It’s round, it’s mechanically-resistant, it’s tangible, it supports multi-touch and gestures. Yep – it’s the turntable, and outdoing it would mean reinventing the wheel, literally. And so it is that more than a few Ableton fans have wondered how they might work vinyl into their software axe of choice.

Ableton and digital vinyl vendor Serato have announced they’re doing “something,” and then announced at the beginning of October that an announcement would be announced on January 14, 2010 at NAMM. Oh, and they said it will “unleash your creativity,” which sounds good. (It’s better than, say, “Ableton and Serato’s creative partnership will unleash two dozen angry badgers,” or “if you own Ableton Live, what we will say in 2010 is that we will unleash an unspeakable, nameless evil, known only to the ancients, which shall bring about the endtimes.”)

Here’s the surprise – you likely won’t have to wait for Serato to get integrated digital vinyl control. It’s already working with Ms. Pinky, and that means more choice, more DIY possibilities, and a broader variety of ways to integrate turntables and Live.

You see, there’s this little thing called Max for Live, which allows the use of Max patches inside Live as seamless instruments and effects. And one of the best – if least-known – vinyl control systems out there has long featured Max integration: Ms. Pinky. People have already made use of VST plug-in integration, but because Max for Live also connects to the Live API for control of Live itself, the functionality of the two can be expanded.

Via our friend Luthier.Lab, we get a first look at the Ms. Pinky plug-in. And this should be just the beginning, as Ms. Pinky and its Max/MSP support could be a great construction kit for building your own solution – something that may not be possible with Serato.

Ms.PinkyforLive [Luthier.Lab - en Español]
Google Translate (which has some very funny ideas about how to translate Spanish)
Discussion on the Ms. Pinky forum

While you ponder the possibilities, it’s time for a video from Daito Manabe demonstrating that not all turntablists sound quite the same.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

Marvin Suggs and his Amazing Muppaphone was just way, way ahead of his time. But if you haven’t already seen it making the rounds, you owe yourself a little video watching break to check out Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs, Inc., an audiovisual dreamscape in which disembodied heads form electronic drum heads and spin on turntables. The work is produced by Chris Cairns of Partizan Lab, who has a striking resume of commercial spots and worked with folks like Lady Sovereign.

The good folks of Motionographer get the scoop on the production background, and interestingly note that the music is scratching away in Scratch Perverts’ weapon of choice, Serato. Be sure to spot that story, as well as the official film site:

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. [Motionographer]
http://www.neurosonicsaudiomedical.com/

If you have any interest in video turntablism, you won’t want to miss dj rndm’s detailed review of the Video-SL by Serato, which allows fluid scratching of video from the Serato digital DJ solution. Thanks to Todd, Josh Randall, and everyone else who sent this our way.

And yet no one has really produced modern Muppaphone technology. Shame. (Hint: get some friends, some socks, and don’t forget googly eyes.)

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.

Following on from our previous Game On Set. Sam will be kitted out with Serato’s Video-SL (review on CDMo), and I’ll be bringing a brace of live camera feeds with the Vixid VJX16-4 video mixer (minisite | on CDMo).

Last time it went down something like this:

Sampology at Game On – AV Turntablist Set (Part 1) and (Part 2) from Herovision on Vimeo.

Video-SL is fantastic fun, and as a visualist it’s somewhat humbling to discover what a turntable worrier can do when their spinning plastic discs suddenly have power over vision as well as sound. Tune in tomorrow to see.

To sweeten the deal, we’ll be preceeded on stage by Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation) and Matt and Yug (of Australian Gamer), who will have a screening of their show Game Damage, and then talk about games rather a lot.

Using web production studio Mogulus, the stream will be viewable on the CDMedia channel, and there’s a countdown and embedded player at Herovision.

Serato announced yesterday that they’ll be joining Ableton in a “creative partnership.” It’s not too hard to parse what this means from the announcement, which notes that Ableton Live’s strength is production and real-time remixing and beats, and Serato Scratch Live is about digital vinyl control, library management, and scratching. (Or, to say it even more simply: Serato is built around digital vinyl metaphors, and Live around remixable digital clips.)

Serato and Ableton announce a creative partnership [Serato News]
Ableton and Serato to work together [musicradar.com]

In fact, Ableton CEO Gerhard Behles spells out what this will mean fairly explicitly:

“Ableton and Serato take different approaches to modern musical performance”

Okay, so, Ableton fans worried that Live is going to just become a DJ tool, or Serato lovers who don’t want Scratch Live assimilated into Ableton, fear not.

Ableton has never had an answer for the DJ who wants vinyl control, and rather than try to emulate what Serato do so well, we simply make sure that our products work well together.

Got that? We hear DJs regularly complain about Ableton Live, that there’s not proper scratching control over waveforms, that you can’t see more than one audio waveform (”deck”) at one time, that it lacks vinyl control, and so on. But obviously, at least some of those metaphors don’t jive terribly well with Live’s clean, signature interface, which wasn’t built to do these things in a traditional way.

Sounds to me like the most likely result is some kind of Serato deck that runs inside Ableton. I feel safe in speculating about this because I haven’t heard anything from Ableton about this. And there’s cause for that, as well, as many Ableton Live users do Live PA, laptop sets with Live, and then turn elsewhere (often to Serato, if not to rival Traktor) for more conventional DJ sets. Regardless, those of you who could care less about conventional DJ features are likely to find this comforting news: Ableton probably isn’t going to muck around with your software to graft them in.

I think this could amp up the NI – Ableton rivalry; Native’s DJ division has been further beefing up their Traktor Scratch options. This comes right on the heels of NI’s own Traktor Scratch Pro offerings, but since I’ll be in Berlin by this time tomorrow and that’s a released product, I expect to talk to NI directly about that. (Of course, I’m horribly biased in that I’d personally rather hear sets with people doing strange things with Live and Reaktor, but that’s me.)

That said, clearly only Serato and not Native could partnership with Ableton, because Serato had “Live” in the name of their product. (Perhaps that was an early sign of Ableton envy?)

All of this probably reminds some of you of another strategic Ableton partnership, with Cycling ‘74, makers of Max/MSP. When announced some time ago, the expectation was that some product would come of that. We haven’t seen that product yet, but sometimes these relationships take time to bear fruit. I wonder.

Incidentally, what gets us most excited about Serato round these parts? Visual vinyl. See the Create Digital Motion hands-on review.

Updated: I should add, it is possible to add DJ capabilities to Live now by using a DJ host that functions in plug-in mode, as a couple of commenters note. Pinko’s Max/MSP-based “Pinky Pluggo” is one option; another is Image Line’s Deckadance. Both allow you to do vinyl control, too; Deckadance will work with any controller. I’m particularly fond of Deckadance’s absurd-sounding effects, which I think could add the sort of digital grunge to a DJ set or loop that will appeal to a lot of the Ableton-using crowd. And these sorts of tools are shipping now.

But of course, we really have no idea what it is exactly that Ableton and Serato are planning, whether it’ll be a new Live instrument or some other form of integration.

Stanton has released the details of its new DaScratch touch controller, and I have to admit, it looks pretty terrific. About as far as anyone has gotten with a smart touch controller is an X/Y pad; this controller, by contrast, defines different areas of the touch surface for different functions and provides LED feedback so you can see what you’re doing. “Scratching” alone doesn’t really make sense in the computer world, even with DJ software, so you get lots of different functions for live performance. I think this may be as big a hit with Ableton Live users and laptop musicians as DJs.

Updated: Richard Devine video above now restored.

The specs:

• 5 touch sliders, 3 of which are switchable via preset
• 1 rotary touch controller (switchable)
• Loads of buttons: 4 hardware backlit switches + 10 + 9 switchable buttons
• USB bus powered
• Windows, Mac compatibility (Linux should work, too; it’s class compliant — you just miss out on the included software app)

What can you do with those touch areas? Stanton suggests scratching, scrubbing, navigation, cueing, looping, sampling, pitch shifting, effects, and the like, but of course, you can hook it up to whatever you like, and for our friends building crazy Pd and Reaktor soundmakers, this could be even more fun.

By switching modes, you can shift the kind of gestures you’re using on the center touch area, selecting three vertical faders, or one vertical fader and a circular touch area, or one fader and buttons. That’s in addition to the buttons and fader areas elsewhere. I’m impressed that in a small space, there’s a significant set of controls. If you want more, you can even snap together multiple units.

The clever addition is that, on top of the hardware, you get a software app called DaRouter. Dumb name, but functional stuff: built on Bome’s MIDI Translator, the software makes it easy to swap between presets for Traktor and Serato or select a generic/Ableton preset. You can’t edit the software presets directly, but you can make your own in MIDI Translator. See the DaRouter page for more.

The best part? Our friend Richard Devine demoing the unit in the video at top. I’m sure Richard can do something a lot more out there with this as the controller, though.

Lots more at the product page:

SCS.3D: DaScratch

Pricing: US$299 list
Availability: Unknown

Stanton wants this to be part of some giant “system,” by which they mean they want you to buy more things from Stanton. I’ll leave that up for you. On its own, this looks like a potentially wonderful controller; I’m eager to try it and see if the hardware build and touch quality delivers.

Previously: Stanton to Release Touch DJ Controller; Surface One, Thunder, Reborn?

… and scratching:

The review isn’t without the odd caveat: for one, you’ll need to pluck down a couple grand to get the complete setup because the Rane mixer employed is required, though rndm ultimately says that’s worth it for the integration payoff. And available transitions and effects are limited in range and prefer to run on dedicated GPUs (think MacBook Pro, or a PC laptop with a dedicated NVIDIA or ATI card). But as you can see, the results are incredibly slick, and there’s no question video on vinyl now has a tool to beat. Check out the complete review and technical details on our visualist sister site:

Hands-on Review: Serato’s VIDEO-SL for Visual Vinyl Turntablism

Some readers on this site — wisely, perhaps — cautioned last year against doing a second "Create Digital …" site for interactive visuals, live visuals, and VJing. But to us, the connection between musical performance and technology and visual performance and technology is really essential. I’m pleased to announce that now, following a two-week sojourn on the Australian content, we’re finally kicking createdigitalmotion.com into high gear and lining up what we want the mature site to be. If you haven’t been reading lately, here’s a bit of what you’ve missed:

• Video scratching with Serato: At long last, one of the leaders in digital control vinyl has added video scratching as well as audio via a new plug-in called VIDEO-SL, now in beta; we’re planning our own test but already have one hands-on.
• We’ve got a big list of video and visual goodies we like. Is it a practical holiday shopping guide? Erm … bits of it are. It’s all drool-worthy, at least. And you’ll really want vintage, gigantic planetarium projections. Lay out some cots, and play that four hour ambient electronic set you’ve been working up.
• Want to learn this stuff yourself? vade has some nice online workshops and tutorials for working with visuals in Pure Data (Pd) and Processing. Both also work well for music, so if you want to dabble in custom-programmed audiovisuals (I swear, anyone can do it with some dedication!) this could be a good place to start. We’ve also got tips for inexpensive high-speed photography and not one but two CDMo tutorials on the free Quartz Composer tool in OS X Tiger and Leopard. See Keith’s report on what’s new in the Leopard release of Quartz Composer, plus a beginner-friendly tutorial for driving 3D cubes with audio courtesy VJ Kung Fu’s momo the monster. The latter should be ideal for whipping up some quick sound-driven visuals for your band; you can even host those visuals in the live music host Rax. Incidentally, our CDMo New Years’ Resolution: make more work, post more tutorials.
• Open jamming for visualists: Just as with music, the best way to practice your chops and share your work is to get out of your bedroom/studio and out to an open jam. We’ve got a full report on the Perth, Australia Plug and Play, an ideal example of how such an event could work, as part of their Byte Me! Festival I attended earlier this month. See the video below, and watch for more video soon – Jaymis and I are editing hours of video footage now.

Plug N Play – ByteMe Festival – Perth from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

If you want to keep up-to-date on Create Digital Motion, you can add the feeds for the site:

RSS Feed (or subscribe via email)

Create Digital Motion Flickr pool

We’re also posting weekend inspiration each week, back next weekend post-holiday break.

From the whole CDM team, very happy holidays. (Yep, New Year’s Eve is among them — we’ll be cracking on 2007-in-review!)

My favorite: a tour of the Superbooth, an exhaustive mini-expo of modular music tech.

Superbooth @ Hispasonic

Plus another look at the Arturia Origin synth:

In the DJ category, Rane shows off Serato Scratch, which, despite our chatter about Native Instruments vs. Stanton, remains a very popular choice:

Serato Scratch @ Hispasonic

Drumagog is a promising-looking drum replacement plug-in; drum triggering is an area in which we haven’t seen a whole lot of action lately, and the fact that this has potential for driving visuals means you may see it soon on both CDMusic and Motion.

Drumagog @ Hispasonic

And finally, Novation’s cute new NIO 2|4 audio hardware, which I’ll be covering properly later today.

Novation NIO 2|4 @ Hispasonic

Updated: One more from Hispasonic: the Dexter control surface. There are definitely some new widgets that were not on the Lemur.