You’ve got to respect BeatKangz: here’s an independent company doing something new in the world of hardware drum machines. Their design is blinged out like crazy, the polar opposite of a minimalist MachineDrum, but with easy access to the controls you need. It’s a box that has personality in a world of gear that often doesn’t. The team has at least some experience, too, having made the SB-246 drum machine for Zoom. (Okay, I hadn’t heard of it before, but it looks like a fun toy for about $200. Here’s a video review.)

I have to say I’ve done a pretty terrible job of covering their upcoming Beat Thang, mostly because, well, I just don’t know anything about it, beyond seeing the videos everyone else had. (And yes, I’ve heard the complaints about the fact that I haven’t been covering it.) So I’ve been waiting for some news about the actual hardware shipping.

Unfortunately, the shipping gear isn’t here just yet. The good news is, Beat Thang hardware is now promised for October, with a pre-sales price of US$999. The bad news is, for now you’ll have to live with a “virtual” software edition. What looks like a very cool hardware interface gets translated directly to the screen – where it just doesn’t make as much sense to me. It may just make you want the hardware all the more. (Full disclosure: I’m biased. I’ve never been a fan of software that emulates hardware. Even less so when you have the actual hardware to look forward to.) It could be really useful to someone who owns the hardware – if you’re on a bus with your laptop and can’t grab your hardware BeatThang. For hardware lovers, though, it’s a bit of a tease.

Still, if you’re starved for BeatKangz news, at least this gives you more of an idea of what to look forward to – and the workflow features look impressive indeed. My guess is they’ll use software sales to fund production. If you’re already committed to this concept, your US$149 spent on the software gets you a $149 off coupon on the final hardware – nice idea.

Feature set details from the company:

Korg’s nano series has been a huge hit. Now it’s Akai’s turn, with their own mini USB pad and keyboard controllers. (Note: given lengthy product turnaround in this industry, these may actually have been designed before the nano – but that’s not as important, ultimately, as which models you like.) The Akai assumes you want something that’s a bit bulkier than the Korg nano line – with, presumably, a payoff in playability.

Sure, the vocoder may now be something of an electronic music cliché now, but it got its beginnings as a mechanism of encoding speech. It was one of the first electronic instruments. It helped inspire the conceptual model for all digital communication. And, those lofty goals aside, it can still sound terrific when used creatively. (Hint: you don’t have to use your voice as a source.)

These are heady times for the vocoder. Hosts are getting better at accomplishing the routings necessary to produce vocoding effects. Software and hardware vocoders are appearing everywhere. And of course, the great moment has been Ableton releasing a Vocoder in its upcoming Live 8, not so much because of Live or that Vocoder, but because company co-founder Robert Henke was immortalized in a remix (video above) talking about how you wouldn’t need it. I expect one of the first unofficial Live 8 tutorials may use this clip. (Apologies to Robert – especially as that’s exactly the sort of thing I might say speaking to students, and I actually agree. You don’t need a vocoder. For one thing, if you know what you’re doing, you can patch your own. But I digress.)

History and Vocoding without Autopilot

For a different take on the vocoder, let’s first take a trip back in time.

Jay Smith of Livid Instruments may be in the business of making controller hardware himself, but that doesn’t stop him from appreciate the knob-laden goodness of the NAMM show floor. Jay’s own gear reveals a not-so-secret love of knobs and buttons and faders, and if you’re into that sort of thing, this year’s NAMM music trade show had plenty to love – Akai’s APC40 controller for Live, Akai’s MPK keyboard, the Alesis MasterControl, Arturia’s Factory Experience controller for their soft synth emulations, and even another brutish-looking computer-in-a-keyboard, now with pads, from Open Labs.

The shots give you a particularly good feel for what the Akai APC40 is like up close and personal. It’s no accident that Jay himself is a VJ. I really imagine that a number of these devices might be brilliant for running live visuals, though we still have yet to find out exactly how the APC works. I assume it’ll run as a standard MIDI controller outside Live, but I’m unclear on the specifics of what that will mean.

Thanks to Jay for sharing these photos with CDM.

Now I can’t wait to get another look at Livid’s own controller line and what may be next for it; see its wooden crossfader below. Previously:

Hands-On: Livid’s New Ohm Controller, Custom Control Geared for Visualists

Assuming you haven’t already hit Ableton overload with all the news announced this week, Ableton has posted a set of videos that do a pretty nice job of demonstrating the features. I’ve assembled them into a playlist here. (Stumbled on these videos thanks to Synthtopia.)

There are four videos in the playlist, covering Live 8, APC, Max for Live, and Share.

In particular, one video shows how the Share collaboration feature will work, with the ability to easily upload sets and share them either publicly or privately. (There’s a long introduction, but skip halfway through and it starts to talk about the actual solution.)

To me, the big question there is how much it’ll cost. It is nice to see an embeddable widget. Even better would be to have an open API – any chance of that, Ableton? That’d allow web developers (cough) hook into these features for other tools. Imagine if SoundCloud, for instance, which offers audio sharing and commenting, could also link more easily to projects uploaded for Live. Now, Ableton could keep control over Share and work with SoundCloud individually, but then they might miss Bandcamp or some other service they didn’t see coming — you get the idea.

Note that Live isn’t the first to ponder online sharing features, either. FL Studio has its own Collab feature, which nicely enough offers its own chat client – something I wrote about for Keyboard Magazine. I can imagine a world in which the Live Share option is just one of a number of similar features — making an open API all the more interesting. (I can’t actually find that Keyboard article, but I know I wrote it!)

More on Ableton at NAMM here on CDM:

Akai APC40 Video from Ableton; More Controllers Coming

Ableton’s Upgrade Options: Easier to Understand than a Large Hadron Collider

Ableton Live 8, Now with Grooves: The Top 8 New Features

What Makes the APC40 Special: Interactive Clip, Device Control, Dedicated Buttons

Ableton: You’ll Be Able to Customize Akai’s APC40 Using Max for Live

Akai APC40 Ableton Live Controller, in Detail: Plug-and-Play Live Control For Everyone?

Updated: It seems that Collab is no more?

And Key of Grey has a nice story wondering about alternatives to this kind of integrated tool:

Collaborating on a music project online