The player piano has come, oddly, full circle.

Peer into the editing pane of a music sequencer, and what you see is an abstracted virtual player piano. The editing views are even dubbed “Piano Roll” views (sometimes officially so). The MIDI protocol by which most music devices and apps communicate is itself a kind of port of the piano roll’s paradigm to a digital implementation, with fixed pitch and durations spanning time in an endless loop.

So it’s fitting that Dan Deacon is busy in the studio, feeding a player piano with MIDI and computers in order to make it play layers of unplayable music. The technical work is significant, to be sure, but on another level it’s natural that the computer would speak to the player piano in such terms. These are distant technologies bridged by a common understanding of how to simplify and reproduce music. The process speaks to some of the limitations in the way in which computers typically relate to musical instruments. We may be at the end of the road for this century-old way of thinking about mechanized music. But, extended to the near-breaking point, the maximalist texture that results is all the more beautiful.

Thanks to Jason Bergman for the tip.

Pitchfork TV: Dan Deacon in the Studio [Player Piano]

Make:Television has done a really lovely piece on CCRMA, the research center at Stanford University that works on problems ranging from acoustics and sound to musical instrument design. CCRMA is really just one microcosm of the whole music tech making scene around the world – a lot of increasingly beyond the walls of academia. But what a microcosm it is: I don’t think it’s understatement to say this is just the kind of institution a lot of us dream of. Among the highlights from the MAKE video that I could pick up:

• Ge Wang, professor and creator of ChucK programming language and certain popular ocarina-themed iPhone apps, and Stanford Laptop Orchestra director
• Carr Wilkerson: Electronic “Rub Board”(?) with a nice accompanying Pd synth patch
• A very nice Max/MSP app that everyone seems to be using for signal analysis
• Edgar Berdahl: a one-handed drum that “hits back”
• Nicholas Bryan building the legendary hemispheric speaker (incidentally, no one seems to be able to tell me who invented that)
• A giant interactive musical playground, with a Wii-powered teeter-totter (with one somewhat silly patch, and then another very lovely bowed-sounding patch)

Thanks to patospurlock on Twitter for the tip. I know at least some of you CCRMA students read this site, so feel free to chime in and identify your colleagues.

The featured Feedback Piano project is a hybrid with a bit of acoustical design (a piano), electronics/recording (mics), and digital/computer design (the Max patch that completes the circle). The results are really striking, and while it’s a lot less portable than a convolution reverb, it’s certainly very different having an actual piano into which you can play your saxophone.

Make followed up with directions on the Feedback Piano (please use a truly broken piano, thanks!) and we’ve got some video, as well:

HOW TO – build a feedback piano [MAKE Magazine]

feedback piano #1 from Alloy Electric on Vimeo.

Alloy Electric has more Vimeo videos of the feedback piano and other projects. (Nice footage, as well! Actually, I think, a bit artier than what Make:TV shot!)

More on Chris Warren’sblog and project website.

By the way, does anyone know why educational programs about Science always have to have some geeky-sounding guy shouting at you? (See the condensed history of all music tech at the end.)

In case you haven’t seen it, Nine Inch Nails has taken to the multi-touch Lemur control surface and More Buttons Than Thou top-end Monome. There’s a short video of an experiment combining the two with a real (MIDI-enabled) Yamaha piano. It’s just under a minute, but already evocative — I’m not entirely sure why Alessandro is manning the touchpad on his laptop given all this hardware around, but the cascading patterns on the Monome suggest both LED art and a digital take on a player piano.

More videos on the official NIN YouTube page, which has recently launched a visuals contest for interpreting music from the new album.

But lest you think you need all that pricey hardware to make use of an unusual tool, look no further than MilkyTracker. Platform wars end here: MT runs on Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista), Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel), Linux (x86, 64-bit x86, PowerPC), Linux game/mobile platforms (GP2X, ARM), UNIX (FreeBSD x86), and Windows CE. Wowsa. And it’s all yours for a donation, if you can spare one. Heck, there are even video tutorials on the site.

But geekdom aside, I love that MilkyTracker ninjas can make so much music out of so little. Without taking on the aesthetic style here, if that’s not your thing, it’s a reminder that economical choices with your tech can produce all kinds of different sounds. So, maybe rather than loading that preset, try to construct a drum kit out of basic waveforms.

Enjoy!

Video by extrabajs; for some reflections on MilkyTracking, see our friend thumbuki — who, speaking of doing more with less, is working with an OLPC. Economical hardware use is back in an age of power efficiency and computing beyond the deep-pocketed “first world” — and everything old is new again:

Milky Tracker @ thumbuki

What? MilkyTracker is fanning the flames of a platform war with the Atari ST? No worries: MaxYmizer is a newly updated (yep, you read that right) tracker tool for the Atari platform. Polyphonic MIDI input and MIDI clock output means it should easily integrate with your existing studio. See the Digital Tools blog for full details.

Imagine every single piece of gear you have on your wish list. Then imagine a baby grand piano, lacquered in white. Then imagine — you know, for the sake of practicality — you want to use the piano as a projection surface. And sound system. And then imagine you just mash all those ideas into one gear-packed baby grand piano, and you’ve got the beautifully freakish BabyGrandMaster:

Baby Grand Master

It’s not just a gimmicky DJ piano. It’s a “video instrument”, blending visuals and audio. The last time we saw something somewhat like this was the keyboard with PC Miko, though since that’s just a Windows PC packed in a keyboard, only the marketing concept in principle made it a “VJ/DJ” product versus, well, a PC in a keyboard. And, of course, the Baby Grand Master starts to make the Miko look oddly affordable and practical.

This isn’t just some random tinkerer, either. It’s the creation of a veteran of the Emergency Broadcast Network group, as seen on Create Digital Motion today, meaning if you want to add missiles, it’s probably possible.

The specs:

Video:

1. Dual Pioneer DVJ-X1 DVD Players
2. Edirol V-4 Video Mixer
3. 3 Marshal LCD Monitors
4. Slot loading assembly
5. Ultra reflective white projection surface

Audio:

1. Allen and Heath Xone 92 Audio Mixer
2. Dual 15″ Subwoofers
3. 18″ Subwoofer
4. 12″ Subwoofer
5. 3 Bullet Tweeters
6. AB 1100 Watt Power Amplifier

Drivetrain:

1. Moog Slip Ring Assembly
2. 8 Foot Rotating Turntable
3. Wall Mount Variable Speed Control

Still not impressed? Options include hydraulic legs and lid, neon underlighting and running lights, fog and laser assembly, and an even more enormous “concert grand” stretch version. If this weren’t April 23, I’d be looking for the April Fools’ disclaimer, it’s so extreme.

All that’s missing: an actual piano. (What, no mapping the hammer action to visual clips?)

Josh Randall of Harmonix/Guitar Hero fame tipped us off. He writes: “From Gardner Post, ex-EBN member. He was the guy behind all of EBNs amazing gear…like the rocket launching golf bags and mobile video attack systems…(huge truck with lots of tvs on it) He’s been telling me about the baby grand project for a while…and he finally posted this site.”

EBN is Emergency Broadcast Network, a terrific multimedia group. Even if this particular creation isn’t your thing, you should check out their work — I think it’ll be right up the alley of the typical CDM reader.

I’ll try to go visit the actual instrument when I’m up Gardner’s way; more soon.

On the visual side: Create Digital Motion, why I think projecting on pianos is fun, and why we should do this the cheap way.

One last minute addition to CDM’s wildly unrealistic and holiday gift guide that’s late enough to qualify as the post-holiday guide (that’s its unofficial name):

Legendary Artist Peter Max Paints Baldwin Piano for Gibson Foundation

Granted, not a digital instrument, but I still love acoustic pianos. Add a Moog PianoBar or a full-featured MIDI retrofit, and this is basically my dream instrument (and I’ve always been partial to Baldwins). And Peter Max remains a terrific visual visionary.

You can help realize someone’s holiday wishes by giving to a charitable organization like the Gibson Foundation. They do some really good work, including helping musicians recover from Hurricane Katrina. What worthier cause than helping give music to the world?

Logic for Quads. Today’s treat from Software Update: Logic Pro 7.2.2 is a must-download if you’re lucky enough to have a new Mac Pro desktop. The update is optimized to take advantage of the Mac Pro’s quad-core architecture. Exactly what does that mean? I can’t say, because I’m perfectly happy blazing away on a dual-2.7GHz G5 (and had equally good experience when I had a MacBook Pro in for testing). But as we’ve observed before on CDM, multi-core optimization is the trend to watch.

10-foot Grands on 13-inch MacBooks. In other Mactel news, there’s a steady flow of Intel-native plug-ins — happily, too many to cover them all here on CDM. Synthogy has released their Universal Binary AU of their fantastic Ivory pianos plug-in; you can find it on their downloads page. Note that there isn’t an Intel-native VST. As with many of the Intel-native updates, this update to 1.5 is recommended for PowerPC users, too. The other good news is that Synthogy is working on an expansion back with a 10′ Italian instrument, recorded just upriver from here at SUNY Purchase (which happens to in fact be a great hall).

The gaping hole in Intel-native Mac plug-in land remains Native Instruments, but the timetable for release should remain this fall, with significant upgrades to boot. That’s when you should start to hear more people say, “wanna buy a G4 laptop?”

I got a chance to work with the inexpensive (US$99) but high-quality library of acoustic drum kits for Reason, Reason Drum Kits, in a brief review for Keyboard Magazine. You can read the full review online. What most impressed me was how cleverly the samples were integrated with Reason:

Via what Propellerhead calls â€Å“hyper-sampling,â€Â? you can assemble endless realistic combinations of sounds. Everything’s here: multiple dynamic levels, mics, playing techniques, and other variations of each sample. Thanks to Reason’s ReFill format and features like the Combinator, the variety is inspiring, not overwhelming. Multi-output drum kits automatically connect to Reason’s mixer so you can adjust the mix of different mics.

As I noted, these kits won’t be for everyone, but if you’re a Reason fan and want acoustic kits, they’re a sure bet. Now, Propellerheads is applying the same technique to acoustic pianos, announced earlier today:

Reason Pianos

I like the lightweight approach: the idea is to give you lushly-recorded sounds without bringing your hard drive and CPU to their knees. The Props are emphasizing rock and pop production, so classical pianists might want to look elsewhere (like Native Instruments’ superb Akoustik Piano, or the upcoming Steinway sample library from Garritan). But whatever they say about pop, these instruments could mix nicely with any music production, thanks to the emphasis on mixing as in the drum sets:

1. The pianos: Steinway D grand piano, a Yamaha C7 grand piano, Steinway K upright piano (it’s especially nice to get the Yamaha and Steinway upright)
2. The mix: Four stereo pairs, two mono ins, all mixed from the Combinator
3. Mics and environment: Think hardwood recording studio rooms with both vintage and modern mics. No concert hall here, though if you’ve got a reverb of choice you can add that when you need it (or use one of Reason’s reverbs).

I’ll reserve judgment until I can test these; stay tuned. But do I want more sampled pianos? Yes! Yes, I do! I’m personally interested because, in their reverb-added and reverb-free versions, they look like they could be perfect resource-light instruments for live performance. I’ll know once I’ve played them.

More Reason ReFill goodness, in case you missed them:

Drums in Glorious Mono: Free Reason ReFill for Reason Drum Kit Owners
Free IK/Sonic Reality Sounds for Reason: TasteFill

Got more ReFills of choice, Reasoners? Let us know.

Tuning pianos involves some heavy science and art. In other words, Reyburn Pocket RCT has absolutely no relation to that simple guitar tuner you’ve got in your gig bag. It’s a US$900 powerhouse of visual tuning:

Reyburn Cyber Tuner / Pocket RCT, for PocketPC (Windows Mobile)

This is probably old news if you’re a piano tuner (either this or the Mac/Windows laptop version), but I saw it this weekend while I was staying at my parents’ house and a tuner came over to adjust our Baldwin grand. The tuner was more than happy to show it to me. You can’t tell in this screenshot, but the UI pulses like some sort of alien eye as you near the pitch. The software was able to guess that the piano was a grand of more than six feet just by listening to the harmonic content of the sound (already impressed); it can compensate tuning for the size of the piano. The system uses aural tuning, meaning it looks not only at the fundamental but directly samples and matches partials, which is the way tuners are trained to work.

The tuner was especially pleased by two features: first, that you can keep records of tunings of different pianos, giving the tuner virtual “medical records” of the way a piano has held its tuning over time. (That helps diagnose how the piano itself behaves, and how it responds to the environment.) She was also happy that she could perform extremely accurate overtuning that would anticipate how the tuning would settle over time; because of the enormous sensitivity of pianos, they don’t hold their initial tuning exactly.

I know a couple of musicologist friends who would love playing around with this, particularly the 57 historical tunings from Owen Jorgensen. Now you can finally play the Well-Tempered Clavier on a piano that’s actually well-tempered. For those learning to tune professionally, the software even includes exams, but it sounded as though pros could comfortably use the technology to augment rather than replace their existing craft and experience.

We have at least a couple of pro tuners reading CDM, so I’d love to hear what you think of this. Maybe some of you think this new-fangled tech is useless; I don’t know.

Updated: Via comments, Veritune is a formidable competitor to this product. The concept is the same, but Veritune has a real-time spectral display, multiple simultaneous partials, far more notes measured (76 vs. 6), note switching for all notes, no required measurement step, and other features. It’s also available in an integrated, rugged hardware unit as well as for your existing PocketPC, and Veritune claims it’s easier to use. Anyone who’s used one or the other, let us know what you think. Thanks to Carl Lumma, formerly of Keyboard Magazine.

There’s just not enough time (or money) for all the great plug-ins around. But one of my favorite instrumental plug-ins, one I can’t imagine living without, is the superb Lounge Lizard electric piano from Applied Acoustics. It’s physically modeled, not sampled, and as a result feels more organic than some of its competitors. EP-3 offered some welcome improvements, including a more fleshed-out effects section, more pickups and models, built-in audio recording, and micro-tuning; some users thought it wasn’t a significant upgrade when they first saw it, but upon closer inspection I think you’ll find it a must-upgrade.

I expect a lot of home musicians haven’t gotten to use Lounge Lizard, though, because it costs money — US$225 street for the full-blown program with gobs of presets and customization. That shouldn’t stop you if you play electric pianos all the time, but if you’re on a budget, you’ll appreciate the new US$99 Lounge Lizard Session. The reality is, this is all most users will need: the top four models are there, plus tremolo, drive, multi-effects, and reverb. If you change your mind later, you can upgrade to the full version. Native Instruments and Apple both have terrific electric pianos, and I use both, but Lounge Lizard remains my first stop. I hope Applied Acoustics applies the same model (erm, so to speak) to Ultra Analog and String Studio, because I’m sure that’d widen the audience for those, as well.

So concludes my rave; now go check it out for yourself:

Lounge Lizard Session

You’d have to be a true Luddite to argue that word processors are bad for writing. Blogs, perhaps, sometimes inspire poor writing (ahem), but it’s more difficult to blame technology. The original argument that word processors would end the process of drafting and revision is absurd to anyone who’s spent long hours slaving over text in Microsoft Word. Our attitudes have changed as we’ve grown accustomed to the technology.

When it comes to music notation, though, there’s still an uncomfortable relationship between composers and computer scoring. That’s understandable: producing a score is a lot more involved than typing words, and even with modern software filled with keyboard shortcuts, scoring music is slow in any medium. But, even as some traditionalist composition teachers preach against the “evils” of computer notation (you know who you are), I think computers are becoming part of an elaborate digital creation process, even for composers working on entirely acoustic scores. Leaving out the tried-and-true methods of drinking tea/coffee, stopping for sandwich breaks, and outright procrastination, here are the tools I consider essential to my studio:

1. Native Instruments Akoustik Piano: I miss the days of huddling over my college’s Steinway Ds, especially when I caught them just after tuning. Akoustik Piano has become an addiction: in the confines of a Manhattan apartment, you can transform a lowly weighted keyboard into a piano, then place it in a virtual rehearsal studio or hall, tweaking the sound exactly to your liking. (You can even put the lid up or down.) It’s impossible not to relax and start to let ideas flow with a software instrument that sounds this good. The resonance of the instrument and the convolution reverb make the sounds come alive. And yes, you can even switch to quarter-tone mode if you decide to go microtonal. I’ve wedged my PC laptop with a copy of Akoustik Piano next to my Alesis QS8 specifically for the purpose of writing. Akoustik Piano is also gifted with a built-in recorder so you can save improvised ideas.
2. Sibelius 4: Sibelius is the one notation program that is able to seamlessly hide its capabilities so you can focus on the score. Visually, you can tuck menus and toolbars away, hiding everything on Windows’ full-screen mode and most on-screen elements on the Mac. That leaves just your notation on screen, and the on-screen view in Sibelius easily beats any competing program. Sibelius’ keyboard shortcuts are also well-implemented and easy to learn (Finale adopted much of the same layout in recent version), so you can touch-type your music. Finale is capable, yes, but Sibelius is consistently elegant where Finale is not, and I’ve even found ways of producing unusual notation by pushing the envelope of Sibelius’ engraving rules and staff and notehead types. (I know a lot of you are die-hard Finale users, but I have to admit it’s Sibelius that gets booted off my hard drive more than Finale.)
3. GarageBand: On the Mac, I enjoy GarageBand’s integrated notation features (as of version 3) as a quick sketchpad for ideas played on the piano. I’m looking for something that feels as immediate on PC, but I haven’t found it. Transcribing MIDI is easier than working with a tape recorder, even with the metronome switched off. That said, I talk to many people who keep a . . .
4. Cell Phone Audio Recorder: It’s the modern equivalent of a dictaphone. I go as fancy as using my Windows Mobile-powered smartphone to transfer WAVs of ideas to my computer. Lacking that, though, there’s always voicemail; I just interviewed a band (People in Planes) whose drummer records riffs on the road by leaving himself messages. And tape recorders still work nicely.
5. Paper: If you want to waste time, get in a discussion about whether composing onto paper or into a computer is better. It’s silly, because there’s a simple solution: keep a computer by your paper, and keep paper by your computer. When you start to suck time arranging notes on paper, you can switch to the computer. When the computer starts to make your head hurt (or crashes, or your eyes start blurring), you’ve got the paper. And really, will we ever want to give up entirely on our chicken scratch? Aside from the ability to print out blank manuscript paper from notation software (which finally lets you create staves that are exactly the size you want and spaced out so you can scrawl extra ideas between), there’s always the new Moleskine music notebook.

Much of this holds true whether you’re a Juilliard-trained orchestral composer or just a songwriter. But tell us: what’s in your studio? Hit comments to let us know, and remember we have a new online forum for discussing composing and music making.