While we’re having a weekend of Live tutorials, here’s another one for you, this time using your iPhone / iPod touch. Now, I’m not sure I’d want to do a whole set like this, necessarily — but here’s a thought: you could use this to do some sound checks out in the house instead of stuck behind your laptop listening through monitors. I’m sure there are other applications, as well. Enjoy!

The secret ingredient this time is i3L (pronounced “eye thrill”), the MIDI bridge app from VJ superstar group artificial eyes out of Turkey. They note that Mexican audiovisual collective Nortec are also making use of i3L (for video triggering).

See our iPhone/iPod touch music tool round-up from earlier this week for other goodies to load up on your device. To me, the iPod touch is the real bargain here; it’s going for under US$300, with used/refurb models going for a bit less — especially given you don’t need a mobile phone contract. Now if only there were a hard drive model…

Our friend Gustavo Bravetti is back with more Ableton Live tutorials. Looks like good fodder for working on some music making this weekend — especially if you’re not familiar with some of these techniques.

First up: cascading follow actions can break up endless looping repetition by triggering complex patterns. Gustavo throws in some "dummy clips" or "ghost clips" for adding additional automation.

Next, if you followed Gustavo’s bass drum tutorial with Operator and want to follow it up with some snares (and resonance), have a look at this:

More details at Gustavo’s iproducer column.

By the way, to anyone who wanted more "advanced" tutorials (or more beginning, for that matter — it’s all relative) — feel free to send us requests. Now I’m sort of intrigued by synthesizing drums; I’ve been chatting with a couple of our contributors here about Native Instruments’ FM8. The whole beauty of Operator is its simplicity, but maybe we should see if we can make an FM8 kit, as well. (And you’re not restricted to using Ableton’s own instruments in the Live Drum Rack, either.)

If you make stuff this weekend, or find tips of your own, let us know!

When we last joined our friend Gustavo Bravetti, Uruguay’s Ableton maestro, he was showing us how to glitch out with Live. Now he’s on Hong Kong-based DJ site djvox with a comprehensive set of Live tutorials. These are not necessarily the usual “how to use Live” fare. Instead, they focus on musical techniques, with Live as the tool — a means to an end, and a way to approach Live as an instrument, rather than a duplicate manual.

First up — one of my favorite tricks, which is building bass drum sounds in Operator. Not everyone loves Operator, but this is exactly why I like it for certain tasks: it’s a no-nonsense, quick way of building synths that drops nicely into a Drum Rack for quick DIY drum machines. And that pitch envelope and all-in-one time controls are especially handy.)

And for IDM lovers, here are some clever tricks for creating rhythmic variations using envelopes and follow actions. This one is especially worth a trip through the guide, even if you have different musical results in mind, because it’s an exceptional description of how follow actions work — one that’s actually better than the manual’s.

That gives you an idea of what Gustavo is working with, but be sure to check out the full guide for more details and step-by-step instructions, friendly even to beginners.

He even gives a shout out to the open-source 3D webcam MIDI controller for Windows we looked at last year.

Looking forward to more iProducer installments, Gustavo! And readers, now you know what to do with your evening / weekend / sick day you’re about to call in. Erm, if you’re not too busy building an arcade cabinet for Live first, that is.

iProducer: A Creativity Upgrade [Ableton Live tutorial on djvox]

(By the way, for digital crate-diggers: snooping around that Hong Kong site, you can buy downloads there internationally, though they wind up being a bit steep in US dollars.)

To all of our readers here at Create Digital Music, thank you for 2007. It’s been fantastic to sit at the helm of CDM and get to hear from all of you, from news tips to musical and technological projects, and get to meet you out in the world (at Macworld San Francisco, Maker Faire San Mateo, Handmade Music events here in New York with Etsy and Make, in Chicago at a demo swap, and even in Australia at a coffee shop).

I’m wrapping our own 2007 in review story, but which stories did Webizens choose as the most significant? Here’s 2007 by the numbers, according to our server. First, the most visited stories of the year:

Top Ten Stories By Visit

The top ten start out with Yamaha’s unveiling of the long-awaited TENORI-ON instrument, a tool for mobile recording, a terrific free tool for Windows, and an unusual DJ take on mobile music players. Apple’s Logic Studio manages not to sneak into the top ten, I suspect because it can’t compete with apps that run on two platforms instead of one. But Reason 4 falls just short of matching CDM reader favorite Ableton Live:

PAiA 2 Transistor “Ribbon” Kit from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

PAiA, the electronics kit creator beloved by music DIYers, has a fantastic, simple kit that’s likely to appeal to beginners and kit lovers alike. The kit is a “2-Transistor Ribbon Kit,” and it’s the basic circuit for ribbon controllers for music, of the sort found in commercial products like Kurzweil keyboards and invented by Paul Tanner as the “Tanner-in” — the same instrument used in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.”

Having a kit that gives you a fundamental circuit, adaptable to a variety of projects, is cool already. But PAiA went further: they took the entire circuit, printed it on a business card, and used basic punch holes so you don’t eve have to solder. Just twist together connections, and you can make the “ribbon” itself using a pencil. (4B-8B softness gives you enough graphite for it to work really well; check your local art supply store.)

Best of all, the cost to you is nothing. Write “Free kit for CDM readers” on the back of a self-addressed & stamped envelope, send it to PAiA Corporation, and our friends there will send you a free kit:

PAiA Corporation
2201 North Lamar Boulevard, Suite 200
Austin, Texas 78705 USA

They’ll even send it internationally, minus parts (see complete details). You can include some spare change if you want to help them out.

What I really love about the kit is that it’s super portable and easy to use with people who have no electronics experience whatsoever. Soldering irons can scare people, and that means extra room for assembly and equipment that’s tough to access. With this kit, you can bring a little bag of parts and rock out with just about anyone. So if you’ve read about crazy projects on this site and never tried one yourself, this is a great way to start. And likewise, if you’re one of those people making crazy projects, you can use this kit in schools, clubs, parties, whatever. I took them along to our most recent Handmade Music night in New York, and the results were terrific. (People picked it up with almost no instruction; see the video at top. That’s my partner Jennifer as hand model and assistant instructor.) We hope to repeat that again in NYC, Chicago, and LA; if you do an event of your own, let us know.

Simple Electronic Kit #1: 2-Transistor Ribbon Kit [PAiA Corporation]
Assembly Instructions

All good fun, but what if you want to make a more serious ribbon controller? Good news:

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!)

Soundscape #1 from Umcorps on Vimeo.

Tired of waiting for Spore, the upcoming Will Wright game that will feature organic, generative music by musical legend Brian Eno instead of … looping … the same 8 bars of audio … over and over again? Want to explore your own oblique strategies in music making and create evolving generative compositions? noatikl could be for you.

Co-creator Pete Cole, who evidently found us by googling Eno, wrote us last week with the details:

intermorphic (http://www.intermorphic.com) yesterday launched the noatikl generative music engine.

You can think of noatikl as a "spiritual successor" to the (no-longer available) Koan generative music engine, which of course was used extensively by none other than Brian Eno; who you mentioned a while back in the context of Spore. Brian created his seminal "Generative Music 1" with the Koan system back in 1996.

As you’ll see from the site, noatikl has been created from scratch, is Windows and Mac compatible, and is available in a variety of plug-in variants. There are also quite a few demo and tutorial videos available on both myspace and vimeo.

noatikl Overview

umcorps Videos on Vimeo (tutorials + musical examples)

Pete Cole Videos on Vimeo (still more tutorials + musical examples)

The price tag is set at US$179 (standalone) to $249 (suite) US$99 (standalone non-commercial) to $199 (suite commercial) under a new pricing scheme, with academic pricing available. I have to say, even if you’re not interested in buying a new tool, anyone with a passing interest in the possibilities of generative music will want to spend a little time with the videos — some fascinating ideas in there.

Windows and Mac tutorials (in HD, no less) after the jump. Thanks for the couple of tips I got on this; back from Australia and catching up now!

Previously:

Brian Eno, with Wright on Spore and Generative Systems, Sound, and Paintings

Brian Eno to Create Generative Soundtrack for Spore; Algorithmic Productivity Busting Follows

(I think CDM should issue a "Seeds, Not Forests" t-shirt.)