This site has always been about making music with computers and digital technology. Today, we increasingly have access to powerful computers in mobile form factors. But, despite the simple fact that all of these are ultimately computers, I’ve quickly learned that mobile music production is a divisive issue. Some of you are as passionate about hating mobile tech as others of you are about loving it, perhaps propelled by a strong uptick of iPhone hype and accompanying resentment. Don’t worry — I won’t be swayed too much by either group; I’m committed to computers in all forms, tiny and large, and accompanying digital synths. And analog synths. And, really, anything that makes sound.

That said, the survey results we did on mobile tech are very interesting. Story topics for CDM aren’t a popularity contest, but your responses do reveal a lot. (The best reading turns out to be the write-in portion.)

First up, here’s a look at what mobile platforms people own. I expect the survey is somewhat self-selecting (some of you in the “none of the above” category likely didn’t respond), but note how the game platforms dominate.

That’s platforms you already own. But which are you interested in reading about? The margin on each device increases significantly. (Sony’s PSP doubles; Linux triples.) So that demonstrates that people are interested in learning about the larger landscape, and may be basing future purchase decisions on what’s available for music creation. (It also appeared that stronger support for PSP and Linux came from Europe than North America, possibly in part due to painfully-inflated costs for iPod touch and iPhone in that market.)

Zany Write-In Response

Okay, enough demographics. The best part of doing the poll was getting your write-in responses.
Google’s Android platform unsurprisingly got a number of write-in votes; GP2X got fewer, but I expect people just (rightfully) answered “Linux.” We did get some interesting responses, though:

Mobile device suggestions:

• Boss Micro BR
• Buddha Machine
• Graphing calculators (careful; with the readers here, you might get your wish
• Korg Kaossilator
• MPC 500
• Psion organizers
• “steam powered”
• Yamaha QY100
• Speak and Spell
• PlayStation 1 (that’s mobile?)
• Nokia N-gage (but now I know you’re joking)

And then there was the hater/lover argument:
“PLEASE GIVE THE IPHONE A REST! BORING YUPPIE TOY. soz for capitals.”
“Not all of us have tiny little girlie fingers!!!” (ouch!)
“The above statement should be “I really couldn’t care less.” As it happens, I am interested in all of them, so I really could care less.”
“mobile audio coverage is getting ridiculous”
“Just keep it to a minimum, guys =)” (Well, it is by definition miniature, right?)
“more iphone!!!! screw the haters”
“Everything. If there’s something new and interesting done with a C64, it could be worth going out to buy a setup.”
“every – f***ing – thing !”

At least someone said “whatever, it’s all good.” Sir, you may be alone in your calm attitude, but the editorial staff appreciates it. Meanwhile, I’ll be exercising my tiny girlie fingers over a variety of devices. (They give me uncanny accuracy in touch apps. So there.)

BeatMaker Update and Workflow

A new BeatMaker video (below)

One of the biggest objections — and a fair one — boils down to “but how do you use this in real life?” The “it’s a toy” argument is a legitimate one if it means you have software you play around with, but that you can’t use as an instrument effectively or work into your own music. (By that token, for instance, my toy piano is actually a valuable instrument.)

So it’s big news that, as many people had hoped, Intua’s BeatMaker has added MIDI export. That means you can assemble ideas and patterns on BeatMaker and bring them into your desktop music software of choice. I’m already hearing from people using this with Ableton Live. This isn’t a new feature — Windows Mobile and Palm apps have offered the same thing — but it’s a big part of the draw of these devices. BeatMaker also has an improved manual, more videos, and Bonjour support:

intua.net

Intua’s Mathieu also tells us “We’re working on the new BeatMaker killer-update now. Should be interesting !” Indeed.

For the record, that means some of the interesting workflow possibilities now available include the likes of:

• Building MIDI patterns and audio loops for use elsewhere (PSP Rhythm, PSP; BeatMaker, iPhone/iPod; many others)
• Building complete tracks using unusual synths (PSPSEQ, PSP)
• Working on drum patterns, with samples, in a round-trip with desktop software (iDrum, iPhone/iPod)
• Using your mobile device as a touch/stylus controller, etc. (DSMI, DS; various tools, iPhone/iPod)

All good stuff. Of course, by the same token, there are clear disadvantages of mobile devices — cramped screen space and controls, limited processing power, a lack of full-sized and full-fidelity audio I/O, and the like. But that’s why I’ve always felt conventional form factor computers aren’t really going anywhere. They work really well; these augment what they can do.

First and foremost, thank you. In just over three years of CDM — and roughly five thousand stories on Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion — you have blown me away. You’ve shared countless news tips, ideas, discussion, projects, art and music, and helped create a unique spot on the Web. That success allows us to deliver hundreds of thousands of views each month, and more importantly, has helped CDM be recognized beyond even musicians and visualists as a leading resource for creative technology. That’s really your success: the ideas you’ve given us, and your work in spreading this stuff to everyone else.

Three years is often the point where people experience some fatigue, but we’re feeling quite the opposite. We want to do more than we’ve done in the past. But we need your help.

CDM Costs, and a New Ad Policy

Running CDM costs money. At the beginning of 2007, after a horrible period of site outages that nearly caused me to shut down CDM permanently, we made the move to a dedicated server, because in hosting, you tend to get what you pay for. That server, bandwidth, and other direct costs of the site have cost me thousands of dollars — nearly all of which I’ve paid out of pocket. More importantly, CDM requires an enormous investment of time, much of it behind the scenes administering the site — and to do what we want to do on CDM, it’s going to take more time.

We are tuning our advertising and affiliate models, and we have some other income ideas we’re developing. But we also know we want our ad model to be different, because it needs to fit CDM. We’ve decided that, beyond Google Ads, any direct ads we take on CDM will be considered an endorsement. That means we need to believe in — and personally use — anything we advertise. We want to remain content-driven rather than ad-driven. If you think you would like to partner with us, do contact us, as we have some affordable schemes for providing ads that are useful to readers — just be aware we do things a little differently. We are serious about advertising — but we’re serious about keeping it in the spirit of the site, as we move forward.

And doing things differently means we can’t continue to survive without some reader support.

Real Reader-Supported Content

I want to do better than simply asking for your support, though. I want to make a promise: support CDM, and we’ll turn that support into content. We want to do more on CDM than we’ve done in the past. We want 2008 to be a breakthrough year for the site, and we’ve got a lot of ideas. We will absolutely make it clear that CDM is publishing some reader-supported stories, and we’d love to hear what you’d like that to be. Got ideas for the kind of videos or articles you’d want to see? Let us know in comments here, or on the CDM Forums.

Donating just a few dollars will make a difference.

I also have ten copies of my book Real World Digital Audio, a near-600-page guide to making music on computers, which I can ship to the first ten people to donate over US$50 (which is actually the book’s list price). If you want the book, don’t forget your address and specify an amount of $50.00 or greater.

I know a lot of you are on a tight budget as we are. But we really do appreciate your support — and with your help, CDM can be an even better free online resource in the future.

Pay what you can, pay what you want. Thanks for your support, and thanks for reading.

1. Play out more: I’ve been in a cycle, personally, of going back to develop material and ideas and get out of the playing-out mode, and I’m ready to cycle back and go play some more. How about you?
2. Practice: It’s all too easy as an electronic musician to let your chops go to slush. Fortunately, I have the staff of Keyboard Magazine to intimidate me, and the fact that they’re such brilliant players is easily enough to drive me back to running some scales and finger exercises and getting back in shape. For added inspiration, you can fire up GarageBand or another easy looping program to build some interactive accompaniments (or go to the old-fashioned method and put on a Jamey Aebersold CD). Trust me: scales are a lot more fun when there’s a rhythm section behind you, even as a classically-trained player.
3. Build some software patches: I’ve been spending time teaching tools like Max/MSP and haven’t gotten to build my own performance patches. Fortunately, it’s possible to keep your projects on a manageable scale, something I’ve learned from my students. Find a simple solution and solve that is usually the advice I give, and now I’ll go take it myself. With tools like Ableton Live, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to performance: it’s easy enough to add custom tools built in Reaktor or Max/MSP to Live.

I’ll be checking my own progress against some of these goals. But I’m curious what our readers have as resolutions for 2007. What are your goals for the year?

Sofie writes:

This bundle of joy came this afternoon and I couldn’t help but take a few happy snaps to celebrate its arrival. My initial comments are â€Å“yayâ€Â? and â€Å“woohoo.â€Â? It looks and feels solid, great key action (no skimping on key size depth), it has pink and blue buttons (extremely important) and rotary LED knobs. The layout is simple and easy to use, and its controls are chosen to emphasise its role as a chunky sounding monophonic synth. And above all it sounds like a moog. My thirst for tangible analogue aesthetic has been quenched. Every girl should have one. ;)

And it glows in the dark. (Hint to product makers: as a reviewer, I instantly put that in my “pros” column.) I don’t own a Moog here, sadly, but I will say, if you haven’t played the Voyager or Little Phatty, you really should get a hands-on experience. The total user experience of the Moog instruments is truly greater than just the sum of their parts; they are fantastic designs.

Sofie, who says she’s also a CDM reader, is an interesting figure herself. In addition to various compositional projects, she helped put together the record label Southern Outpost (as in Southern Hemisphere, I presume), which now has a deal with Submerge in Detroit, has worked with a lot of really cool people, has played SONAR as a laptop artist, and, well, go read her bio. And she has her Little Phatty under a Roland SH1000, a rig that will make any synth-loving boy or girl happy!

For more:

my first moog
my first moog part 2
flickr stream

(Apologies to Matrixsynth readers, who are now experiencing the new Sofie Moog meme.)

We’re always happy to hear reader stories, so all you good folks, feel free to share any time you like.

The HPD-10 hand percussion controller by Roland could be a terrific controller for synths and clips, from its traditional purpose (drums) to lots of other applications:

My main interest in getting the unit, though, is as a midi control over softsynths. Its 10 pads can be freely assigned to any note numbers on a per kit basis (64 kits can be saved in the unit). So far, I’ve set up different kits for Live’s Impulse, Reason’s Redrum and an Alesis Micron Setup that I have dedicated for drum sounds.

Check out velocipede’s full review:
Handsonic 10 (HPD-10) [Create Digital Noise]

The news from Tokyo’s Music Instrument Festival is mostly what’s going away as what’s new: Alesis selling off the last stock of Ions in Japan, and Roland discontinuing their cult favorite AX-7 strap-on keyboard controller. Fortunately, velocipede dug up two gems. Vestax’s Guber line has some far-out hardware like this crazy-looking turntable:

And from the non-electronic end of the spectrum, the Xaphoon is an original hybrid instrument that packs sax-like sounds in a recorder body; velocipede assures us that it sounds far better than its toy-like looks suggest:

Music Instrument Festival in Tokyo [Create Digital Noise]
Vestax Guber players [Japanese only]
Xaphoon instruments product page

Love the blog; thought I would chip in on the current run of articles about rackmounting PCs. I have just done the same thing after many weeks of research. Like most people looking at this, my budget cannot stretch to a laptop at the moment, so rackmounting my current PC ([AMD] Operton 165) seemed like a cheaper idea. I also needed to mount up my mixer as the idea is to live live with my band and be able to mix vocals/instruments through the computer as well as turntables, etc.

This is the flight case which is perfect for my needs:

Gator Cases

They do come in smaller sizes if you only wanted to have the PC, but I figured that a few extra rack spaces would come in handy.

The main problem with flight casing PCs is the dimensions; rackmount cases tend to be server cases, and as a result are very long, a lot long than most standard rackmount equipment. After many weeks of searching I came across this case, designed as a HTPC case but this is a bonus, as it means it is quiet and about the same dimensions as a HiFi amp, so fits the Gator perfectly.

Silverstone Tek LC17

The only problem I have had is that the rackmount ears for the LC17 are not actually out yet. My solution was to bribe a retailer into selling me a pair of the rackmount ears for the LC18. I had to drill them to get them to fit as they are a different shape. This should not be a problem by the end of the month, though, as Silverstone will be releasing the proper rackmount kit. The case is beautiful, has well-designed cooling zones, is quiet, and will take a full ATX motherboard.

All in all, the Gator case was £75 from eBay, the case around £65, and I’m real happy with the set up. It’s a bit heavy, but nothing in the laptop world can touch it!

Thanks, Nat! Your whole note was useful, so worth reprinting in its entirety. If anyone else has rack rigs they’d like to share, send ‘em on in! And in the meantime, have a listen to 601: quite nice music!

As I continue this Reasonable Friday, here’s a reader report on how to use Propellerhead Reason live in performance. He’s making use of the terrific Windows-only MIDI tool Peter Tools LiveSet — more on that in an upcoming story. And he’s taking his one-man band to an environmental-activist music festival outside Sydney in gorgeous environs (pictured).

Stevo writes us:

I have been working on organising Reason for use in a live situation . . . I am a solo artist producing entirely on a laptop. I have a controller keyboard, a [Behringer] BCF2000 controller that is locked to the main mixer, a Korg Kaoss 2 pad, and a copy of Peter Tools LiveSet. I am a loop-based type of artist, meaning I like to mess with ideas as loops and rarely program a song from begin to end, as this ends up doing my head in . . .

Here’s how I set up a track. I fill up the 14 tracks on the mixer with programmed sequences. Generally I look at a loop of about 32 bars as this gives a bit of room for changes, turnabouts, etc. I then use liveset (controlled by my master keyboard) and program 12 preset mixer settings that reflect a movement through the track. All the devices in the track are then Combinatored (you can set up numerous Combinators and centrally control through the midi busses). I use the kaoss pad to control the rotaries on the combinator. i then go and tweak each device in the Combinator programmer so when i play with the Kaoss Pad I get something interesting.

The BCF controller gives me hands-on control of 2 send effects and mute/solo. I set up another Combinator that contains 2 different send effect arrangements. I again tweak the programmer settings for these effects and also control these via the Korg Kaoss Pad.
And then it is a matter of playing around. The end results are very hands-on and can be quite unexpected and unusual. The benfit of LiveSet is that with the press of a key you can power into a new arrangement.

I have a 3GHz Pentium 4 with 1 gig RAM and this arrangement pushes the processor to its limits. I find I can finally make the type of computer music I have been trying to make for the past 7 years. As far as recording goes you just copy and paste the loop to as long as you want, record arm all the tracks and off you go.

Check out my site beatrootrecordings.com.
Soon I will be adding some tunes created using this method. I have a gig at a festival at the beginning of November where I will test out this setup on a 10k system. Bear in mind that it takes a minute or 2 to load new tracks so you need to have something for the mix as well.

There you have it. My own setup for loops wouldn’t be Reason — I’d just ReWire Reason into Live, and I expect many of you are in a similar boat — but I’m really intrigued by LiveSet and love the Combinator.

So how are you working live with Reason, Ableton, or other programs? Let us know, via comments or by emailing me.

I love it when CDM readers win major accolades. So it is with Cris “Atariboy” Pearson of plasq, who’s just scored the prestigious Apple Design Award for Best New Product for OS X at the WWDC conference. The winning app, the brilliant comic creation tool Comic Life got mentioned here on CDM just about before anyone knew about it. Congrats, Atariboy!

Of course, as this is a music site and all, we’re still partial to the very-cool, very-free, very-Mac-only sampling instrument Musolomo, which just got a lovely Sound on Sound review. But that doesn’t mean we can’t send kudos to Cris, and that I’m still not holding out hope that someone will create a digital music-themed comic using this tool. If it helps motivate you, I could point out that the Packrat strip featured on Music Thing got picked up by Keyboard. I’m waiting.