Ableton Live 8 Looper & Korg nanoPAD

The music of Yoav is heavily loop based, due to the fact that every sound is either produced by his guitar or his voice. To accomplish this he has several looping delay pedals; In some of his videos on youtube you can clearly see the Boss RC-20XL. These pedals are fun to play with because you can loop and overdub anything placed into the input, then improvise over the loop creating nearly any sound possible. Recently Keyboard Magazine ran a 2-part article on using multiple loopers with live, but their instructions are a little unclear unless you're familiar with Live.

Over the weekend I've experimented and played around alot and produced this Live 8 set, and nanoPAD preset. I don't suggest using the nanoPAD with your feet, but for beatboxing in the style of BeardyMan this will get you there. To get instructions, tips, and download the Live set w/ nanoPAD preset, please continue reading.

Geek Gear-Day 2k9

Yea-haw... yesterday was geek-day 2k9, and this time I had a bit more dough and a bit more luck... My shopping list was simple:

1. Drum Sticks
2. Bow & Rosin

But I had a good time, and a bit of good luck... Found some decent deals (spent a little over $100 on alot of quality goods)

Drum sticks & Bow are going to be put to use for sound-design, I just need to wrap the sticks other ends to make them mallets (yarn & bouncy balls)... Need to figure out the methodology behind bowing, rosin & friction, expecially since I have absolutely no intent on using it on string-instruments.

Also I aquired a rig that hooks up 3 mics on one stand, which is going to let me use my DanElectro Free Speech Talk-box along with my mic, and the opportunity to connect my telephone-mic too!

But the pièce de résistance is the Korg nanoPad, It's so easy to set-up and use, although if I get other nano-series controllers I'll have to invest in a powered USB-hub, because my computers mobo doesn't play nice with my front-facing USB ports. Korg has included some other goodies, drum programs, a discount for Ableton Live, and a USB A to USB mini-A cable. This thing is beautifully responsive to velocity, feels as nice as an MPC, it's wafer-thin and the roll & flam are controlled by the X-Y pad in some pretty fun ways allowing for amazing controllerism effects with no software setup. The software for the controller allows an insane amount of tweaking what everything does in all 4 scenes, and you can even drag & drop the order of the scenes, very sexy for $60.

I recently downloaded CamStudio so I'll post some production tutorials fairly soon (I promise.) next big purchase will be a camera, so I can show some non-computer-related sound-fun too!

Cheap DualShock

I recently got a chinese knock-off USB DualShock Controller (like what's used with playstation) and I've been playing with that and rejoice (you can download it here) I've been using it with Ableton Live pretty much like they show in this forum post.

The main reason I got the thing was so that my wife and I can play with some NES emulators and other questionably free things, but Nesticle is stupid and doesn't recognise it. Fortunately for me autohotkey allows access to the joystick to emulate key-strokes, which after a bit of coding makes it bearable, but I need to take some time to perfect the script & make it work 100%

With Ableton Live's key-mapping ability I might just do-away with rejoice, if only I could figure out a decent way to send the actual joystick data to Live in a way that works well.

Originally when trying to get the DualShock controller to work, I figured I would use PureData's [hid] object. Unfortunately I was on a windows machine, which uses [hidin], which is nowhere near as functional as hid, so none of the buttons would register anything.With hidin the D-Pad, joysticks & select/start were the only buttons working; but with hid they all worked perfectly. maybe I'm just missing some minor detail, but I'm definately not using OSC just to access hid to make a $10 controller work properly.

As I look at the controller, I can't help but to be tempted to re-case it with arcade buttons & replace the joysticks with knobs (2 each) to be a custom ableton controller, but I'll wait til after the numark scratch deck comes out to see if it's worth-while, I mean look at this thing, imagine using that as a HID with ableton live? heck, maybe they'll even release one AS a hid for controllerists.

Scratch Deck Controller Preview from semantik on Vimeo.

Anyhow, this has gone on long enough, so if all goes as planned I will post some source code later this week for comment & prosperity.