Native Instruments had already revealed that it would add new hands-on remixing capabilities to its flagship DJ hardware and software line. But today, we get to see precisely what form that will take, with a grid of light-up, colored pads that seek to make DJing with Traktor as much about remixing tracks as playing them.

Plenty of DJs and electronic musicians have been doing just that via a variety of methods. Some use samplers like the MPC, some hardware like Korg’s KAOSS line, some combine live and DJ sets in software like Ableton Live, and some even use custom creations built in tools like Max and NI’s own Reaktor. What sets Traktor Kontrol F1 apart is an approach that melds those sampling/remixing features with DJ-style decks, in something NI calls “Remix Decks.”

The function of the touch-sensitive, light-up LED colored pads is a bit different from similar offerings, as well. Any light-up grid of pads will recall hardware for Ableton Live and devices like the ground-breaking monome grid controller. As with the Ableton solutions, those F1 pads do indeed launch clips, as well as everything from full tracks to loops and one-shot samples (samples that play once without looping).

These triggers act as shortcuts, too, however, with settings like Punch mode, effects assignment, and sample muting mappable to the matrix of pads, too. There are 16 pads, as on iconic hardware like the MPC, but you can scroll through pages on an encoder. You can also trigger functions like Sync, Quantize, Sample Size, and Reverse. As such, the F1 is a bit like a compendium of everything we’ve seen in grid controllers. You could treat it like an MPC with more conventional samples, you could treat it like Ableton’s Session View of clips, or use it as a set of shortcut keys as we’ve seen in hardware like DJ Tech Tools’ MIDI Fighter – or some combination, or more than any of those things.

In case you don’t want to combine this with another controller – perhaps hoping to squeeze into cramped quarters in a DJ booth – there’s also a set of four volume faders and four filter knobs.

The release today is also about new functionality in Traktor Pro software itself. Delivered in the 2.5 release, the new build packs up to 64 slots for samples – much as you’d find in a sampler or something like Ableton Live – right in the DJ tool. These samples then play on up to four decks. The “Remix Deck” is differentiated from a normal “Deck” in that it adds beat grids, BPM, and key information associated with those samples – again, a bit as you’d find in looping software. (I’d utter the word Ableton again, but it’s really Acid and Propellerheads’ REX that introduced that idea.)

To me, it’s really the combination of those sampling-style functions with DJ-style decks that are interesting. The moment you bring the deck metaphor back, you’re re-entering a realm that’s more comfortable for DJs. On the other hand, all this remix business could finally bridge some of the gap between DJ software and production tools for producers who find themselves juggling both roles.

We won’t get shipping hardware until May 30, but I hope to talk to NI more about it before then. US$279 / 249 € is the full price. Given that comes with a full copy of Traktor Pro 2.5, I’m not sure if the software has become free or controllers are becoming standard dongles for software. There are also 4 GB of pre-remixed sound content to get you started. You existing users of the Pro hardware and software will get Traktor Pro 2.5 as a free update.

NI is assuming you’ll use this alongside a mixer or their own S4 and S2 controllers, but it’d be nice to try to only use this, I must admit. Oh, and there’s also a new bit of luggage for it for when you hit the road.

DMC champion (read: internationally-recognized) DJ Shiftee shows off the new instrument. I got to meet Shiftee through Dubspot, and the guy is an immensely-talented musician with an incredible sense of rhythm, as well as a supremely nice guy.

Now, I want someone standing behind me shouting me on as I work. It’d sound a little different.

“P.K.! P.K. here in X-Berg! Berlin, baby! It’s cold! It’s wet! You’ve got the granular reprocessor! You’re crunching up sensitive acoustic piano sounds! You’re making MeeBlip noises acid basslines, you’re coding now! You’re doing generative – what’s that? I think you’ve got a bug. You lost your 3D camera in your reactive Processing.

And now you’re blogging, blogging, go hit the spell check. Add in that Oxford Comma. My boys, Struck & White.

Publish that s***…”

www.native-instruments.com/f1

If you just want to fire up Renoise, the modern tracker/music production app, and not worry about the fact that its innards are hackable, you can. But for a reason why you might at least want to explore customization of this music tool, give the video above a look. It starts sleepy and slow … and then, part of the way through, as creator Dac Chartrand starts demoing the tool, something really special happens. (Anyway, that’s what I think. See if you agree.)

Dac explains his work, completed at the recent Montreal Music Hackday:

My Renoise hack was Grid Pie. One of the new trends in our community is the concept of a meta-interface. In essence, programmers use the Lua API to transform Renoise into something else, hide the Renoise window, and work with hardware interfaces connected to their own scripts. Three current examples: MPE, Step Sequencer Lauflicht and Duplex. Grid Pie is “yet another meta interface.” It turns Renoise into a live performance audio recombination machine. Still in alpha, but people were into the demo I gave. I got a lot of handshakes and positive feedback.

It’s an alpha, so your mileage may vary, but I’ll bet this whets some appetites for people who hadn’t yet realized the power of the Renoise API.

http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Grid_Pie

The iPhone’s glass touchscreen may be a thing of beauty, but despite its multi-touch capabilities, it would seem this device is incapable of responding to how hard you tap it. But the developers at Wave Machines Labs apparently didn’t want to take no for an answer.

The iGOG drum suite for iPhone provides drum pads and sample triggering in unique ways, most notably in its velocity-sensitive VelAUcity. How do you get velocity response from a device that’s supposedly not pressure-sensitive? Presumably there’s additional data in the touch events that makes this possible, but for now Wave Labs aren’t saying:

iGOG’s proprietary VelAUcity technology does the unthinkable and turns the iPhone’s screen into touch sensitive drum pads. Play loud, play soft, or play a full-blown crescendo on a crash cymbal, iGOG will capture every nuance of your performance. Just plug in your headphones and start playing.

Here’s the interesting twist: generally, when any of us say “iPhone,” what we really mean is “iPhone or iPod touch.” That’s not true in this case: “NOTE: VelAUcity is only available on iPhone devices. if you’re using an iPod Touch, VelAUcity is disabled.” That seems to suggest that the trick is the built-in mic, or at the very least some private API that’s iPhone-specific. (Audio triggering is most likely, as this app comes from a developer with drum replacement experience.) That would also suggest to me that you might be able to pull this off with non-Apple mobile devices and controllers in the future.

As a result, though, I can’t test it – I have only the iPod touch.

Unconvinced or uninterested? iGOG has some other approaches to how the small Apple handheld can be made more useful as a set of pads:

• Multi-positional pads that assign articulation based on location
• A mic trigger mode — which may be more useful than the VelAUcity. This mode assigns any nearby sound (like rapping a table) as a trigger. (That’s possible, of course, with a variety of software, but having the device itself be portable could be handy, so to speak.)
• Multi-samples, file management, and sequencing for doing more with the samples.
• No, real multi-sampling — 384 multisamples per drum!

Even if you’re skeptical of yet another iPhone app, I think there are some great ideas here for music software (mobile and otherwise). Here’s a look at the mic trigger mode in action:

Oh yes, and speaking of all this audio triggering, the same developer makes the superb Drumagog drum replacing plug-in. With pricing at US$199-379, you have to be pretty serious about drum replacement, but I know people who are who swear by it. There’s really nothing stopping you from whipping up your own solution, but Drumagog has a lot of niceties that make the process easier, quicker, and more powerful.

http://www.drumagog.com

If you are a Drumagog user, you can bring those files into iGOG. That makes this app all the more interesting – it can be both a fun toy for someone new to the idea, and a companion to a more serious (and more expensive tool).

More on iGOG:
http://www.wavemachinelabs.com/igog/