When we last joined our friend Gustavo Bravetti, Uruguay’s Ableton maestro, he was showing us how to glitch out with Live. Now he’s on Hong Kong-based DJ site djvox with a comprehensive set of Live tutorials. These are not necessarily the usual “how to use Live” fare. Instead, they focus on musical techniques, with Live as the tool — a means to an end, and a way to approach Live as an instrument, rather than a duplicate manual.

First up — one of my favorite tricks, which is building bass drum sounds in Operator. Not everyone loves Operator, but this is exactly why I like it for certain tasks: it’s a no-nonsense, quick way of building synths that drops nicely into a Drum Rack for quick DIY drum machines. And that pitch envelope and all-in-one time controls are especially handy.)

And for IDM lovers, here are some clever tricks for creating rhythmic variations using envelopes and follow actions. This one is especially worth a trip through the guide, even if you have different musical results in mind, because it’s an exceptional description of how follow actions work — one that’s actually better than the manual’s.

That gives you an idea of what Gustavo is working with, but be sure to check out the full guide for more details and step-by-step instructions, friendly even to beginners.

He even gives a shout out to the open-source 3D webcam MIDI controller for Windows we looked at last year.

Looking forward to more iProducer installments, Gustavo! And readers, now you know what to do with your evening / weekend / sick day you’re about to call in. Erm, if you’re not too busy building an arcade cabinet for Live first, that is.

iProducer: A Creativity Upgrade [Ableton Live tutorial on djvox]

(By the way, for digital crate-diggers: snooping around that Hong Kong site, you can buy downloads there internationally, though they wind up being a bit steep in US dollars.)

Breaking story from Messe — the V-4 video mixer, the gold standard VJ mixer that’s almost uncanny in its ubiquitous appearance on live visual sets, finally has a sequel. No word on pricing yet, but the V-8 is already tantalizing in that it ups the input and output count and finally(!) adds a 15-pin connector for computer video. Full details on Create Digital Motion:

Edirol V-8 Mixer: 8 Ins, 3 Outs, Computer Ins Mean V-4, The Next Generation

With this arriving this month and the boutique Vixid mixer to play with, it could be a great year for audiovisualists.

It’s Flash 909, and Amiga Flash.

Code wizard Andre Michelle has already made a name hacking audio capabilities into Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3. We got to see his work in the form of real-time audio effects processing in the GarageBand-like online sample-and-compose interface for Splice:

Interview: How Splice.com Has Taken Music Real Audio Processing to the Web

Well, there’s more, well into the “Things Adobe Wouldn’t Normally Expect People to Do With Flash” category. There’s 8BitBoy (warning: link autoplays music), a Flash-based player for Amiga MOD tracker tunes. There’s a 909 emulation (cutely named FL-909). There’s open ActionScript 3 source called popforge [@ Google Code] with all the Flash-hacking tricks needed to do audio.

Now, the most tantalizing bit yet: Andre has a new music environment coming, and to tease its arrival, he’s put up a little application with Roland emulations and stompboxes — and it’s all part of the Rich Internet Application of the Future:

Pristine digital technology — some people just can’t resist putting it in the service of recreating grungier, noisier sound-producing tech. Hot on the heels of Indirect-to-Digital - by-way-of-tape samples of the TR606 and 808, here are some digital recreations of circuit-bent noisemakers. Of course, I generally prefer to see circuit bending producing actual, DIY hardware — see our Circuit Bending Challenge — but it’s still an interesting exercise. (And it’s worth sampling some of this gear for live performance, especially when you can record sound before something, um, breaks. At least if it’s my project.)

Rekkerd.org finds not one, but two projects:

• Eric Beam releases Circuit Bent TR-505 samples, samples of a bent TR-505 “DeComposer”, captured “with pristine TC-Electronic A/D converters.” (What, no Marantz portable? The hardware in-progress pictured above.)
• de la Mancha releases Bent, a free “circuit-bent resynthesis” effect, with tempo-sync granulator effects, and jittering, morphing, and jittering morphing pitch. Windows VST.

De la Mancha’s stuff is great, and with some granular effects, you get a “bent” creation that can only exist in software. In fact, maybe “faux” is unfair in that case. Software doesn’t have the reputation of hardware circuit bending, and there’s not the immediacy of a contact point on a physical circuit. But you can certainly find just as many, if not more, strange and organically accidental “discoveries” when working with code and patches.

Digital samples got no soul? How about digital samples of tape and cassette samples of classic Roland instruments? Huggie from New Zealand (and Goldbaby Productions) has been producing some lovely sample libraries from favorite gear, free and payware. He’s posted two of the best as freebies to the CDM forums. The hook: they’re recorded on analog before being sampled again.

There’s a TR606 recorded to an Ampex 1/2 inch 2-track tape machine, which appeared around Christmas. And this week, we got a superb 808 samples set recorded to a portable Marantz deck. (Funny, I’ve spent some quality time with both recorders, so that adds extra nostalgia.)

Less this all be chalked up to simple novelty, I have to admit you get a nice, warm sound out of the results. I’m dropping these on some Drum Racks in Ableton as we speak.

And here’s what it sounds like in action:
Cassette 808 Demo [mp3]

Free Tape606 sample pack… Merry Christmas! [CDM forums in December]

The Cassette 808 sample pack! Old skool and free… [CDM forums]

Free Stuff @ Goldbaby (other goodies, too, but for these scroll to the very bottom and look for Tape606 sample pack and The Cassette 808)

Thanks, huggie! Good stuff. Anyone else with soundware they want to share, please let us know.

As a follow-up to my controversial defense of the keytar attempt to get people to stop complaining in comments that they can’t buy a keytar and excuse to needle Roland again.

This is CDM reader Billy Hunt. The bright spot in the upper right hand of the screen is fire — a fireball launched from his keytar. Billy modded his Roland AX-7 for wireless MIDI control (okay, logical, practical choice there) and added a “gun that shoots flash paper” (not so typical).

Billy writes:

It is the best instrument ever. Shooting flames out of your keytar while you use the infared beam to make it squeal like a pig makes the girls want you, and the men want to be you.

Billy is in the band Straight Punch to the Crotch with Buddy — the dummy you see on the right, which itself is MIDI-enabled. Billy describes Buddy as “a midi dummy with drum triggers in his head, shoulders, and (of course) crotch.” I’m hoping Billy will someday present an academic paper at the NIME conference on “Musical Applications of Tactile Sensitive Anatomy Sensing: Dummy Crotch Punching.”

CDM doesn’t very often print retractions, but I think it’s time for one. As a number of you pointed out in hilariously frank fashion, keytars are indeed not cool. So, here’s my Official Correction: flame-shooting keytars are cool — provided they’re in the right hands.

We’ve learned many things through this week’s Keytar Controversy:

1. Keytar aficionados don’t like the term “keytar,” preferring the more-dignified term “strap-on.” This is analogous to the Star Trek fan deciding neither “Trekkie” nor “Trekker” accurately describes their devotion, suggesting instead “penis.”

2. Normal, non-strappable keyboards and pianos actually are cool. Really. You can play keyboards just like that. (Who knew? I thought my piano teachers were trying to tell me something.)

3. In the Chinese and Japanese markets, keytars are preferred by girls. I will extrapolate from this that while I would look really dorky playing a keytar (I don’t own one, despite allegations from readers and bloggers), many girls look super cute with them.

4. Readers here are split between loving and hating the keyta– uh, strap-on. No one has neutral feelings about them. I think that tells you the real reason why they can’t be made any more.

The best part of the debate comes in the blog post Keytars Are Still Lame, with this visual aid:

There’s just one problem. Ray Charles is a great reason to learn the piano. But hand Ray Charles a keytar, and suddenly the keytar is cool. And that’s the point, isn’t it?

I love you, Roland. I really do. But it has to be said:

You’re completely clueless when it comes to the coolest things you’ve ever made.

And if an ordinary keyboard with a silly guitar-style body and shoulder strap can be cool, I’m not sure I can even blame you. You just have to listen to the people.

People love their 303, their 808, even their 909. Yet when these a whole generation of kids desperately wanted you to just re-release these things — or your Jupiter, or Juno, any of your other fantastic keyboards and sound toys of yesteryear — you’ve responded with souped-up, “modernized” versions that mainly share only the name.

But most importantly, you killed the keytar (the awesome, infrared-equipped AX-7) just before everyone decided they really had to have one. So, every week, I hear from people wanting them, just because of I mentioned the keytar in a random post back in April 2005.

Ironically, then, I said, the Keytar Lives. And it does, more than ever — just not in your catalog.

In comments, people sound desperate, hungry — sometimes even poetic. (They sing to the keytar, in Spanish, “ESTOS INSTRUMRNTOS SON GENIALES…..YO TENGO UNO Y LO RECOMIENDO, EL NIVEL DE EXPRESIVIDAD EN VIVO CON ESTA JOYITA ES INCREIBLE….”) Pure poetry.

It’s driven the AX-7 prices sky-high on eBay, though some cheaper items remain of lesser-known and older models. The really lucky people get theirs for fifteen bucks at a yard sale from people who don’t know better.

But why not new units, if they’re this popular? Yamaha — I hope you’re listening, too. Korg? How about a nice, cheap CME version with motorized faders and some band dumping paint on it?

But Don’t Take My Word For It

Take the Times. No, not the New York Times or LA Times - the Times, as in London. The one that gave us Times New Roman.

You’ve seen the “top picks” lists elsewhere online for the NAMM show, that massive Californian convergence of musical instruments and music-making gear. Add together the knobs and faders from such lists, and you could probably build a synthesizer Death Star and destroy Daft Punk’s hidden Rebel base. Of course, you’d only have a marginally larger Death Star than the identical one you could have built from last year’s gear.

We’re doing things a little differently: picking out entirely random stuff that managed to reach for the sublime — including the sublimely absurd. Bad is better than boring. We’ve seen strange things that simply failed, or at least substantially creeped us out.

Now, those moments of victory, of supreme revelation, of –

Yeah, that’s Roger Linn, the LM-1 and former MPC designer without whom drum machines as we know them today wouldn’t exist, holding the “Drum Machines Have No Soul” bumper sticker he acquired. That’s why we were in Anaheim.

We’re still waiting on Barry Wood’s legendary NAMM Oddities, so we’ll focus on our own sense of the exceptional.

Other standout moments and products for reflection:

Music software maker Cakewalk is now “Cakewalk by Roland” after Roland acquired a majority stake in the company. While the new logo raised a few eyebrows around the show floor, especially after full acquisitions of Steinberg and Emagic by Yamaha and Apple, respectively, this deal is more of a smaller evolution than a big change. Cakewalk’s history has been intertwined with Roland’s since the early days of its first sequencer — founder and CEO Greg Hendershott talked with us over the summer about those early days and noted early versions relied on and were even engineered specifically around Roland’s MPU-401 MIDI interface. Formal business collaborations began as early as 1995, with a specific commitment in 2003 to work on joint products and an investment by Roland.

The message from Cakewalk: it’s not a buyout, but you should be able to expect some joint hardware/software products in 2008. (What form that’ll take, they’re not saying yet.)

Greg posts a letter to customers on the Cakewalk website. The bits you won’t want to miss:

Although Roland now owns a bigger share of Cakewalk, they didn’t acquire the whole company. Cakewalk is not becoming a “division” of Roland. On the contrary, we remain committed to developing stand-alone software, as well as hardware/software products…

Our discussion forum will remain open. You will have the same high level of technical support and customer service you have come to expect from Cakewalk. And furthermore, we will stay committed to our belief in open standards, collaboration with other leaders in our industry, and not using intrusive copy protection.

Cakewalk has some additional resources, but mostly things seem not to be changing significantly. We got to hang around the Cakewalk booth a bit today, and it was mostly business as usual. The big question is what these joint projects look like — we’ll have to see later this year.