We’re seeing all sorts of musical sequencer creations with grids, from software to hardware like the Monome and Yamaha Tenori-On. But, of course, the whole beauty of a grid is that you could map to it whatever you like. Maybe you want your sequencer to work differently than someone else’s sequencer.

CellDS, from the creator of the popular, glitchy sample-playing homebrew DS apps glitchDS and repeaterDS, is a new DS sequencer. Out of the box, it’s already very usable. Six sequence lines play back either one of the 175 included sounds or sounds you convert for use on the DS. You can customize the scale to whatever pitch and tuning you like. A 1.2 update announced yesterday added some bug fixes and volune sliders for each of the six “engines.” WiFi MIDI support isn’t available yet, but it’s coming.

If you’re willing to write a few lines of script, each one of those sequencers can be modified to your own purposes. If “scripting” sends you running for the hills, don’t fear. Lua is a dead-simple language, so writing a few lines of script can actually be far easier than deciphering a UI. (Hey, there’s a reason we all communicate using, you know, language.)

Here’s a really simple example from the developer documentation (for would-be Lua scripters):

Line #1: function stylus_newpress()
Line #2: set_pan(X)
Line #3: play_note(17-Y,16)
Line #4: end

In other words, if you press the stylus, you get a sound, setting pan with X on your stylus and pitch with Y. Pretty easy, right?

I’m quite eager to give this some quality time. If it could sync up via MIDI, of course, it’d become far more useful as part of a bigger setup. The Tenori-On is wonderful, but customization (as also found on Monome) is often better, especially as you can think of sequencers as a kind of score.

http://www.glitchds.com/about/cellsds/

cellDS 1.2 update

If you haven’t been following the Kore @ CDM site, we’ve been picking up some great tips from contributors Peter Dines and Eoin Rossney. This video has inspired me personally to dive a little deeper beneath the shrinkwrap on Kontakt 3, particularly with its scripting capabilities:

Creative Abuse of the Kontakt Sampler

Peter Dines’ tutorial on scripting and modulation in Kontakt 3 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Kontakt Tutorial Video: Creative Abuse with Modulation, Scripting

Kontakt 3 users, we’ll be curious to see what you do with that one.

User-Created, Free Modular Reaktor Powers in Kore

Also in the spirit of pushing tools past their usual capabilities, Eoin Rossney talks to Jonathan Adams Leonard, aka sleen, who has built an essential set of modular power tools for Kore, constructed in Reaktor. (He did this entirely for free as a user — nice.) What I especially enjoy about this is that Jonathan is upfront about things he felt like were missing in Kore 2 — but instead of just complaining about it, actually went and built it himself. As he tells the site:

Kore 2 was an ambitious release for any software team, so instead of complaining, I did what any enlightened engineer would do and built something. In some ways, there was no choice. NI created a semi modular matrix into which audio and midi objects can live simultaneously.

… The toolpack represents my preference to communicate where possible with solutions rather than suggestions or complaints.

I like that attitude. Eoin also walks through the toolpack tool by tool, with some tips from him and Jonathan for getting the most out of them, including some very powerful MIDI and audio capabilities. We have some other ideas for how to work with Kore live, and we’re learning from some folks who are using it out in performance, as well, so you can expect more on these issues soon.

Sound Design, Drum Machines, DSP

Also on the site: I find some percussion sound goodies from the So Percussion Ensemble by making use of the Kore Browser’s metadata options, and take a look at a pack full of retro drum machines from Crumar to Linn to Moog and Roland which could be a good use for your free sound pack. Make sure to authorize Kore this week if you have bought it, so you get the Massive synth free.

And lastly, while this is likely to convert even more of my weekends and evenings into sound programming time, I’m especially excited by Peter pointing to this set of tutorials on Core, the DSP geeks-only low-level sound programming engine deep in Reaktor:
She Blinded Me With DSP Science: Learn Core with Reaktor

That’s “Core” with a “C”, part of Reaktor, as opposed to Kore, a separate product. (Hey, I promised you this site wouldn’t just be about Kore.) Reaktor geeks, if anyone wants to join me on this brain-busting journey to the center of Reaktor, say so in comments and we can form an impromptu user group.

Stay tuned, we’ve got plenty more in the hopper for this site. Head over to kore.noisepages.com, or subscribe to the site’s RSS feed. And if you’re not seeing what you want, let us know in comments or contact us directly.

“If only Live could …”

Hard-core Live users dream of more than just an extra feature widget or two. They imagine a world in which they can hack and alter the way Live itself behaves. They want the ability to develop software that works with Live at a low-level. In short, what they want is an SDK. It’s a beautiful vision, but it would create challenges for Ableton: they’d have a whole new support burden, and any change to the program would mean having to update the SDK, in parallel. If only there were a way around this problem. If only you could use a scripting language like Python to make developing advanced Ableton Live tools easier. If only you could harness a whole community of programmers and users to undertake testing and support — you know, like have the source … but … open … like open-source.

Announced early this morning, LiveAPI.org is just that. And even if you’re not, say, a Python programmer, you may soon be reaping its benefits, whether using a more powerful clip setup in performance or hooking up a Monome controller.

LiveAPI.org

In short: it’s an API. It’ll run apps that the larger Live community could use, for tasks like using OpenSoundControl for control. It’s not affiliated in any way with Ableton, in that they’re not supporting it, but it is being done with their blessing (so they’re not about to shut it down). The project is open source. You can script in Python. You can share projects. You can expect some things will break on a regular basis — definitely keep around those old versions of Live, to be safe, when you upgrade. But you can also expect this to be a huge landmark for the bleeding-edge end of the Live community.

One bit of bad news: it is Windows-only for the moment, though the developers are Mac fans, and while Mac support seems to be more complex, it is planned — there’s just no date yet. (Okay, Mac Python gurus, go help them!)

Rob King (who did the Telnet bit, among other things) writes CDM:

I thought I should give you a heads up on a new project that I have been working on over the past couple weeks, and am pretty excited about. It’s all detailed in our release below, but basically Nathan Ramella, James Andrew, and I have uncovered a Python API in Ableton Live which gives you access to a nice chunk of the internals of Live. We have developed a couple apps so far such as a Telnet server to access the Python interpreter, and a easily extensible OSC Server to control live. And best of all, these new ways of controlling live just appear as extra remote devices in Live!

We all feel that this opens up Live significantly for developers, and hope to see some really interesting new interfaces for Live coming about. Rest assured I’ll be updating PlayLive to take advantage of this, and support features like automatically updating track/clip/controller names, and a new midi-loopback-less setup. No more need for a client and server side of PlayLive!

The exciting part, of course, is that last bit: what you can do with it: finally get around the lack of OSC support and make clips and MIDI routing more powerful. This seems like it might create a new developer/user relationship: users can actually experiment with new features that might eventually influence official development.

By the way, while all of you have evidently been making wishes, here’s an interesting tidbit about Nathan Ramella: “His next project is a custom VST for the Vestax VCI-100 with special focus on features for Ableton users.”