By now you’ve all probably seen that excellent video of Kid Beyond illustrating his usage of Ableton Live. Pretty cool, right? If one had such a system, you could loop yourself playing guitar, beatboxing, etc., all perfectly in sync with programmed drum/MIDI tracks and other performers.

Here’s how to set up your own system in a similar hands-free operation style, for about US$10, without having to solder anything. It’ll take you about an hour once you gather the parts required, or less. No joke.

You will need:

• A QWERTY keyboard, preferably with a USB connector. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy an adapter to fit your laptop, which costs extra. You can get one for $7.50 at AllElectronics.com, but you can find them even cheaper at your local thrift store’s “technology pile.” I got mine for $2.
• A flathead screwdriver.
• Ableton Live. Ed.: Live is a perfect choice here, but you may find this useful with other music apps, as well — or even in a VJ set. -PK
• A free keyboard-mapping utility called Autohotkey (if you’re running Windows). If you’re running Mac, the program to use is calledIKey.

  That’s it. Here’s how to make it go:

  
  

  Above: Steps 1-2. Simple enough.
  

The $75 app energyXT2 starts out sounding similar to other music apps — but after a long list of twists, seems anything but. It’s a DAW. It’s a sequencer. It’s an audio multitracker. (Okay, not so interesting so far …) It’s a synth. It’s a sampler. It’s a drum machine. It’s a looper. It runs as a host. It runs in a plug-in. Now it runs on Linux — making it perhaps the first significant music creation app to do a commercial, out-of-box release for the penguin. It’s got a modular engine underneath.

And now there’s a big release coming soon. Before we get a chance to spend some time on it, here’s a preview of why it’s on the radar screen.

Release date: June 15. (See the discussion thread on KVR.)

energyXT2 is in beta now, the first big release in three years. In features and interface design, it appears to borrow more than a little from Ableton Live — but, then again, since energyXT2 runs as a plug-in, I’m sure someone is working out some wild performance setup where they use both simultaneously. It also takes some design cues, as near as I can tell, from Cakewalk. But the combination of features here in unique, it’s affordable enough to be an impulse buy, and we’ve heard from several users that you’re very excited about it.

Is there room for yet another music production tool? EnergyXT already has a loyal following, and with music creation as personal and dynamic a process as it is, I think the answer can always be yes.

New in energyXT2:

• Completely re-worked interface and structure
• Higher-quality time- and pitch-shifting algorithms
• Support for MIDI, audio, and dedicated “drum” loops, including a specialized “drum-machine track”
• Clip-based automation
• New mixer, phase modulation synthesizer, and multi-FX processor built in
• Controller maps
• Out-of-box Linux support — yep, that’s right, from a commercial application.

Cockos’ REAPER, the lightweight audio and MIDI multitrack editor from the creator of Winamp, is coming to (Intel/PPC) Mac, too. There’s a full discussion of the update on the REAPER forum. It’s an “alpha” build, but comes as a surprise: REAPER may have a lot more appeal as the “standard” lightweight host as a cross-platform app. Finished version is due “Q4″ of this year.

REAPER has been getting endless updates of other kinds, as well, including this new “Stealth” color scheme which looks suspiciously like SONAR to me. (Sorry to be harsh, but it was fugly before. If it’s SONAR-y now, that’s a huge improvement.) If you want to try it, it’s downloadable as “uncrippled unexpiring shareware.” Remember when most shareware worked that way? That’s a retro trend I could get behind.

REAPER

Rather than praise or criticize REAPER, what I’d really like to know is, are any readers using it? What do you think so far?