8-bit and robots and odd Max and Reaktor patches and custom visual software and visualizations of data packets and sound made from plants and mutant trumpets and gloves for DJing and laptop music – we’ve got quite a lineup here in New York this week.

Friday night, a live audiovisual lineup from the worlds of createdigitalmusic.com / createdigitalmotion.com invades the HOPE conference, aka Hackers on Planet Earth, the three day-long convergence of tech hacking. $10, open to all, 11-2a Friday July 18 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. It’s a live digital, technological variety show in a doomed NYC landmark hotel with an audience of famous and infamous hackers. (Think Kevin Mitnick and MythBusters’ Adam Savage and Steven Levy, all in one place.)

Facebook event page; also on Going.com

Here’s a look at the performers and projects. If you can’t be in New York, this should give you a little taste of the range of work people are doing here and in our community in general, and I hope to have more coverage after the event.

Michael Una performing at SYNC Fest 08 from Michael Una on Vimeo.
Robot drummer from Michael Una on Vimeo.

Michael Una’s live-looping, robot-drumming, circuit-bending experience

CDM contributor, Circuit Bending Challenge coordinator and sage of all things DIY and sound art Michael joins the ensemble with robotic assistance:

I will be using custom-built interface devices, acoustic and circuit-bent instruments, and a robot drummer to create a rhythmic, textured and melodic sonic experience on the fly.

http://una-love.com

(Hey, does anyone know why Renee and Michael’s site is being blocked by Google? Was it the beat bike or the prayer wheel? What gives?)

Building and Using a Reaktor Grain Delay in Kore 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Let’s cut straight to the reason we use this stuff: we want crazy-sounding delays we can play with. Reaktor guru Peter Dines shows just how you’d build such a thing in Reaktor from the ground up for CDM’s Kore site. He also takes it one step further by creating not only the Reaktor ensemble, but also a Kore performance preset to match. The advantage of going this route: Kore provides a way of organizing parameters for control, performance, and automation.

This is another all-free download, so have at it. Now I feel like I’m in a patching race with Peter, because I’ve got some ideas of my own for how you might modify this basic idea; let’s see if I can actually make that happen.

Making sense of Kore

The other side of the minisite is we’re further exploring what Kore is for and how to make it work. We asked readers of the minisite to tell us their thoughts on how Kore is going and how they use it, which has yielded an interesting comment thread:

How Do You Kore?

Our main focus, of course, is simply teaching people how to use the tool effectively – from there, you can decide whether it’s for you and how you want to use it. To that end, I’ve got the first half of a tutorial up that explains what for me was the biggest draw and the most initially confusing, which is the control pages Kore uses to assign automation and physical control. I walk through why you’d want this, how it works, and how you manage different levels of the control pages:

Demystifying Kore Control Pages for Automation and Performance, Pt. I: Different Page Types

We also have some important basics, like Kontakt automation, how to get a normal mixer view, and external MIDI control.

Coming soon: I’m planning some short features on each of NI’s instruments. We’ll have to call it the “get it out of the shrinkwrap” series, especially for people who got the overwhelming set of instruments that comes with Komplete.

We’ve been busy at kore.noisepages.com hacking away on Native Instruments’ software to share more playable tools and tips. Peter Dines has built a really fantastic tool called Frankenloop. It’s a "step sequencer with a twist" — probability settings for each step so that it sounds different each time. Peter has released it under a ShareAlike Creative Commons license, so we actually hope you’ll take this and customize it to do whatever you want, and release it under the same license.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Introduction to Frankenloop from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Download and explanation of how to use it:

Introducing Frankenloop: Free Reaktor-Powered Step Sequencer with a Twist

Peter will be revisiting how the tool was put together and how you might use it in Kore in future episodes stay tuned.

We’ve had some running themes going on the site in the past few weeks.

I’ve been talking about Kore for sound design and performance:

Fennesz at Mutek‭ ‬2008

Fennesz and Lillevan at Mutek 2008 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

I met with Christian Fennesz and video artist Lillevan in the green room of the Theatre de Nouveau Monde, where they would be performing together at A/Visions 3. Fennesz had no idea what visuals Lillevan would be using that evening, but they say they have known each other for a long time and there is an element of trust there. The trust was well placed because their performance was lovely and memorable, often using oceanic and watery themes projected over the top of both performers as they stood in front of a screen.

To really work with music software as an instrument, you have to focus on a set of tools and get deep into what they can do. Today, we’re launching the first of a limited series of minisites that lets us do that. It’s called Kore @CDM, devoted to NI’s Kore and Komplete lines. We’ve built a special blog which will feature regular tips on how to work with this set of tools, basic and advanced tutorials, and downloadable content, all free and open. (The contents of the site will be Creative Commons-licensed, so you’re free to share and modify what we do, with credit to the authors.)

Kore Minisite @CDM, http://kore.noisepages.com

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Subscribe to Kore Minisite by Email

Why choose this product now?  I’ve felt really strongly, even having been critical of Kore’s first release, that Kore 2 has the potential to live up to its promise of creating a "meta-instrument" for working with sound and effects. Combined with the rest of the Komplete family, including Reaktor’s open-ended patching environment and the scriptable sampler Kontakt, NI has some deep tools — not perfect, not for everyone, but tools that matter to us. We want to really get into how to use them, and to develop a set of techniques and tools for others, both for sound design and live performance, in combination with hosts like Ableton Live. And this means not just doing stuff "by the book," but really seeing how far we can push these tools, sonically and in playability.

Kicking things off is Eoin Rossney, who talks about how to create feedback loops intentionally in Kore for special effects. It’s something mentioned in the manual, but there haven’t been instructions on how to accomplish it until now. Eoin takes that challenge on, and produces some really oddball sounds just by routing effects into themselves. Have a listen to the samples — just be sure to turn your speakers’ volume down first.

How to Route Feedback Loops in Kore - On Purpose [Kore @CDM]

Peter Dines, a Reaktor whiz and author of the Reaktor Tips blog, will also be writing and screencasting for us soon. Both Eoin and Peter have been CDM regulars, so it’s great to have them onboard.

Why we’re partnering with NI: So that we can provide as much content as we can for free, we’ve gotten sponsorship from Native Instruments to produce the site. But that doesn’t mean we want to make an "advertorial." NI has been generous enough to give us full control over the contents, and the goal isn’t a review, or an ad — it’s as much actual knowledge of these tools as we can provide. And, hey, it’s basically our job to demonstrate that by doing as good a job as we can and listening to your feedback. I’m happy to answer questions about why we’re doing things this way and what it means; we can talk in comments or contact the site.

Most of all, though, I hope you’ll check out the site. If you don’t own Kore or the other tools, we’ll still have sound and video samples and will include instructions for trying out projects in the demo, if you just want to kick the tires a bit. And definitely let us know what you think as we roll out more stories, because we want this to be as useful to you as possible.

Oh, yeah, and if you’re wondering about what the "noisepages.com" thing is about, you’ll be hearing more soon. Suffice to say the Kore site isn’t all we’re working on.

Bonus points to anyone else who had the "opportunity" to see the movie Deep Kore Core.

Digital turntablism is nothing new. But Ammobox, debuted at the first-ever CDM Futuristic Music Design Challenge, is unique in a number of ways. What creator Nathan Ramella has done differently:

1. He’s demystified digital vinyl timecode. With no previous DSP programming experience, Nathan created his own custom tool for reading vinyl timecode — and explains how he did it.

2. He’s changed the rules of scratching — it’s now polyphonic scratching. As Nathan puts it, "You get a polyphonic sampler that can layer multiple samples at the same time and scratch them all simultaneously." Yep: no more does digital vinyl simply replicate what records do normally. Here, it actually works as a digital instrument, manipulating layers of samples as you go. Check it out running in Ableton Live as a demo at top, though other hosts could work, as well, if you prefer.

3. He’s giving everything away. You’ll need some vinyl, and because the sonic wonders are all built in Reaktor, you’ll need a copy of NI’s modular mad science lab. But the ensemble itself is released under the GPL v2, which could make it a great way to learn more of the mysteries of Reaktor.

Official Ammobox Page

Download the library, free [ Direct Link ], or head to the rabbit hole that is NI’s User Library

Clarification: I should add that part of what makes Ammobox cool is actually that Nathan’s doing the timecode decoding the "wrong" way. Normally, a timecode system like Ms. Pinky or Traktor Scratch reads speed, direction, and absolute position. Position is the hard part, and the part that’s dependent on sophisticated error correction. What’s clever here is not that AmmoBox is likely to replace those systems (that’s not the point), but that by breaking the rules of how you’re supposed to do digital vinyl, Nathan’s created something different and expressive.

Nathan describes the system in greater detail:

We’ve heard from DJ Chinkial — and via several of you — that he’s working on a way of turning Korg’s KP3 KAOSS Pad into a step sequencer, by way of Reaktor. Each step lights up, causing him and others to use the phrase “Monome-like.” Monome as an adjective? Congrats to the Monome designers for that! The KP3 is a cool device on its own, so it looks fascinating to me.

Just be prepared to try to read chinkial’s massive run-on sentence describing the project. He writes:

just thought id let youse know im making a reaktor ensemble at the moment to utilize the korg kp3s 8×8 grid as a seq its going pretty well managed to get the kp3 to trigger the steps on an 8×8 event table and ouput them im also getting visual feed back from the kp3 aswell so u can make beats and not look at the screen just like the monome this is just a test to c if it could b done as i plan on porting it to a vst plugin in sythedit somehow that was my initial idea as not everybody uses reaktor that has a kp3 u know so let me know what youse think about my project

More power to you, man — I think you’ve learned to speak better to the Reaktor than to us, but keep on rocking the KP3. The project looks really cool, from what I can see through blurry cameraphone footage. Anyone in the UK who wants to go shoot this with a real camera, let us know!

It’s like a spy video. And 69 views, plus two tips from CDMers, which means basically you guys see everything before the rest of the universe, even if it’s barely capable of being seen.

chinkial also wins bonus points for plastering his MySpace page with marijuana leaves, being the first and only person to create a stoner mystique for Reaktor. (As opposed to, you know, basement club in Berlin and Red Bull or, maybe more like a lineup of espressos and cigarettes.)

The project looks great, though, so you can bet we’ll stay tuned to the chinkial YouTube channel.

From ribbons to multi-touch, musicians are looking for expressive controllers, ones that allow continuous control for performance.

Oh, yeah, and it’s like totally super-cool on the original Star Trek when people run their hands over the Transporter controls and the blinky lights move. I mean, like still super-cool, even in 2008. (Hint: try to look completely chilled out like Spock when you do it.)

So, one of the things I noticed when the Monome was first introduced was, excellent as that open controller is, you’ve got buttons and no continuous controls. Ever wished another nice square box could sit next to it and give you multiple touch controllers? Good news: Stribe is here.

The Stribe is an 8-channel multi-touch controller for music or video software. 1024 individually-addressable LEDs provide animated visual feedback.

The low-resolution (16 x 64) LED display is controlled in real time by either firmware or host software, or both. MIDI or OSC communication to compatible hardware and software is achieved via patches written in Max/MSP.
Touchstrips down the center of each channel trigger events in the software and the firmware, which drive the display, creating a haptic feedback loop. Each of these eight “channels” has two 64-led-tall columns, e.g. a left and a right.

The Stribe can act as a touch controlled meter bridge, or as an interactive, animated16 x 64 led display. Oriented horizontally, the Stribe can more intuitively interface with step-sequencer type applications, or allow direct manipulation of granular synthesis sampling, or allow the user to perform “scratch” like gestures

or…?

Take the modular, patchable sound-making capabilities of Reaktor and (at the other end of the scale) Reason, and combine it with a graphical, zoomable, nodal interface with patch cords showing actual signal, as on the reacTable interactive table interface, and you should get something like Mod271. (Pronounced “mode.”)

The software is in pre-pre-alpha phase, but it’s freely downloadable for Windows users if you’re adventurous, and the developer promises more progress and other operating systems soon.

Features:

• ASIO/MIDI support, VSTi version coming
  
• Everything is full audio-rate, meaning you can mix and match MIDI and DSP
  
• Powerful nodes: “every node can be automated with unlimited control points and automation takes place right in the 3D environment.” … “nodes can influence any amount of other nodes or switched into a singular state.”, with radial and linear modes for the nodes
  
• Interface is 3D hardware-accelerated, and the signals even (optionally) draw at audio rate for realistic previews
  
• sample-accurate envelopes and motion, “meaning you can make an oscillator out of an envelope.”
  
• 25 node types and growing
  
• Make your own nodes with Python

Crazy stuff! It’ll be interesting to see how this one develops. And I hope the Reaktor developers are paying close attention; there’s a lot here that could inspire a future Reaktor version.

Full description, lots of background, and that bleeding-edge super-pre-alpha-at-your-own-risk:

Mod271 @NuDSP

Thanks to Ronnie of rekkerd.org for the tip!