Clean is overrated. If you’re ready for a little digital dirt in your synth life, powered by the open-source Arduino hardware, Marc Nostromo’s Squealer is for you. Built atop the wonderful, Arduino-based Pocket Piano kit by Critter and Guitari, it’s a full-blown, simple, digitally-gritty synthesis engine.

You get a monosynth, some fixed waveforms, a resonant filter, decay, and some aliasing tricks for extra grit. The big news: the Arduino Piano Squealer is now under a GPL license.

Official Arduino Piano Squealer Synth Page has everything you need
Announcement of GPL v3
All at Mustalk@noisepages.com

Here’s what it sounds like:

SAP+BOM+Dodgey Eighties Ringing Reverb:
apbom.mp3

Eery piano:
ap-eery.mp3

SAP+Flanging Mini KP:
ardboy1.mp3

It’s drumming, the multi-player game. The Drummer is an open-source application for the Nintendo DS handheld, developed by Andrea Bianchi and Woon Seung Yeo and presented alongside a paper earlier this year at the NIME Conference (The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression). As with any Nintendo homebrew software, you’ll need a special DS cartridge capable of loading software from flash memory – though if this app were developed more, it could make a terrific DSi app.

The idea is this: while making a handheld game system into an instrument, why not take advantage of its networking features? Grab a friend (or friends) with the Nintendo DS, whip up a drum kit that’s to your liking, then play along.

Oddly, while we live in a networked, Internet age, the client-server model rarely gets applied to music. One of the things I try to explain about the protocol OSC (OpenSoundControl), aside from the fact that it doesn’t have to be about sound, is that it’s really a collection of best practices in open networking communication. It’s not simply about connecting devices to one another in serial fashion, as with MIDI, but forming a network – an idea familiar to anyone who uses instant messaging online. True, latency considerations and other complications can add another dimension of challenge. But I think there’s plenty to explore when it comes to networking devices, and it promises to make computer music a less solitary experience. The Drummer is a good step in that direction.

The Drummer project page + NIME paper
Google Code page

Thanks to Andrea for sending this our way!

The “space bassoon” Eigenharp seems to have landed from another planet. Today, I’ve got good news: it’s bringing alien gifts with it. By next year, both the software and the high-performance protocol the instrument uses will be open source. Taken together with other advancements in the open source community and with protocols like OSC, that could mean we’re at the vanguard of a golden age for more open, more intelligent, more expressive digital instruments.

Genuinely new music controllers made available commercially don’t come along very often. So this week’s news of a strange but wonderful-looking instrument shaped like a bassoon with customizable key controls turned many heads. With high-resolution, high-frequency data and reliance on the computer for everything from sound generation to mapping the keys to different tunings, the computer connection matters. Eigenharp’s chairman, John Lambert, sets the record straight for CDM on the software, the way it talks to your computer and other gear, and how open the tools and protocol will be.

I’ll be talking more with John next week, but I want to bring you this news now. Part of blogging means that you don’t hold back – you share that first reaction and then learn more. I’m pleased to say I was dead wrong on the Eigenharp. What looked on the spec sheet like MIDI-only communication and proprietary software turns out to be just the opposite. Sometimes, being wrong is great. Here are all the details:

What protocol do the instruments use?

The instruments talk to their base station by a dedicated, high speed, differential, transformer-coupled, error-correcting digital protocol designed (and tested) for use in noisy stage environments by ourselves. The wire used is a 4 core, standard star quad mic cable and can be up to 40M long. The base station then talks to the control software running on the host PC (Mac at the moment) via a dedicated protocol over USB2. In the host system, the native protocol used between agents (our software components) is a network protocol called Eigentalk. This can run over Ethernet wires (with slightly increased latencies due to some smart jitter buffering we do). We will be making this public and freely available (when we open-source our main software) in Febuary next year. There is an open API, to be published at the same time, for our equivalent of AU’s or VST’s, hosted in our software, EigenD. This is rather richer than the AU and VST API’s, for reasons connected with the expressiveness and configure-ability (is that a word?) of our system. A couple of interesting AU vendors are looking at producing native EigenD instruments at the moment, and I think there will be many more in time. We try to avoid MIDI wherever possible as it has so many serious performance limitations.

Had you considered OSC?

We did have a look at OSC but there are a bunch of things that our protocol does that OSC didn’t (not least of which, for example, is clock syncronisation for jitter removal, utterly vital over ethernet for live performance) so we decided to grow our own and release it. Absolutely no reason whatsoever that we can’t interoperate fuly with it though, I suspect that an OSC EigenD Agent will probably come quite soon after the open source release.

Ed.: Actually, with OSC (OpenSoundControl) moving increasingly toward broader input and assimilating other standards, I can easily imagine that a future implementation of OSC could begin to implement these features. More on both protocols in the coming months. -PK

Is it possible to use this as a controller for MIDI hardware? MIDI software?

Yes, EigenD has in and out MIDI gateway programs. The incoming [MIDI] is mainly used for pedalboards at the moment (to control scale, key, tempo, etc.), although there is no reason you couldn’t use a midi keyboard to play notes. We’re using the MIDI out to do a wide variety of things, including playing MIDI sound modules, and controlling video DJ software and lighting systems. There is a huge reduction in effective bandwidth when ‘downsampling’ to MIDI, but for a lot of things it still works very well. And of course, the AU and VST standards (which we fully support) are a kind of MIDI interface.

Is it possible to access its native protocol for custom software / Max-Pd patches and the like?

Well, we’re open sourcing the whole thing early next year, and I think there’ll be a lot of work done to glue all sorts of external stuff in then. Max/MSP has attracted a lot of interest in this area. The whole of EigenD is kind of built for this really. We’re an Open Source company: my main personal desktop is Linux and I have a strong personal commitment to open standards. I offer a number of ‘programming bounties’ for Linux improvements on my personal website at http://johnhenrylambert.com.

Tell us more about open-sourcing the software. What tools did you use to build the software.

It’s written in a mixture of C++ and Python. It’s quite scary code, but very clean and pretty, with little ‘cruft’. I think the open source community are going to have fun with it. Its a big system too, 8 years of R&D in one huge release. I don’t think that there’s been anything quite like this open sourced before in the music world – it is a bit as if Logic or Ableton were GPL’d tomorrow.

Thanks, John! Stay tuned for more details, and let me know if you have specific questions for the creators.

It’s actually paradoxical to talk about music “made” on the monome. The monome, the open controller, is after all, a grid of buttons. It has no sound of its own. But as such, perhaps its design as a blank canvas – without any indication of how a single button may function, without a screenprinted logo or name – that allows computer musicians to project upon it whatever they wish. The monome, more than any other object designed since the emergence of computer performance, is emblematic of what digital music can be. It’s an empty digital grid, like viewing the world of music software under a microscope.

It’s also, therefore, possible for the monome to disappear, leaving behind a spectrum of what people are doing with music on computers. That was what was most striking to me about the music of the monomeet on Saturday in Princeton, NJ: it covered a range of techniques, from glitchy granulation to breakbeat rhythms derived from turntables. Listen to what

In the lineup: tehn (aka Brian Crabtree), the instrument’s creator, playing on the Max/MSP patch mlr that is partly responsible for the monome’s set, through Daedelus, Brian’s friend who helped raise awareness of the strange box of buttons around the world. There are also fantastic sounds from mtn (makingthenoise), picture in the photos here, Edison, ro, %, and altitude sickness.

Here’s what the live sets sounded like. Bet you you can’t hear the monome.

Latest tracks by monomeet

More photos from the event:

Part of the beauty of the iPhone from its launch date was the notion of a Mac you could fit in the palm of your hand. That makes it ironic that, for so many developers, mobile platforms in general have turned into a way to fragment software, to make it run fewer places instead of more. There’s something to be said for designing to a specific mobile device, but on the other hand, how many developers would want to restrict where their creations run? And particularly in music, isn’t the appeal of mobile creation the ability to have your tools work in more places? Maybe targeting just one gadget is the right choice for a given tool, but it shouldn’t be the only choice.

On the iPhone, the application Thump has plenty in common with a range of mobile music making tools. It’s simple but fun, a groove box with sequencing, subtractive synths, drums, and a set of basic effects, plus the ability to load your own samples and export songs.

Thump also demonstrates how simplifying sonic capabilities can produce musically-beautiful results, by focusing on the essentials and creating something with personality. Here’s a track by its creator showing off its sounds:
thump soundreel by mazbox

Well worth checking out the app on your platform of choice:
http://www.mrkbrz.com/thump/

What might not be immediately apparent is that under the hood, Thump makes use of the open source environment openFrameworks. As a result, the same code runs on iPhone, Mac, and Windows, as well as Linux. (It’s not distributed for Linux, but it could be. Hint, hint.) Creator Marek Bereza gives back, too – he ported the openFrameworks audio library to the iPhone, where it’s available to anyone.

Updated Marek notes in comments just what this means. The video below is, essentially, the same app. In place of the iPod screen, he has used a massive lattice of physical controls. A separate installation at the same show used a large touchscreen and simplified interface. And this really demonstrates what cross-platform means. Guy Kawasaki in the 80s mocked “ports” as a cheap wine. The idea is not to simply dump your code on a different platform and hope for the best – in fact, in this case, the changes from one platform to another were radical. The key is maximizing what’s essential, what really is not specific to a single device.

Physical Sequencer from Marek Bereza on Vimeo.

Creative Applications has a detailed write-up of the installation with more documentation.

If you’re interested in creating your own projects, oF has an elegant syntax based on Processing, but adapted to C/C++ coding paradigms and libraries.

I would recommend trying desktop development first as you’re learning, but when you do want to go mobile, setup is absurdly easy:

Setup instructions for iPhone

Having this as a foundation means more freedom for users and developers alike, the ability to run where you want, and a shared community of artists helping one another out. It does not mean sacrificing revenue, either – which is important, because revenue is often what enables (and encourages) developers to make new things. Here, we see a commercial mobile tool and distribution via the iTunes store, with free-as-in-beer distribution of desktop apps. But even the Free Software Foundation actually encourages charging for distribution – and to many people, the FSF is the most extreme example.

The bottom line is, you’re free to create what you want, where you want – and it doesn’t even have to have a price of free.

The use of openFrameworks is possible because the iPhone allows the execution of native code. Apple does not allow the Java virtual machine, which locks out many useful platforms and tools — including Processing. Naturally, that should not be the case with forthcoming non-Apple platforms based on Linux; more on that soon.

Thanks to Memo Akten for the tip — and for his exceptional documentation of iPhone openFrameworks development.

GPU-tiful and Cross-Platform

Updated Another framework I left out is the lovely libnui. The tagline says it all: “C++ API, multiplatform (Mac OS X, iPhone, Win32, Win64, Linux), 3D hardware accelerated GUI and more…”

On the iPhone, Intua’s elaborate Beatmaker software and David Wallin’s bleep!box have both been made with libnui. I want to single out bleep!box because of its UI – note how UI elements are simplified and scaled to the size of your fingertip. That’s something that, speaking of multiple platforms, could be equally important with touch hardware coming to Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms (some of it here already). I saw a huge fan of Windows tablets loving Propellerhead Reason on a tablet. He probably would be less enthused running Reason or Record on a touch interface; the UI elements are way too small.

bleep!box is also worth a look for the same reason as Thump: elegant UI, simple functions, and a lot of fun.

Pd, too

Pure Data, the open source patching cousin of Max/MSP, can also run on mobile devices. It’s currently powering the application RjDj, but because Pd is free, that could be just the beginning. In May, I wrote about the work being done by Hans-Christoph Steiner, who has been porting Pd even to ancient PDAs and iPods – including those, notably, without native floating-point capabilities (the kind of number crunching usually associated with sound).

Well, now Hans-Christoph is looking toward other, current-generation devices, too, kicking off with a workshop on making interactive sound on the iPhone using Pure Data. Here’s a taste:

OK, kids, you won’t believe how easy this is. Once you have Pure Data installed on your your iPhone or iPod-Touch, creating and uploading your own sound-processing and sound-generating patches is as trivial as copying a text file to your device! You’ll still need an Apple Developer License, but because Pd patches are treated as media files, they don’t have to go thru Apple’s elaborate code review — so, you can just dive right in, turning your phone into a pocket synth within minutes. In this 3-hour hands-on workshop, interactive sound whiz and Pure Data developer Hans-Christoph Steiner will lead you through all the steps.

Hans-Christoph will be talking Pd on the iPhone at a conference next month at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. That will also include Memo Akten and Zach Gage talking about openFrameworks. And for nearly-entirely open source hardware, there’s a tantalizing-looking workshop combining Android with Arduino, too.

http://artandcode.ning.com/

There’s quite a lot more to say about this, but I hope this whets your appetite.

And, of course, riding the train to Pittsburgh or your nearest university or open source workshop, now you’ll have Thump which which to make some thumping tracks on your iPhone.

Bliss – SevenUpLive 1.4 Preview from bar|none on Vimeo.

monome lovers have come from all over the planet to exchange tips and creative ideas and check out music here in Princeton, New Jersey at the Monomeet. I’m here shooting some video, so expect a feature and links to some of the projects in a few days. In the meantime, JP has set up a live stream, so you can listen in while you clean your studio or whatever you happen to be doing on this Saturday afternoon / evening. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more! (Incidentally, there’s quite a lot of discussion here that’s relevant whether or not you own the monome hardware, really getting to the heart of open source and DIY musical tools. I’ll certainly be sharing some of that soon.)

Updated: what a Saturday! The monomeet was incredibly packed with goodness, from crazy DIY projects to terrific music. And it’s also worth saying, the event wound up being about far more than just the monome; the object becomes a catalyst for all sorts of other discussions of open source and audiovisual technique. I have some video that looks good, lots of cameras were rolling, photographers snapping – expect good documentation over the coming days.

You can also follow the post-event discussion on the monome board.

If you have videos to post, there’s a special monomeet Vimeo group. To get things kicked off, check out the SevenUpLive preview, contributed virtually by bar|none who couldn’t make the event. (See the monome boards for a discussion and download of the software in the video.)
http://www.vimeo.com/groups/monomeetfall2009

If you have photos, of course I always watch the CDM Flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cdmu/pool/

For blog posts and so on – or if you couldn’t make it and have specific questions for the monome folks – you can holler on Twitter or via our contact form:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/contact/

I got to spend yesterday working with the Launchpad; see the video above which I think should help you get a sense of scale and what it looks like. (Also on YouTube) We have additional videos from other sources below.

It’s only been public for less than 24 hours, but as we did with the APC40, I think it’s time for a superguide answering questions about the Novation Launchpad controller.

The Launchpad and the way it works reveals a lot about how controllers work with Ableton Live. You may be surprised to learn a lot of this doesn’t require a special controller and doesn’t require Max for Live – it’s standard Ableton stuff that works with MIDI. (Remember MIDI?) And I think some of these answers could be worth a read if you have interest in hardware control hacking in general.

There have been a lot of questions from myself and readers, so I’ve done my best to get answers. Realize, a lot of this information is developing and is based on my limited understanding, so it’s all subject to change. I’ll update this guide over the next couple of days if I get any corrections.

Side note: What about interoperability? I intend to talk more about OSC and the Live API (and each separately) in coming weeks. I think it’s impossible to judge the full picture of how Live can interoperate with other tools, though, until there’s some more information, so stay tuned on that.

Basic Questions

Q. What do you get with Live 8 Launchpad Edition, the bundled software?

New to Ableton Live, and wondering if you can get anything done with the “lite” Launchpad Edition bundled with the hardware. The short answer is, yes you can. The included edition has restrictions, but it’s still a reasonably capable version if you’re new to Live and want to experiment.

Ableton Live 8 Launchpad Edition vs. Live 8

The Launchpad Edition even comes with 1 GB of Loopmasters loops to get you started.

Most importantly, ReWire support for Master and Slave (Host and Client) is included. That means if you have an existing host and just want to play with Live’s non-linear clip launching features, you can stick with that host, using Live alongside software like Reaper and Reason. You may want to consider upgrading, though, as some cool features like the use of Racks and the ability to slice instruments, plus the “Complex” warp mode, are missing.

Q. What the heck is going on in the crazy Novation video demo? How do I do that myself?

There isn’t any Max patch or other voodoo in the video demo from Novation. It’s all just a standard Ableton Live set, and the fact that the Launchpad responds to MIDI messages as well as sending them (something useful if you’re scripting the Launchpad in software other than Ableton, too).

Matt Derbyshire of Novation put together the video. Matt’s an interesting guy musically when not working for Novation, too – he’s part of a DJ Shadow cover band, for one. He shares with CDM how he went about this:

It’s actually a very simple session.

1) There are four clips only for drums in the drumrack channel

2) Each clip is pre-recorded but EMPTY at 1 bar length

3) These four clips are the first four clips in session mode but for convenience I also learned these to to User 1 mode bottom four left buttons.  Basically setting this up removes the need to rush back to session mode to drop out of record

4) Obviously quantize is on ‘cos my playing ain’t that great.

LED feedback

In User 1 mode the bottom left button turns on/off LED feedback.

The important thing I want from the video is to show that I personally do not think the lack of velocity sensitivity stops drums being played. In fact, to the contrary, I think in creative electronic music it helps to even out the playing.

The still-simpler explanation:

So long as you use the User Mode to play, enable LED feedback, and route MIDI from Live back to the Launchpad, you can get interactive light modes, as seen on the monome and Tenori-On.

Q. Okay, the Launchpad can assign control to continuous values. But it’s got buttons. How do you get eight buttons to replace a fader?

Actually, thanks to an Ableton feature that works with any MIDI controller (not just Novation or Akai), this is quite easy to do. You can assign any range on your controller by holding it down.

From Novation’s Matt Derbyshire:

Step 1: Choose the slider/knob you want (i.e. cross fader)

Step 2: Select USER 1 or 2 mode on launchpad

Step 3: Select MIDI learn mode in Ableton

Step 4: Select the thing you want to control (ie crossfader)

Step 5: Select the range of buttons on launchpad

Note that this also works for playing clips.

Now, obviously, if you control something like a volume fader with a set of buttons, you won’t get continuous values. And unfortunately neither Ableton nor Novation has designed any sort of interpolation between button values (though DIYers could find a way to do that). But I’m kind of finding the angular changes in buttons to be fun to play with. If I want a knob or fader, I’ll use a knob or fader.

Q. What can you do with these User Modes?

There are two User pages. User 1 sends basic note values – minus any velocity sensitivity, just on/off. User 2 sends control changes. User 1 by default will play any active MIDI inputs listening to channel 1. In Ableton Live, User 2 only sends control changes once you’ve mapped it using the MIDI Map, to avoid accidentally triggering notes when trying to control something else. (See also the special behavior with Max for Live below.) Of course, in software other than Live, you’ll set up whatever layout you want.

You can’t rearrange the organization of pitches on User 1 because there’s no real editor for the device; everything is hard-wired. On the other hand, you can always make this adjustment in software, as in a Rack in Live.

Advanced Live Use

Q. How will Max for Live integration work?

Max for Live will use the User 2 page. The good news here is, Max by default will listen only to User 2 while the other modes get routed to Live.

Q. Can you control Devices dynamically using the Launchpad?

No. Unfortunately, while there are pages for mixer settings and a generic way to transmit MIDI control changes, you can’t click a device and have a page on the Launchpad automatically make its eight columns control eight parameters / macros. That’s actually a feature enabled by the simple scripts available for the Korg nano series here on CDM (see my post explaining how this works, follow-up script from reader Raymond).

Of course, because this feature is supported by the Korg with our scripts and it’s very, very compact, the nanoKONTROL and Launchpad could make a great, cheap combo. And if you have Novation’s ReMOTE, Nocturn, and the like, you can alternatively use them – so, for instance, a keyboardist could stick the Launchpad atop a keyboard.

Q. Can you edit MIDI assignments? Is there a MIDI template editor, in other words?

No. All the MIDI assignments are hard-wired. The good news is, everything appears to send MIDI, though I still need to investigate how that works outside Live. The bad news is, as with the APC40, a lot of functionality is organized around Live.

That would be my one potential criticism, which is that we’re moving away from hardware that’s useful everywhere to hardware that’s useful only in one program. But I want more time to see how the Launchpad performs outside Live before I pass judgment on the Launchpad in particular, especially as I don’t even have the final software yet.

I still like editors, though, Novation, if you’re listening.

Q. What if you still have Live 7?

Update – official word: Ableton’s Baptiste Grange tells CDM:

On Nov 1 we’ll release two updates: Live 8.0.7 and Live 7.0.17. These will both support Launchpad.

So, Live 6 and earlier would need to upgrade, but not Live 7.

Hacking

Q. Will we get the full MIDI implementation and protocol for creating custom patches or custom setups with our own software? Will that be true outside of Live, too?

Novation confirms that they plan to release the full MIDI implementation and communication protocol for the Launchpad at launch. That’s something that was missing on the APC40, leaving us all to figure it out ourselves, so I’m looking forward to seeing that documentation. Part of the reason to use MIDI is to have a spec that everyone can read so power users can do what they want.

Q. Can you control the lights using MIDI?

Yep. This should be in the full documentation, too, but here’s a sneak peak. Bjorn from the awesome Covert Operators sent me the velocity assignments, which I’ll be using to hack my Launchpad setup:

Velocity 0 = Off
Velocity 1 = light red
Velocity 2 = medium red
Velocity 3 = full red
Velocity 16 = light green
Velocity 32 = medium green
Velocity 48 = full green
Velocity 17 = light amber
Velocity 34 = medium amber
Velocity 55 = full amber
Velocity 18 = light orange (Lighter > red / darker > amber)
Velocity 35 = medium orange (Lighter > red / darker > amber)
Velocity 31 = full orange (Lighter > red / darker > amber)

The Competition, and the monome

Q. How does this compare to the Akai APC40 / controller XX / the monome as far as Live integration?

The most important point here is that you can easily mix and match. You can even have multiple control surfaces active, operating dynamically, at the same time, as well as multiple MIDI inputs for instruments. Also, most of the features of the Launchpad are available to all controllers. Novation is emphasizing the mix-and-match functionality of the Launchpad. Basically, the feeling is, there is no one control scheme that works for everyone.

The Launchpad is quite similar to the APC40. The clip functions are nearly identical, if in a slightly different (8×8) layout – you get the red onscreen rectangle, the red/green/amber LED indicators, scene launching, the ability to page through clips, and so on.

Basically, the major difference with the APC40 is trading functionality for size and price. The APC40 has the ability to map to Devices automatically, as does Novation’s own ReMOTE series; the Launchpad does not. The APC40 also has encoders, faders, a crossfader, and a number of shortcuts. On the other hand, you can get a lot of the APC40’s functionality in other hardware, meaning the Launchpad can combine nicely with other gear you already have.

One significant edge the Launchpad has over the APC40, though, is that the Launchpad is set up to play drum racks.

The monome is also capable of nearly everything you see the Launchpad doing, with the exception of the clip selection rectangle (though I find that a bit hard to see, personally). In fact, the pages on the Launchpad are clearly inspired (directly or indirectly) by Pages, a GPL-licensed, fully-free, Java-based tool for monome which even appeared in action on David Letterman with Imogen Heap.

You certainly have other options that provide dynamic, automatic control mappings, including the M-Audio Axiom Pro series, the Korg kontrol and nano series, Novation’s ReMOTE line, the Faderfox series, and various others. You can see the built-in scripts available on the Control Surface menu, and anything that supports MIDI can be adapted for additional functionality.

I expect that with the release of Max for Live, scripting custom control for other controllers should be more powerful, even if you don’t have Max for Live installed. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as I’ll be trying to get more complete information on this.

The Live API improvements should be especially benefit the monome project. And remember, the monome isn’t standing still. Because it’s open, it’s conceivable clever users could hack new features.

Q. Can I run monome software on it? OSC?

Yes and – no.

The Launchpad uses MIDI, not OpenSoundControl (OSC). That means you have to translate incoming, sometimes arbitrary MIDI numbers to useful information, and that the Launchpad can’t natively interpret messages in the way the OSC-native monome can. However, as noted in our APC40 hacking superguide, it is possible to use an emulator to translate between MIDI and OSC. That should also be possible with the Launchpad. One challenge is the extra buttons around the grid. I’m going to have to write some Java MIDI code that can map to an arbitrary array of buttons, huh?

Q. Does the Launchpad violate monome’s license and design? How is the monome licensed? How “open” is the Launchpad?

I don’t want to – and cannot – speak for the monome project. However, while the Launchpad is unmistakably similar to the 8×8 grid of pads on the monome, it is not a “clone.” It’s only superficially similar to the monome. Cloning isn’t necessarily healthy for design, but a certain amount of copying can be. Without the spread of keyboard layouts, for instance, we wouldn’t have any of the keyboard instruments we have today – and, indeed, before the standardization on the fortepiano, a lot of keyboard instruments were strange copies of one another. In modern design, the monome is itself indebted to the pad layouts on early drum samplers.

I mention the word “clone” because the Arduinome is an clone of the monome which is distributed non-commercially as a result. It actually duplicates major portions of the design, PCB, and protocol, which is not remotely true of the Launchpad. Because their intention was cloning (for the purpose of ready availability of parts), the creators of the Arduinome consulted with the monome project.

For the record, the monome’s software is released under an open source license, and it uses fully-documented, open protocols, including OSC. The hardware is not technically open source, but it is open to the extent that specifications for the hardware, PCB, and firmware are provided for customization and modification, and the construction of custom housing. You are restricted from using the hardware design to make your own commercial hardware, which means the monome doesn’t fit some more restrictive definitions of what qualifies as open hardware. But it does offer some components that are truly open source, and it affords a great degree of real-world openness for its users.

None of the “openess” of the monome is true of the Launchpad, which operates under more traditional and proprietary models. You can’t easily physically open the Launchpad case (and I expect you’d void your warranty if you did). It uses MIDI, an open protocol, but has a proprietary mechanism for interacting with Ableton Live (at least so far as I can tell). It uses USB, but does not support class-compliant operation – you must install your own drivers, which means you can’t use it with some devices (like Linux netbooks). And the process and operation of the Launchpad are not available or documented. That’s not to discourage the Launchpad, and you still have plenty of power via its MIDI implementation to keep you busy. But that does differentiate it from open hardware like the monome and the newer Livid Ohm64, and it’s worth considering how this difference impacts the ways you want to use the hardware. That issue is much bigger than any one piece of gear, and it’s one I hope we can cover in more depth.

More Videos

MusicRadar did their own hands-on:

Actually, judging by the LEDs, I think they were also working from a prototype and not the final production run. But you will also notice they have an L-shaped USB cord, which I believe is what the final unit will have. (And, heck, that’d be a useful thing to have around here, I may have to pick up some.)

Novation TV also has their own set of videos:

http://www.youtube.com/user/NovationTV

And DJ Tech Tools got a hands-on, too.

Marrying open source and commercial development, or trying to bridge analog consoles and computers – either task on its own might seem improbable. But yesterday, a newly-announced tool promised to bring together all those dimensions.

Ardour is the free and open source Digital Audio Workstation software for Linux and Mac. It’s widely underrated and has some terrific architecture underneath, with tools that are maturing at a healthy pace. Harrison is not an open-source developer – they’re a commercial manufacturer of analog and digital consoles and do proprietary DSP development. Conventional wisdom says the two shouldn’t be able to work together, but they did. The result is something called Mixbus. It’s got Harrison’s technology for mixing, atop Ardour (on Mac OS X, for now) for recording, editing, and arranging.

The Harrison half of the solution uses Harrison’s own DSP algorithms for sound, which they claim match the EQ, filtering, compression, tape saturation, and summing on their large-format mixers. But aside from sound, this is also about design: the layout only ever has one knob per function and metering is done in a conventional way. The result is not just a set of plug-ins, but a real virtual console inside your Mac. Interestingly, too, while you can use your Mac Audio Unit plug-ins with the solution, Harrison chose the open LADSPA format to implement their channel strip.

I imagined that the pricing would be something like a thousand dollars, given the pro target market, but the whole thing costs just US$79.99 as its introductory price. If it sounds anywhere near as good as the makers promise, it’s probably the best deal in mixing and channel processing anywhere. Here’s the product page:

Mixbus [Harrison Consoles]

Of course, the advantages of free software are more than price; it’s the ability to keep the source available, to be able to customize it, and to be able to run it on a variety of hardware and software platforms. So how does free software coexist here, with Ardour under a GPL license? Creator Paul Davis says that the free code for Ardour remains available in Ardour’s Subversion repository; only the Mixbus components remain closed. As for Linux support and not just Mac OS, which would in turn support more hardware, Paul says they’re looking into the feasibility of binary Linux distributions of Ardour and Mixbus.

For any commercial developers who think that you can’t work with open source projects – or, for that matter, if anyone thinks open source projects can’t benefit from collaboration with commercial developers – I think you’re wrong. And licenses aside, this looks like a nice solution for music making.

It’s simply stunning some of the terrific instrument and effect plug-ins available that are now free and open source – yes, free as in freedom, not just freeware. I had commented in the past something along the lines of, “boy, wouldn’t it be great if this now meant, say, a Linux port?” and then went on the business of my daily life, which tends not to include re-compiling plug-ins. But now, the folks of JUCETICE have been busy doing just that, serving up delicious instrument and effect goodness, running native on Linux.

Translation: fire up that netbook and make some music.

Following up on our tutorial on Ardour and netbook-optimized music competition with Renoise and Indamixx, here’s what you need to get rolling.

With Linux growing in popularity on netbooks – and an option like the pre-configured Indamixx solution saving you the work of optimizing and configuring it – it’s suddenly no longer a stretch to imagine yourself a Linux music user. Of course, what you don’t want is to wind up without the arsenal of plug-ins to which we’ve all become accustomed. There are various ways of hosting Windows VSTs under Linux as though they were native plug-ins; check out dssi-vst (which also enables 32-bit VSTs from Windows under 64-bit Linux hosts), in conjunction with WINE. That should probably be the subject of a separate tutorial. (Ardour 3 also promises Windows VST support.)

But here, let’s have a look at native Linux plug-ins. JUCETICE has some beautiful creations of their own – an elegant, 32-voice polyphonic drum synthesizer and a TB-303 clone – plus some familiar favorites ported from Windows, like the ingenious DiscoDSP sampler created by the late, great Arguru.

Here, we’ll use the native Linux version of a commercial host, energyXT. energyXT is proprietary, but it costs just EUR59, has a free demo to check out before you purchase, and – if you do like it – is really different than any of its competitors.

Patrick Shirkey of 64studio, the music-centric Linux distro, walks us through the steps necessary to get the JUCETICE plug-ins going under energyXT on Linux – all native, no WINE or Windows anywhere.

I’ll be doing this myself on my Indamixx test unit, and will let you know how that goes.

Developer note: yes, you should definitely check out the JUCE framework, which makes developing cross-platform C++ easy, efficient, and modern, and is free for open-source projects.

Patrick explains:

1. Download the jucetice linuxvst plugin : http://www.anticore.org/jucetice/?page_id=7

2. Make a folder called “plugins” in the home directory

3. Save or move the plugins to that folder and extract the plugins.

4. Open energyXT and add the “plugins” folder to the “Plugins” folder list. Choose File > Setup:

Select the “Browser” tab and set it to the “Plugins” section.

Now select the “plugins” folder and add it to the list of known folders.

[Here’s what it looks like in the path structure.]

5. To add the plugin to a project double click on the “Plugins” section on the left panel of the main window to show all the plugins and right click on the plugin you want to use. Click “Add as Send” from the popup menu.

6. Finally, open the “Window” menu and choose the plugin from the list to display the user interface and adjust the settings.

Ed.: Definitely let us know if this is helpful to you; we’ll have some more comprehensive, big-picture tutorials on this stuff soon – but in the meantime, I’m definitely checking out these instruments!

Take a weekend, and make something: that’s the challenge behind the Music Hack Day, which joins a growing phenomenon of events built around collective creation. (CDM held its own tangible interface hackday online, which I definitely hope to follow up soon!) Initiated by Dave Haynes of music sharing service Soundcloud, the Hack Day has already hit London. Many of the events were Web app-based and focused on consumption rather than creation of music, but we also saw a chordal synth plug-in and beer bottle percussion instrument.

The Berlin Hack Day, which wound up earlier today, offers still more projects focused on the creation side of music hacking. Having Ableton and Native Instruments as sponsors likely helped the mood. And as you’d expect from one of the world capitals of creative hacking, Berliners don’t disappoint.

Among the projects: a beautiful, elegant 3D sequencer, a fun bird-and-sky multitouch soundmaker with multitouch trackpad input, and a robotic xylophone controlled by monome. Someone even worked out a way to turn NI’s Maschine into a rhythm game, complete with Street Fighter sounds.

I’ve got some of my favorite projects here, but see also an eyewitness report (in English and Italian) at Audio News Room:
Just back from Music Hack Day Berlin
… and keep your eye on the wiki:
Berlin Hack Submissions

xylobot run by monome from robb on Vimeo.

Monomist Rob Böhnke and Ramsey Arnaoot created one of my favorite hackday projects so far: a monome-controlled robotic xylophone. The ingredients: one monome grid controller, one Java application for step sequencing to the output, one Arduino open source controller board, and one terrific xylophone “robot” made of an array of servos that strike the bars of the instrument. Oh, and some hot glue and wood, of course.

Project details

Debugging

Audio loop

Of course, what’s especially impressive is nailing this in just a weekend – imagine what they could do with more time and iterations.

Proof that musical visualizers don’t always have to be trippy, futuristic, Tron-like 3D landscapes (and that’s me speaking as a fan of such things), Gernot Poetsch instead chose a whimsical environment with clouds and cartoon birds, inspired by the graphic identity of Twitter. (No actual Twitter is involved, meaning you lose the, ahem, unreliable, buggy, unfiltered chat network but keep the cutesy happy sky! Works for me!)

The visuals are built in Quartz Composer, which via OSC transmits messages to synthesis language ChucK for noisemaking. The surprise is, the multitouch input is not a Lemur or an iPhone – it’s the new MacBook touchpad under Snow Leopard!

iLoveAcid is a beautiful-looking nodal sequencer by Jakob Penca which uses wireframe “tracks” to guide music playback through a sequencer, transmitting events to your soundmaker of choice via MIDI or OSC. By using curved timelines and connections, it’s a veritable model railroad of music, in which formations combine to form more complex structures instead of simply stepping across a grid. Despite appearances, it is so far only two-dimensional – but then, the z displacement could easily be assigned to some form of modulation. I’m really eager to see the video of this.

One ingredient: Processing, which makes it easier to write visual code and to connect to Java libraries.

Project Page

The hardware controller for Native Instruments’ Maschine software drum machine has been adapted to other software, like Ableton Live. But this is surely the first time it’s been made into a game. Using Maschine’s MIDI output as a game control and sounds from Street Fighter, MaschineFighter is a simple, Simon-style rhythm game. Unlike Simon, though, there’s a twist – instead of rote patterns generated in advance, you face off against a friend and try to out-rhythm each other, battle style. I think it’s actually a pretty brilliant idea, and could become a new sensation for us electronic music nerds – not to mention, it’ll finally test our rhythm in a way electronic performance often does not. (Correction: It is Mac-only, making use of the PYMIDI Objective-C based library, which, since everything else that starts with “Py” usually means Python – a la jThings that mean Java – I assumed, incorrectly, was built on Python. But anyway, if you like the idea, carry on! And, actually, having a pure Objective-C CoreMIDI interface is also pretty awesome.)

Hoping for a video of this, too.

If you have a project that didn’t make this list, or if you add documentation after the fact, let us know.