The KORG nanoSERIES has a rabid following among many Ableton Live users, and with good reason. The nanoPAD and nanoKONTROL street for about US$60, provide basic knobs + faders + transport (KONTROL) and pads and X/Y control (PAD), plus a fully-featured, cross-platform editor, but still fit in a backpack. They’re small enough to use in coach on an airplane.

Having to open Live templates, however, just to get the mappings you want is a big pain. So, instead I’ve created a basic set of MIDI Remote Scripts and Kontrol Editor templates for Mac and Windows, Live 6.x and later, and wanted to share them with you.

If you’re Windows-based and a big fan of the nano, I will say that I recommend you use something else altogether – the brilliant nativeKontrol. It’s a hell of a lot more sophisticated, gives you more control, and still requires no template:
nanoLive

Of course, there are some advantages to my (otherwise inferior) humble solution. It’s free, it works on Mac, it’s completely editable, and much of the idea was to provide an easy way of learning about MIDI Remote Scripting. (Check out the tutorial below.) Now, knowing CDM readers, I imagine someone out there can improve what I’ve done, so feel free to modify it and please send us a copy of what you’ve created!

korgnano_live.zip [Cross-platform archive; will update with a fancier release later on once I've gotten some feedback]

Ableton Live MIDI Remote Scripting How To: Custom Korg nanoSERIES Control

And, of course, read all the instructions…

Install instructions:

1. For full control, upload the templates to your Korg nanoSeries using the Kontrol Editor, via the Communication menu. (See your manual for more.)

2. Place the proper folder(s) in your User Remote Scripts folder, inside your user preferences folder (NOT the Live program folder). That’s something like (Windows Vista/7):

[Windows boot drive] > Users > [username[ > AppData > Roaming > Ableton > Live [version] > Preferences > User Remote Scripts

or (Mac OS)

[boot drive] > [Library folder] > Preferences > Ableton > Live [version] > User Remote Scripts

3. Start Ableton Live 6.x or later (restart if it was already running)

4. Select the device. Choose Preferences > MIDI/Sync, select Control Surface in the first column (nanoPAD or nanoKONTROL), and then its Input and Output ports. Finally, enable the Control Surface Input for Track and Remote. Note that you can have more than one control surface, so if you’ve got both nano’s plugged into a hub, set them both up!

Usage instructions

nanoKONTROL Scene 1 is for device control. The buttons act as triggers for pads in drum devices, and the faders control the eight Macro encoders in any selected Rack. You’re free to assign the scene 1 knobs to whatever you like.

Scenes 2-3 control tracks: the top button record arms tracks, leaving the button button free for whatever you like (mute, enable/disable). The faders control level on tracks 1-8, and knobs control the first send for each track.

Scene 4 is basically unassigned and ready for custom assignments.

Across all scenes, fader 9 is the master level. Transport buttons are automatically mapped and will work as expected.

Because there are so many controls free, I’ve created a sample template that pre-maps some parameters. In case you prefer to work that way, that template can get you started.

nanoPAD: The nano is much simpler, but I’ve set up the X/Y pad to dynamically trigger the first two parameters in a rack, making this much more fun to use with a Drum Rack. I like having access to all 8 Macros, so I’ve spread them across the four scenes. The pads will dynamically map to the first 16 pads, with 1-12 on scene 1 and 13-16 on the top of scene 2. There was some trickery to allow you to map these pads more or less as you see them in the software, beyond those first 16. I’ve provided alternative versions that allow easier continuous melodic control or keep CC 1 + 2 consistent across all four scenes.

(I didn’t say that very well, so if anyone’s feeling really motivated and wants to do a quick post or video of this or even modify them and make them better, feel free!)

To avoid accidentally triggering parameters with the X/Y pad, you can either turn flam/roll mode on all the time, or make sure instruments you want to play are added to racks first.

For more detailed instructions on Live setup and how MIDI Remote Scripts work, please see the separate tutorial!

Scripts for KORG nanoSERIES and Ableton Live by Create Digital Music is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Want to help motivate me to do more stuff like this? (I and others on Planet CDM really will — open to non-KORG, non-Ableton requests!)

Want to reignite interest in DJs who actually use their hands and fingers to slice up and juggle sounds? A cavalcade of “laptopists” is the ticket. Suddenly, at least in some corners, people are again interested in turntablism. It’s nice to see how a controller can integrate digital loop and cue points with a setup that still focuses on scratching. And Stanton’s SCS.3d turns out to be scriptable in the open source DJ software Mixxx. As some live PA musicians revert to a “push play” mentality, DJs can keep it interesting.

I’m generally not so interested in posting videos from manufacturers, but in this case it’s fun just watching DJ Jungleboy work behind a pair of Stanton SCS.3d controllers. These instruments seem designed for him. In a way, a lot of what he’s doing could easily be done with a sampler and drum pad, like an MPC setup, but then he’s got it mapped in a slightly unusual way, and the radial layout serves that nicely.

Oddly, what Jungleboy is doing is “DJing,” whereas some people with Traktor or Ableton Live supposedly doing “live PA” (some, not all) are basically just playing finished tracks – something you might more accurately term “iTunesing.” It’s a strange world, and what may ultimately happen is that we start to divide things between people who are making an effort to be musicians, good or bad, and people who aren’t.

These SCS.3d’s I see are now at a street price of US$200, which could make them a nice buy.

Open Source SCS.3d Scripting?

Need another reason to check out the SCS? All due respect to the folks at Serato, here’s a neat twist: you can script the SCS.3d with Mixxx, the open source DJ tool for Windows, Mac, and – yep – Linux. Serato is a terrific and solid tool, but if you’re looking for something a little different, Mixxx looks terrific.

This also demonstrates why choice makes controllers much more powerful, just as you’d want choices and versatility with a musical instrument. There’s a detailed post over at Mixxx’s blog from back in February. Basically, if you’re a power user, you can make the SCS.3d do any trick you like with its controllers, response, and lights. If you’re not, you benefit from the hard work DJ Pegasus has been doing to make this possible.

MIDI Scripting and the Stanton SCS.3d (Videos)

Now, I wonder if we’ll see this scripting applied to Akai’s APC40 soon, too, in Mixxx – my guess is yes, if that team gets their hands on one.

One thing’s for sure: the spirit behind turntablism, virtuoso manipulations of sound, lives on. And those of you just faking turning knobs? You’ll have to figure out how to live with yourselves.

You know the stereotype. “Synths” are expressive. “Samplers” are those things relegated to playing fake instruments.

But what makes synths fun to play as an instrument is the power they have over your sound, and the interactivity they provide. Peter Dines did a series for our Kore+CDM minisite at the end of last year that I think really illustrated how Native Instruments’ sampler Kontakt can be made a powerful performance tool – something that’s really fun to play. In doing so, he gets into the “s word” – scripting. When you hear “scripting,” I expect a lot of you run and hide, or wonder why the heck you’d want to write scripts when working on your music. The answer is, thanks to content that’s out there, you can make use of scripts for Kontakt without ever having to muck with code yourself. And if you do want to create your own scripts, a lot of the things you might like to do turn out to be quite simple.

What might a musical workflow look like with Kontakt? Peter answers that question with a beautiful, delicate-sounding music box patch. In this example, working directly in Kontakt allows him to start with a recorded sound and get into the manipulation phase very quickly. I know many folks use Ableton Live for the purpose, and Live is itself essentially a sampler turned into a host. But if you’re comfortable with that method, you may find the addition of something like Kontakt is all the more useful.

In the music box example, Peter looks at:

• Turning a recording into a sample
• Slicing and dicing with the Wave Editor
• Making use of presets in the Script Editor to get powerful features, then making quick modifications – no need to script from scratch

Slicing, Dicing, and Scripting a Music Box with Kontakt; Free Download

That’s a specific example. With Performance View, you can turn your sampled sounds into something that could work really well live – again, using scripts without scripting:

Learning Kontakt: Performance View and Scripting Power, Hidden in Presets

Finally, when you are ready for the power of scripts, Peter can get you started with that. With a couple of lines, you can retune, resequence, constrain to scale, pan, and randomize. That makes Kontakt a powerful compositional and performance tool.
Dive into Kontakt Scripting: A Gentle Introduction, plus Script Downloads

I hope we see scripting show up in more tools. (I’d lose my mind – in a good way – to see it in a future version of Maschine.) In the meantime, this gets you rolling.

And really, you don’t have to be an advanced sampler / sound designer / Kontakt user. I think you’ll find these tutorials to be exceedingly beginner-friendly. In fact, samplers have often gotten underused by us mere mortals. Sure, you probably don’t have time to do a massive, multisampled grand piano patch – and someone else has already done it for you. But to take a quick field recording and mangle it, samplers can be fantastic.

If you come up with anything based on these tutorials, we’d love to hear it.

Previously: Kontakt Creative Abuse and Scripting, Modular Reaktor Goodness, More On Kore@CDM

(Side note: yes, the Kore+CDM site has sprung back to life, on a new server. Enjoy!)

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

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.”

And what about Ableton? I’d actually heard some of the Abletons publicly bat around the idea of some sort of API, and the LiveAPI.org developers said as much. But the concerns about support seemed to hold the company back — and wanting to do something and actually being able to take the leap are two different things. The result, in fact, seems to be even better, because the entire source code for this project is open, and the whole endeavor is fully community-based and independent.

In the end, the developers got Ableton’s blessing. Rob writes, “We’ve actually been in touch with the CTO of Ableton, and they’ve actually been quite supportive in all this and even offered to answer our questions about the API. We also gave them a preview of our works in progress, and worked out a disclaimer with them. ”

The SDK includes:

• LiveOSC: A UDP network based Open Sound Control (OSC) interface that allows both sending and recieving of OSC messages through a Python callback system. Any task that can be performed with the Python API can be triggered as well as monitored. By Nathan Ramella and Rob King.
  LiveTelnet: Telnet server access the Python CLI for exploration and programatical manipulation of the Live Python API. By Rob King.
  Ableton Live API Documentation: Full documentation on whats available in the Ableton Live Python API reprinted with permission from Ableton AG. Original extraction from runtime objects by James Andrew.

  Thoughts about what this might mean for the Live community? Will (hopefully) Ableton continue to push for core implementations of important features relative to clips, MIDI routing, and hooks for future OSC devices? What might this mean given Ableton’s announcement of a partnership with Cycling ‘74 (in that case, an official one)? And what do you personally want to do with it, if anything? (Anyone happen to be a Python coder out there?)

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