Our friend and interactive hero Gustavo Bravetti must have been inspired by all the talk of hexagonal sequencers, because he’s come through with a brilliant prototype of a new interactive sequencer design. He writes:

I just wanna share mi first very unfinished and at ultra alpha stage, hexagonal sequencer prototype!

Between many things, I have planed to include many automatic scale definition tools, follow actions, you’ll can easily change the hexagon density, and multi-touch support via IR (wiimote or cams) is planned also.
This is just a sneak peak.

For an “alpha” version, as you can see, there’s already a lot of goodness going on. The visuals and interaction are powered by vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial use (and otherwise affordable) Windows-only patching language. Max is great, but vvvv is capable of some very powerful features of its own, including particularly nice hooks into Windows’ DirectX rendering engine.

vvvv Site + Wiki + Community

More on vvvv at Create Digital Motion, as it’s most often used on the visual side:
http://createdigitalmotion.com/tag/vvvv

As with so many of these things, vvvv’s community is more valuable than even the tool itself; we’re seeing lots of work on doing clever things with the environment. And vvvv has gotten some powerful music features like VST plug-in support, meaning you could build your sequencer in vvvv and skip something like Live altogether.

Previously on this topic:
Music on the Game Grid: Interactive Arpeggiators Al-Jazari, reacTogon
Alternative Sequencers: Elysium Generative Mac App and the Joy of Hex

And for more of the Awesomeness of Gustavo (pay close attention to that interview, especially):
Live + FM8 = Drum Kit Love: Free FM8 Drum Kit Download
Weekend Inspiration: Ableton Live Follow Actions, Dummy Clips, Making Snares
Interview: Gustavo Bravetti, Playing Music with Light and Interactive Gloves

We asked to see inside the Ableton Live sets you use in live performance, and you’ve responded with an overwhelming variety of responses. There are plenty of very practical submissions, from beginners and advanced users alike, which should give us a real sense of the ways in which people are playing Live as an instrument. Naturally, there are also some more unusual entries.

At top: Mark Gutierrez has used the Live arrangement grid as a palette for animated pixel art, with 8-bit game characters from Space Invaders and Super Mario Brothers dancing across the screen. At bottom: Manuel Palenque has connected Live to the patching environment and 3D visual tool vvvv for live, animated visuals. (Manuel, maybe you can tell us – do you output those visuals to a screen, or use them as feedback during your set?)

Insane examples, yes, but they do illustrate what’s possible. Videos after the jump.

Keep your Live sets coming. Grab a screenshot or video and send to:

• our Live set Flickr group or
• email to pictures (at) createdigitalmusic.com

vvvv, the free-for-non-commercial-use patching environment on Windows, already has a cult following among visualists. Now, it’s looking more interesting for music, too, with the 4.0 beta 17 release.

• VST plug-in support for adding audio/music instruments and effects
• Multichannel waveplayer
• eCue Lighting Control Support

In case you haven’t worked this out yet, what this means is that you can now add powerful visual interaction with a VST plug-in. That could be a huge boon to audiovisual shows. Max and Pd (among others) have had this ability for some time, so it’s not revolutionary as an idea – but it is nice to get this feature in this powerful, eye-candylicious app. (Thanks to Bjorn from vvvv for the heads-up.)

I may have to try out Kore, since Kore runs easily as a VST and hosts other instruments / effects in a way that can work live. FL Studio could be interesting, too, for the same reason – and, like vvvv, has a solid following as a Windows exclusive.

Details:

http://vvvv.org/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=3&postId=256
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=Change+log
http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php?page=VST
http://www.ecue.de/products/interfaces/butler.html

vvvv Tag @ createdigitalmotion.com

vvvv also recently added the ability to develop your own objects (“nodes” in vvvv speak). Development looks unusually easy, with baked-in C# support, so there’s good stuff happening in vvvv-land in general.

Everywhere I go, people bug me about when they’ll see better support for OpenSoundControl (OSC) in applications. Why use fancy-schmancy OSC when MIDI does the job? Well, OSC supports higher resolutions of data when needed, maps variables elegantly (when you’re controlling something like visuals and descriptions like musical pitch or filter cutoff make no sense), and plays nice over networks and with multiple computers. In other words, go ahead and use MIDI when it does the job — but we need something else when it doesn’t.

Here’s one way to get OSC from your favorite app: hack it in. Spotted today as Gav tells Create Digital Motion about gluing together Isadora and Ableton Live, the OSCGlue plug-in is a simple VST insert that listens to MIDI and sends OSC.