When we say “handmade music,” we really mean this sense of crafting something , of touching something – not so much the technique or the technology as the intention behind what you do. In a striking film portrait of Nick Zammuto for nakedmusicians.com, the craft of living is spotlighted as much as the craft of music making.

Nick, is known for his role in duo The Books (with Dutch-born Paul de Jong), and their distinctive, rhythmic, homebrewed-original sound. Here, he covers his manipulations of everything physical and temporal. Sound sampling is a tangible process, the poetry of things put together and assembled in surprising ways. So, too, is his life in music, as he talks about raising kids and literally building a home. They are all of these activities a way of stopping and shaping time, of composing yourself and your loved ones into the future. The resulting sounds and stories might just make you want to move around.

You can learn more about Nick on his site:

http://zammutosound.com/

Burlington, Vermont-based filmmaker Matt Day is responsible for this gem.

And if you’re in the Eastern USA, you can catch Nick live:
FEB 3: Mass Moca, North Adams, MA
FEB 4: 92YTribeca, New York, NY
FEB 6:Brighton Music Hall, Allston, MA

Sounds from his new EP, via SoundCloud:
Zammuto – Idiom Wind EP – Make Mine, London UK by zammuto

What should DJing software look like, anyway?

It’s just a teaser, but for once, the idea is simple, straightforward, and clear. Native Instruments have taken their DJ software, Traktor, and combined it with a grid of pads for sample triggering and loops. The upcoming hardware/software combination we expect later this spring.

At the risk of stating the obvious, what’s significant about adding loop triggering to any DJ set is that you can more easily move beyond playing and mixing tracks. Even without drum machines, this kind of manipulation is part of the grand tradition of DJing, made all the more impressive when ground-breaking DJs were able to accomplish it using only a turntables. (It’s perhaps a triumph over the linearity of recorded music in the 20th Century that, at last, artists found a way to subvert recorded music’s permanently-frozen state and reclaim the playback device as an instrument.)

What the upcoming product does is to take the virtual deck metaphor of Traktor and makes each deck a sampling machine. Each deck can trigger one-shots and loops, coupled with the mixing, cueing, and effects possibilities of Traktor as a DJ tool.

The obvious comparison will be to Ableton Live, but here, it’s as significant what is different as what is not. This wording from NI’s description will admittedly sound a lot like Ableton Live and colored renditions of the monome: “Stylish multi-color pads trigger loops and samples, allowing for on-the-fly remixing.” There’s definitely some influence there.

But the grand-daddy of all these things is sampling drum machines, the first instruments to popularize triggering one-off or looped audio content from a grid. (Tip of the hat here to Roger Linn and his designs.) Ableton’s breakthrough was taking that sample-triggering grid metaphor and cross-breeding it with the DAW, the all-purpose studio workstation with its channel strips, tracks, and arrangements. In Live, the track is king.

NI’s breakthrough here promises to be seamlessly making each deck – not each track – the focus for sample triggering. And their hardware literally combines the DJ mixing and effects functions with those pads. In the future Traktor tool, the deck, not the track, is king. And that makes all the difference. The deck will behave like a deck for cueing (a common complaint about Live), for one, but it’s also important that whereas Live gives you as many tracks as you want, you’re forced into the limitation of four decks in Traktor. That limitation is neither positive nor negative, but rather something that will influence every other decision you make. (Having looked over the shoulder of Richie Hawtin’s impossibly-enormous Live set recently for Plastikman, with tracks that scrolled on seemingly endlessly, I can tell you this isn’t a minor point.)

Of course, the other amusing point is the timing of when NI is tipping their hand. NI already makes a popular sampling drum machine, Maschine, combining a dedicated controller with software. Akai has just entered the ring with their own revision of the MPC – combining a dedicated controller with software to make a sampling drum machine. NI, for their part, here reveals that their next move is a new dedicated controller/software combo that also adds in DJing.

Anyway, for now, it’s just a video, so everything else is speculation. Feel free to have a look and let us know what you think, which, knowing comments, I’m certain you’ll do in no uncertain terms.

Side note: My brain is fuzzy; can anyone remind me of the capabilities of 4decks? This was, as I recall, a Reaktor patch that combined looping and decks.

It’s that time of the year, when the halls echo with the sound of … horrible electronic synthesized Christmas tunes, playing on endless loops from strings of lights and other cheap electronics!

But wait – what if you could take those sounds and embrace their low-fidelity, chippy sounds to more inventive musical purposes?

Turn to our friend AfroDJ, who has gradually built up several dozen Ableton Live racks. The latest samples Christmas tree lights for a festive, chiptastic holiday timbre.

I just put up my Christmas tree and put on some lights that play Christmas songs. The songs are comprised of very simple monophonic melodies, coming out of a tiny little speaker, but as soon as I heard it I was transported back to my youth sitting around the tree late at night. Naturally I had to sample it. So I put my AKG C3000 right up to the speaker and let it play. I selected four different notes to use in the instrument.

With reverb and the wave shaper inside Ableton’s sampler, those samples get a bit more creative. (If you don’t have a copy of Live, you can use the samples and add your own effects chain.)

The results are good fun, and could be just the thing for an improvised track while fiddling with your laptop, the warm glow of Egg Nog spreading through your fingers. Enjoy! (And if you make a track with this, do send it our way!)

Want more inspiration? AfroDJ is selling packs at 50% off through January 1. So take that holiday, and make some music.

Ableton Live Rack #39: Christmas Tree Synth

Sound and light artist, guitarist, Max patcher, and all-around sonically-fascinating guy Christopher Willits has opened up his “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” record on Ghostly to remixing. Halfway through the project, we talk to Chris about what’s going on – and what the results so far sound like. And we share, from earlier this fall, a composition in which you can recharge.

The project begins not with stems, but with samples, the raw materials on which the album was based. Christopher walks CDM through the audio highlights, one sample at a time. Along the way – as with all these samples – you begin to appreciate the process by which Christopher makes his decisions, how he moves from samples like pieces of wood to the finished structure. And of course, by opening these up to remixing, you have an opportunity to hear the work differently in his finished, released form, as well as to find your own, distinct decision-making process. It’s perhaps obvious in a remix project, but what this does is to allow the sounds a life separate from the fixed set of decisions that produced the album.

And that can even change Christopher’s own view of the work, he says. He tells us:

I think it’s fun to play the set like an album. I’ve heard these pieces so many times that it’s really refreshing to me to hear them alone. Now I hear the pieces differently.

That was actually one of the thoughts behind sharing all of these sounds, so people can hear the layers, and if they wish, tune their ears to the subtleties and intention I wanted to create in the mixes.

You can find the remix project at:
http://willits-sample-library-vol1.herokuapp.com/

“The stuff i’ve heard so far is AMAZING,” Christopher tells us. “I can’t wait to feature the best of the best. We’ll be releasing a free comp on [Christopher's experimetal label] Overlap and Ghostly will feature my favorite remix on a free comp, too.” Winning remixes get Ableton and SoundCloud prizes.

Let’s hear a few words from Christopher about the sounds he’s produced.

A Tour of the Sounds

A lot of the samples are about variation of common materials, so there’s plenty to explore. Christopher tells us that just one sample – like this guitar solo – can take on very different meanings with different processing, heard in two variations.

Guitar process solo1-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar process solo2-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

This tone is created from a custom-made Big Muff > BOSS distortion > Fender Twin with a couple power tubes removed for low volume and max distortion. This is a trick that ted from Flipper showed me around that time, and it created the exact orange laser beam i was hearing in my imagination.

Guitar solo long noise-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar solo-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The whole piece “Plant Body” came from this guitar improvisation. With releases like “Folding and the Tea” and “Seven Machines for Summer,”

I set the process to be only the guitar recordings. With this release, I gave myself a new set of constraints and permissions, allowing my imagination to add whatever comes up for me. No judgement on which one is better to me, they are just different. There are infinite possibilities within any process I determine, yet discerning the process that resonates with my true intention is what creates the shapes and forms and colors that feel like love.

Guitar process4 fold-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The drum samples come from:

…my great friend Jeff Pierre – one of the best drummer I’ve ever worked with, and the youngest, as well. All of Jeff’s takes were one take; this sample is shortened from the original length, but you get the idea.

Drum2-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

Drums distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

I just love the lightness and feel of this sound — like the funkiest insects in the jungle, getting down.

Perc1-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Willits-120 by Willits

Someone please make a disco track out of this.

Synth arp-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

Me and my friend Reiko were messing with patterns; then we would find a loop. We were laughing so hard as we were playing this stuff.

Perc-Intend-Evolve-Willits-120 by Willits

Check your volume for this one — probably should have exported it at a lower volume for this set! The heat of this, the crushed distortion, is from a technique called input flipping on the SSL. This is an input flip with the preamps cranked, with odd harmonics.

Ryan (Ryan Kleeman) and I just about lost it when we first input flipped like this for a distorted sound. It became a theme in a sense that resonated with this orange laser beam electromagnetic sound that much of the work stems from.

Synth arp noise-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

You can also hear it here- and a few other places on the record, to a less extreme degree. There is something about this texture that has a cleaning function to me. Washes things off, away, cleans the ears out. Resets your space.

Branches Into Flowers-Willits by Willits

“Could hear many more strings and horns in this piece.”

Guitar2-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this floating feeling.”
Guitar lasers-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“This pattern makes me want to get down.”
Perc distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this kind of generative sound.”
Subconscious Transmission-Willits-120 by Willits

Two samples that were not used in “Light into Branches.” Made the baritone thing in one mode of listening, came back and asked myself, why did I put a baritone guitar solo in the middle of this song? Did I really think that’s what it needed, or did I just want to play my baritone along with this song for fun? The answer was the latter. But here it is anyway.

The ambient layers sample was to create more depth of field in the mix, have it floating behind at a low volume, but it was not doing was I wanted it to, so I cut it out.

Baritone solo unused-Light Into Branches-baritone-Willits-75ish by Willits

Guitar layers unused-Light Into Branches Willits-75ish by Willits

Videos

From the original record release:

More information:
http://ghostly.com/releases/tiger-flower-circle-sun

Soak in a Sound Bath

Another release from this year revealing Willits’ musical approach, “GOLD” is an ambient piece in you can inhabit, in which you can restore yourself, according to its maker:

GOLD is a 24 minute and 17 second sound bath / ambient piece to soak into. Listen, relax and recharge. This harmonic weaving of sound was created with the vibration of affinity, love.

Made with voice, processed guitar, and a low-frequency oscillation out of a Nord Lead synth, Christopher actually encourages people to share how they “used’ the piece and how they made it felt, a kind of design experiment for spiritual being in sound. Have a listen or pay-what-you-will on Bandcamp:

Read up on what he has to say about this release:
New Release – GOLD [Sound + Light - Chris' blog]

Infinite

It seems only appropriate to close with this reflection from Christopher:

After working on this project, I’m realizing so tangibly what I’ve always known — that any mix is a sonic photograph of vibrational affinity, and even with a grounded intention behind any mix, and a very clear outline for a process in which you allow that intention to emerge, there are infinite possibilities of expression. Infinite. It is so beautiful.

You’ll find plenty of contact mic tutorials floating around the Web, but bassling (Jason Richardson) – working with a learned technique – has what I think is a really nice example, one that sounds really good. It’s easy to do, but unlike a popular tutorial (and one I’ve tried myself), you won’t wind up dis-assembling a Radio Shack piezo speaker. The result is an inexpensive, versatile microphone that will happily go places your conventional mic won’t, giving you new possibilities for sampling and sound design.

bassling credits his source:

This technique was taught to me by Alan Lamb when we worked together as part of the 2006 Unsound Festival. He’d developed this approach for recording ‘the wires,’ a large-scale aeolian harp modeled on telegraph poles he recorded in Western Australia.

Full tutorial:
How to make contact microphones [Bassling / Selectronica blog]

Here’s what it sounds like:
Piezo contact mic demonstration using a biscuit tin as a hand drum by bassling

I’d love to hear from readers: have you built contact mics? Which technique worked best for you?

And, if you try this one, any suggestions on various suppliers for the piezo crystal part itself? (Particularly in the US, Germany and continental Europe, UK, Japan, other places we have lots of readers.)

More:
Creme Dementia’s handmade bottle cap mics, on GetLoFi
Tutorials on the “Radio Shack” approach (though I like the one above better):
furious contact microphone assembly
Make a DIY Contact Microphone

I tend to tune out when it comes to sample libraries, but here’s one that takes the scripting capabilities of Native Instruments’ Kontakt sampler to extremes. The Grid Machine line developed by Lindon Parker (Channel Robot) and distributed by LoopMasters brings to Kontakt the sort of grid-based, sliced-up sample manipulation we’ve seen in the monome community and in custom tools in environments like Ableton Live and Renoise. Using KSP, the scripting environment in Kontakt, these produce entirely-custom instruments that cut, chop, stutter, reverse, mix, trigger, sub-loop, re-trigger, and modulate. You can change speed, mute, skip, reorder, and play patterns, and even mix between loops.

Even before you get to Kontakt’s effects, this kind of work really challenges the notions of what people imagine a “sampler” or “loop library” to be. And that’s been true of the sample sound design community, generally – they can brew things beyond the expected boundaries of a sample. I could even see this becoming a performance instrument.

Now, for those of us not content to use existing loops, I hope we can somehow convince Lindon to explain how he did the KSP scripting work to make it all happen. Drum ‘n Bass and House libraries are £29.95 each.

Loopmasters: Channel Robot

Some House for those of you who weren’t into the DnB version:

The possibilities of a microphone and the world are limitless, so as this week we looked at a recording of music made with playgrounds, a mic, and Ableton Live, readers responded in kind with a fantastic spectrum of sampling-inspired, real world-produced musical wonder. From comments, a few examples:

Diego Stocco, a favorite sound designer on this site, ventures in his latest installment into a dry cleaner. Clean, wrinkle-free clothes and great music – see, you don’t actually have to choose. See top.

“Vega” by CDM reader Cordovan Music (Gregory Reeves), is an eerily-lovely ambient score made from LA’s freeways – and perhaps an ominous, if beautiful, portent of a lot of us driving on said freeways for NAMM in January.

Vega by Cordovan Music

From the experimental and minimal ambient release “Photic”, “Vega” is made entirely from field recordings taken on Los Angeles freeways.
About the album:
Gregory Reeves is a Los Angeles-based electronic artist, composer, and musician. His work can be heard on A&E, History Channel, FUEL TV, Universal, EA Games and many more. His sound art and installation work includes pieces for the Gaffa Gallery, Sydney, as well as creating a soundscape for the huge geodesic dome at the Peats Ridge festival in Australia, New Years eve. Electronic releases under various aliases have received winning reviews in XLR8R, URB, JazzTimes, and Rolling Stone. Remixes include Bob Marley and the Wailers (“One Love” from “Roots Rock Remixed” on Tuff Gong/Quango), Sarah Vaughan, and others.
“Photic” is a collection of minimal, generative ambient works. “Vega” is made entirely from manipulated field recordings taken on Los Angeles freeways. “Dark Field” uses convolved urban sounds to create a brooding ambient soundscape (the piece was originally composed for the DUOscope multimedia installation in Sydney). “Anemone” was created using undersea video footage to generate musical events, while “Haiku in C” is based on classical Japanese Gagaku music. For fans of Brian Eno, Murcof, and Loscil

Reader Cillian John, in the more pedestrian-friendly city of Stockholm, looked instead to escalators.

On and on by cillianjohn

He writes:

The urban environment is full of inspiring noises. I particularly enjoy the mechanical rhythms you hear all round.
The rhythmic element of this track is a field recording of escalator I recorded while on a trip to Stockholm.

Audiovisual remix superstar Pogo, aka Perth, Australia-based Nick Bertke, is embarking on a mission to “remix the world” as has inspired the headline of this post. Check out the spectacular results, and perhaps even get involved (thanks, BenAlex):

http://www.pogomix.net/remixing-the-world/
Kickstarter on Tibet

(I’m awaiting further details, but I am personally angered by the apparent mistreatment of Bertke which recently resulted in a 10-year deportation from the United States of America – and even that only after seemingly-extreme prison time and detainment that required the intervention of the consulate of New Zealand; you can follow on his blog. I’ve been deeply frustrated by the apparent targeting of artists, whatever the requirements of the law, in the US and Canada. More on that soon; anyone with expertise or experience in these matters, I’d love to hear from you. I feel it’s worth bringing up, as I’m sure that someone would have done so in comments as this story has spread.)

I’m sure there are many, many other examples, but this seems to me a nice place to begin – and fertile ground for inspiration to make something yourself.

Sonic and musical inspiration are never far away, especially with a microphone in hand. For the latest example, Ableton Live meets a local playground.

Jason Richard, aka “bassling,” used field recordings in the park to compose a track. He writes:

I’ve been recording playgrounds and remixing the sounds in Ableton Live to create tracks. To help people understand what they’re hearing, I’ve been making short videos showing some of the process.

It’s an idea I’ve had in mind for a while and the centenary is deadline to work towards. I’m inspired by the Italian Futurists and Alan Lamb, who mentored me in 2006 as part of the Unsound Festival.

The playground is part of a series of videos of local playgrounds, intended to celebrate the 2012 centenary of Leeton in New South Wales, Australia. (That’s southeastern Australia, for the uninitiated.)

More information:
http://bassling.blogspot.com/

It’s really nice having the video to serve as a guide to the music, I think. So, what field recordings have inspired you? Let us know.

Ableton Live fans hungry for sounds, what a good half-year it’s been. AfroDJMac alone has been busy putting together delicious-sounding, versatile racks of virtual Ableton-ready gear. After six months of contributing free downloads and videos – and discovering the use of this kind of generosity as a tool for exposure – he’s come up with some 26 such racks. You can grab them all, but I asked the artist to choose his six favorites out of the bunch:

1. Nintendo Rack- Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but these sounds have so much personality, I love them This rack has been the most popular and has been downloaded more than twice as many times as any other (I blame the CDM feature
Free Weekly Ableton Live Rack #6- “AfroDJMac Nintendo Rack”

2. Vocal Rack and Dub Delay- I first got a good taste of Ableton’s capabilities when I mapped out a more primitive version of this rack to my midi controller. I don’t think I’ve looked at another DAW since.
Free Weekly Ableton Live Rack #12: Vocal Rack and Dub Delay the AfroDJMac Way

3. Super Glitch Machine- I like when things sound broken!
Ableton Rack #23: Super Glitch Machine (part 1)

4. Laptop Feedback Rack- This was the first one I ever released, having no idea if anyone would even care, and to my surprise they did. I really like how this sound starts out pad-like, but decays after a few seconds into something a bit more glitchy and spacey.
Free Weekly Ableton Live Rack #1- “AfroDjMac Laptop Feedback”

5. Broken Bells Rack- Made from xylophone samples playing forwards and backwards simultaneously, in my opinion there is a lot of character in this one. To my surprise however, it has been out-downloaded by most of my other racks.
Free Weekly Ableton Live Rack #10: AfroDJMac Broken Bells Rack

6. AfroDJMac’s Drum Racks- I like this one because it gives a peak into how I treat my drums in my live performances. I got a couple of really nice emails from people expressing how it inspired them, and that to me is the ultimate compliment.
AfroDJMac’s Drum Tracks [Free Weekly Ableton Live Rack #16]

And, to celebrate the half-year anniversary, he’s got a new rack out, as well. Tom of the Waveformless Blog provides samples of the Ensoniq SQ-80 – hardly something we get too much of. Here, you get bits of “the “Hush” preset, as well as a sample of the synth powering down,” all mapped into a sampler. Video below:

Download and more information:
Ableton Live Rack #26: SQ-80 Hush [6 Months of Racks!] [afrodjmac.com]

And all of the free racks:
http://afrodjmac.com/category/free-ableton-instruments/

There have actually been a number of other free downloads this month for Ableton; more on that next week.

MOTU’s MachFive sampler, while perhaps not getting the kind of attention rivals from NI and Steinberg have, has had in its history some compelling features. Those features were in a multi-window interface, though, that not all of us loved – while I can’t find the review, I know when I covered it for Keyboard, I praised powerful editing features like the slicer but lamented the UI.

MachFive’s new UI looks radically different. The tabbed layout and modules and preset browsing all recall NI’s products, but there are new twists, too, like slick, readable waveform views, gorgeous EQ visualizations borrowed from MOTU’s DP DAW, and plenty of shiny. The results look far more usable, which means easier access to new sonic capabilities. And that’s good news, because it’s those features where things get interesting. Just a few highlights:

• Granular stretching and re-pitch sounds, licensed from IRCAM. I’m fairly certain this is the first time I’ve seen the Paris research center as a specific bullet point in product promo, but there are samples that sound terrific.
• New scripting which MOTU touts for modeling things like strumming and fingering on guitars – and lots of other things, too. New sound content will take advantage of the scripting features. And, oh, yeah, if you’re thinking that scripting is available elsewhere, CDM’s nerdier readers will like this: the scripting engine is now in Lua.
• Hybrid synth engine covering wavetable, subtractive, and FM synthesis. Earlier today, readers were talking about disappointment that Omnisphere, the massive sample-based synth, lacked samples. Well, here you go – here’s one strong sample/synth hybrid contender. (Omnisphere’s another animal, but that doesn’t make this any less interesting.)
• Modular effects architecture, convolution reverb mean greater ability to apply effects, from buses to individual oscillators and keygroups.
• Oberheim-style Xpander filter.
• Tons of ready-to-use MIDI scripting.
• Powerful arpeggiator and micro-tuner.

You also get 45 GB of sound content (wowsa), full-screen mode, an updated slicer/looper, and expansion of MachFive’s already-extensive support for third party samples, even including obscure old formats.

I’m intrigued: the intelligent new layer rule interface, the overhauled UI and sound engine, and then extensive micro-tuning and Lua scripting start to make me interested, even with intense competition in this arena. For experimental sound design, there’s some real potential here. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, pictures:

More:
http://www.motu.com/products/software/machfive/

http://www.motu.com/products/software/machfive/technology.html