their near-20 releases, including ambient soundscapes and a crackling compilation that sounds like your radio waves have achieved sentience and begun singing maths. Ambient and noise are typically the order of the day. But the latest and apparently most popular of their releases is decidedly at the warmer end of the spectrum.

Paul Croker’s medium is sampled vinyl, but to me it’s just as interesting that some of the perceived organic, warm and fuzzy quality comes from the low-fidelity digital samples, too. Paul’s apparent workflow: sample vinyl to MPC, use the MPC for the “vibe,” arrange on DAW (apparently Ableton). The specifics are less important to me, however: it’s the combined crunch of the turntable with the digital sample that works here, true to the traditions of hip hop.

The Creative Commons license covering Paul’s two releases for PublicSpacesLab is sadly problematic. Because of the current interpretation of US Copyright Law, the fact that the samples themselves aren’t cleared means you probably aren’t free to do what you like with this. You are free to listen, however – and, as I said, if this isn’t your cup of tea PSL has plenty else to explore.

PublicSpacesLab official site

PublicSpacesLab @ Soundcloud (with links to other free music groups)

[PS019] Dustmotes | The Containment Sessions by PublicSpacesLab

And because the release was disseminated via Twitter, Twitter becomes a forum for feedback. (Oddly, Twitter commenters are often more positive and enthusiastic than the troll-leaning web commenters, I find – perhaps because they reserve their time for the stuff they like.) Thus, Kieron James replies via Twitter:

“Primitive, raw and beautifully crafted. A collage – components collected and mounted with complete respect for their musical heritage on a cave wall (solid, dependable rhythms chipped, cracked and twisted into something new). More pretentious feedback you won’t have read for some time, but I want to convey something of what your music speaks (to me)!”

Bonus listening – here’s Paul’s earlier release for PSL:

PS012 – dustmotes – Beats for the Subverted by PublicSpacesLab

So, folks, what are your favorite netlabel resources? Who do you most closely follow on a service like SoundCloud?

“Feature creep” is a tricky thing. We all say we want tools that focus more on what we want rather than just add features. But some functionality is there for a reason.

When Maschine came out, Native Instruments’ take on drum machine workflows showed a lot of promise. The biggest draw: Native build a dedicated hardware controller just for the application, making working with the software tool more tangible, but with the flexibility of software. Maschine could integrate with your existing software effects and DAW (like Ableton Live), but without giving up the kind of hands-on control found in hardware.

At least that was the promise. In reality, version 1.0 didn’t quite do some of the things people expected when it came to integration. A series of updates, culminating in the deeper changes in 1.5, has addressed that. 1.5 now allows you to record Maschine events into your DAW, and supports MIDI pitch bend and Control Changes. You can also now drag and drop MIDI patterns. That means if you want to drop Maschine in something like Live or Renoise for sequencing, you can do so more practically.

Also new in 1.5:

• Grain Stretch effect (yes, this part is especially tasty)
• Modeled “vintage sampler” modes for emulating the MPC-60 and SP-1200. NI says they’ve done “sophisticated component modeling.” I haven’t heard the results yet and don’t know exactly what that means, but maybe an expert on one of the original instruments would like to test it out for us? (I’m particularly interested in the SP-1200, as I think there are more reasons to model that sound than an MPC.)
• New slicing and mapping options
• New samples, including Goldbaby’s MPC-60 kits, and special versions of some existing NI packs covering Abbey Road drums, session strings, and vintage synths.

In other words, it’s a huge upgrade. It probably could be called “2.0,” but happily, it’s a free update. (That’s especially good news, as we’ve gotten some fairly negative comments when NI users haven’t had the upgrade path they wanted. This, by contrast, makes a terrific gift to users.)

True to NI’s recent marketing efforts, the launch is accompanied by plenty of celebrity videos. There’s no question who NI hopes will buy Maschine: appearances by major hip-hop producers leave little doubt. But my guess is the tool itself is more of a selling point for that market than any big-name producers on the vendor website – and, for that matter, I think the supposedly-separate interests of electronic and hip-hop communities are more blurred now than ever. Maschine 1.5 is more likely to live or die based on how musically useful it is. Based on what I’ve seen from CDM readers, the gradual improvements – plus simply having more time to get it into musical workflows – have led to growing ranks of Maschine fans. If you count yourselves in those ranks, do let us know what you like or what you’ve found to make it useful.

native-instruments.com/maschine.info