The Covert Seq – Creating patterns and Presets from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

The Covert Operators and Bjorn Vayner have become my favorite go-to source for wild Ableton Live hacks. And even before the release of Max for Live, Bjorn has built some terrific, simple step-sequencers using Live’s Racks feature. That’s just the Racks feature – no Max patches or hidden features anywhere to be found. Sure, I suppose the clip view itself can be seen as a kind of step sequencer, but this gives you a unique way of generating sequences.

If you just want to begin playing with step sequencing in Live, Bjorn has a new download, aptly called The Covert Sequencer, as seen in the video at top. It’s free, it’s fun, it celebrates the 5th Anniversary of Covert Ops and the 10th of Ableton Live (good grief!), and it’s all voodoo built with dummy clips and MIDI effects.

Full post, downloads, and video tutorials:
The Covert Seq [The Covert Operators]

If you want to try your hand at the ninja skills behind all of this, Bjorn posted a screencast back in August revealing his secrets:

Want to make a splash among the aficionados of digital sound? Releasing a software instrument emulating a broad collection of vintage digital synthesis chips from game and computer systems seems to do the trick. See my look at that software, and just as importantly, the chips that inspired it.

Within days of the release of Plogue’s Chipsounds, we have a couple of fair reviews of the new tool. Already got Chipsounds? Plogue’s David Viens has released screencasts showing you how to use it. Curious about other ways to explore vintage 8-bit sound? We’ve got that, too, in samples, hardware, and even SuperCollider code.

Reviews are in

Torley has an extensive video review – amazing stuff for something just days old – shown above. Gisle Martens Meyers has a review, too, on the blog Ugress. One complaint is that the plug-in is multi-timbral, rather than requiring different instances. In turn, automation is in the form of MIDI Control Changes, not parameters, since parameter automation really doesn’t deal with multi-timbral plug-ins. But all in all, you can get a lot from both reviews, plus a look at how the software works. There’s also a sense of where the software could go in future updates.

Plogue Chipsounds makes chiptune & video game sounds easy [Torley Lives]
Chipsounds Plugin Chip Sounds [Ugress]

The discussion of Chipsounds has also brought other efforts to resurrect vintage, 8-bit sounds.

AudioMulch 2.0 live patching screencast from AudioMulch on Vimeo.

Wonderful things come from Australia. Developer Ross Bencina has released AudioMulch 2.0, the audio patching environment, now on both Mac and Windows.

Audiomulch is all pretty in black now with a new UI. But why is it special? AudioMulch has always been distinguished in its quick workflow, its ready-to-use objects that allow sophisticated patches with relatively simple structures, and its idiosyncratic soundmakers. The Metasurface multi-parameter controller is also a favorite.

The price is higher, which may scare away some – US$189, or $89 upgrade. There’s a 60-day trial that you can try out.

But the best part of this launch is that, instead of releasing a flashy demo with pans over girls in bikinis or booming drum beats and type flying through that says something like “THE FUTURE OF MUSIC IS NOW … HOLD THE SOUND IN YOUR FIST … BE THE MUSIC … WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?”, they just released a video showing someone making a piece of music. (What a concept!)

The video at top is a live-patching video, and it really reveals how, powerful as many interactive music environments may be, having some objects that get straight to what you want musically makes a real difference. (That’s something to keep in mind even as you create macros or code in other environments, too, I think.)

I like the idea of other people doing live-patching videos that work as music and not just tech demos, not only in AudioMulch but whatever your tool of choice may be.

If you give AudioMulch 2 a try, let us know what you think.

http://www.audiomulch.com

PEMF Lessons: Bidule – Direct Cabling & Your Default Layout from Primus Luta on Vimeo.

The DJ Booth at Bily Kun where Bidule was first conceived.

Ed.: Music creation is all about the special relationship we have with certain, powerful tools. And one app that gets very little attention is unquestionably the deep but elegant modular patching environment Plogue Bidule. CDM turns to power user Primus Luta to kick off a series on learning this tool, starting with an exclusive interview with Bidule’s creators. And if the interview sounds, at times, more than a little pro-Plogue in bias, make no mistake: this is love. Primus Luta takes it away, as we look forward to his upcoming how-to series. -PK

In the modular future, the Bily Kun will be a leading tourist attraction for Montreal. Patrons will come with laptops tucked under their arms sporting fork bomb t-shirts. The bartenders by then will be used to answering the question only tourists ask with a slight wave of the hand toward seats on the other side of the bar. The tourists will follow that wave to the ultimate destination of their pilgrimage, open their laptop, and broadcast their location to bidulers everywhere, before reenacting some sort of virtual cabling ritual to mark their presence at the conception place of Plogue.

“It all started what seems a long time ago,” Sebastien Beaulieu, Plogue co-founder tells me. “David (Viens of Plogue) was coding a few VST plugins to add new toys to Ross Bencina’s AudioMulch. We would meet up one evening a week to code a few cool bits then head up for beer afterwards at the minimal techno pub in Montreal called Bily Kun, where most of the ideas for the future came into place.”

It was the late 1990’s. Modular audio was just coming out of a clumsy adolescence. Miller Puckette rewrote his then decade old MAX software in a new open source format to create Pd. David Zicarelli founded Cycling ‘74 to continue development of the original MAX codebase beginning with a new audio processing engine – MSP. Ross Bencina released the first of thirty six public beta versions of AudioMulch. It was a developing frontier, still early enough that the horizon couldn’t completely be made out. And while working on what would be the first Plogue product, the VST plugin ReBuilder, what would become the Plogue team started envisioning a horizon they could paint themselves.

chromedecay studio look: TouchOSC with Ableton Live and BigSeq from chromedecay on Vimeo.

New Year’s Resolution: do cool new stuff. In celebration of the coming of 2009, I’ve got a set of tutorials to post here on createdigitalmusic and createdigitalmotion, so you can get a jump start on the new year by learning some new skills and making new music and visuals. First up: our friend Bill Van Loo has a great video tutorial on working with touch control on an iPod touch or iPhone.

The ingredient list here:

• TouchOSC, one of a handful of superb new touch controllers on the iTunes app store that supports the flexible, forward-thinking OpenSoundControl protocol. TouchOSC’s edge? Ready-to-use, clever, music-oriented control layouts.
• Ableton Live, a good choice because of its live-playing emphasis and solid hosting features
• BigSeq, Audio Damage’s fantastic analog-style sequencer plug-in
• OSCulator, the glue that holds the rest together by intelligently

In fact, even if you don’t have an Apple mobile gadget, you may find this useful: the OSCulator software on the Mac used for control processing can work with a variety of controllers. If you don’t want to spend $200+ on an iSomething, you can spend a few bucks on a Wii controller and run with that, or grab a SpaceNavigator (also very affordable) or Wacom tablet. (OSCulator is Mac only; PC users may want to check out the likes of GlovePIE.)

chromedecay studio look: TouchOSC with Ableton Live and BigSeq