Probably the best thing that ever happen to me through my multiple visit to the frankfurt musicmesse was to have the hability to see Robert Henke (aka monolake) doing a gig at the Ableton party. Since I’m not a big fan of minimal techno, I thought the gig in itself was nothing to write home about - no offence intended to R.H.’s talent – but I had the chance to sneak in behind the stage (before getting kicked out half an hour after) to examine his setup and that was inspiring.
His back-end was, to no suprise, ableton live but what made him different from the countless other ableton-based gigs was that his monitor was actually turned OFF.
Controlling everything from his custom-made monodeck II, he had enough vision and control on his set that he didn’t need any visual cue from the program: everything was light and knobs, and he looked more like a crazy star-trek music freak than the usual numb face staring at a blue sickening light while fondeling their precious mac’s trackpad. WINZ.
Since I saw him, I’ve been wanting to reproduce this scheme for my own gig. At the time ableton controllers like the APC and the Lauchpad didn’t exist and I couldn’t really build a monodeck myself, but as soon as these came out, I had set my sail on doing the same thing.
A few years later -i.e. now- I had collected what I needed to start doing it: an eeepc strong enough to run my set with Live 8, a novation launchpad and a korg nanokontrol.
If you are familiar with the launchpad and apc (and if you read this my guess is that you are), it’s fairely easy to guess how the setup would work but to completely achieve “laptop blindness”, I was missing one major thing: clip position feedback.
I’ve explained already before how I organized my sets. Since I work with pretty structured song based tracks, I chop them in sections in the session view and play them roughly in order with the abilty however to loop section and re-organise the track’s structure to some extend. One “drawback” of this method is that I end up with clips of very different lenght because they reflect sections in the song. Some might be 1 bar, others might for as long as 48 and when performing, it’s important to know whenever a section is going to finish because you might want to add some tension or put on some effects to engage the transision to the next one.
As beautiful as they are to navigate your section, none of the controller let you see that kind of thing and I needed it to go completely blind.
I’ve thinkered for a long time about the approach to do this.. including hooking into python scripting but one day I saw this small demo vid about the launchpad where the guy had a small metronome-like function by simply creating a midi clip that would send midi to the lauchpad to create an animation and there was my solution: All I needed is to create a base clip running an animation showing me the clip’s position (I went for the 16 last bars which is plenty enough) and adapt the base clip for the various lengths of my clip so it would always be in sync with the track.
Here’s what it looks like for a 24 measure clip:
The notes at measure one turn all the indicators off. Then starting at 16 bars before the end, I’ve got a first animation that is simply a green led moving from left to right over 8 measure and for the last part, the animation speeds up to indicate then end is near.
All that is needed from there on is to create a midi ‘animation’ clip with the right length next to every section of the songs. It sounds a bit like a drag but since sections are often of same sizes, it’s often just a matter of copy/paste:
To display the animation, I chose to use the last line of 8 leds on my launchpad. I’m loosing a row in my session view but it’s no biggie for what I do. The ableton mapping system is extremely clever: if you map manually the controller buttons to something, it will automatically disengage the original function and the visual feedback. So in order to have the animation not colliding with the session display, all you need to do is to map the bottom row buttons to anything (possibly nothing that would make your set go bonkers obviously and you will have that row to play with without any interference to the session view.
Here’s a small video of what it gives. First clip is 16 bar, second is 8, third one is 24.
Sean Costello – the mastermind behind the wonderful (and cheap) eos reverb plug-in made by audio damage (in case you haven’t heard of it, I recommend you to get it, it’s a killer for the price) – has a really nice blog called “the halls of valhalla” where he discusses various topic related to his dsp work.
Following the release a couple of month back of a free delay with a unique pitch shifting feature -definetly another grab- he started looking back at various techniques used to achieve pitch shifting… including the wonderful scene of HAL’s death in 2001 (that I didn’t know was the making of wendy carlos).
Sean post seldomly but every post is worthwhile.. he balances high tech & simple explanation in wonderful ways…
Just as I wrote yesterday’s post on MidiVox, CDM unveils a new arduino ATMega328p-based synth – the shruti-1 – developped by Olivier Gillet, the maker of Bhajis loop for Palm devices a while ago.
Now this baby is getting VERY close to being perfect: on top of matching the “let’s have a a re-programmable synth” pattern close to, for example, arduino based units, it adds a nice LCD screen AND an analog VCF/VCA borrowed from prestigious old school synth like the Ensoniq ESQ-1, Waldorf Microwave and Prophet VS.
I’ve always been a great believer of the Digital Oscillator/VCF combo since it allows you both to generate freaky harmonics using heavy aliasing in the oscillator and “warm up” the result using VCF’s so in term of architecture, this is damn hot.
Let’s not hide from the fact this is one of the most exciting news from the music making scene for me in a long time, certainly beats anything announced last week’s at the Music Messe. At this point I have still no clue how many of the parameters are addressable by MIDI but even so, it’s a pretty groovey item !
Going to my google’s anal today – after way too long time off Mustakl – I found this interesting little project from Colin Cunningham: basically a combined MIDI/Audio shield for Arduino, something that looking back I’m surprised nobody did yet.
This shield basically allows you to use the arduino as a standalone little programmable MIDI synth in a fairely small form factor – all good if you ask me.
Colin’s giving away an example of synth sketch for the board that is derived from my own squealer code, it’s nice to see that giving away code allows people to move to other areas and make things moo-ve !
Sometimes you gotta love just staying quiet for a week-end and having your mind on Sunday… Havin been off for any kind of brain damaging party for more than a week, I decided this morning I’d try something that was on my mind for quite a while related to feedback. I love feedback, it’s a really nice way to bring lively timbres in the background or do completely new sounds from scratch.
Being fed with Rock when I was kid, one sound that I really find magical is the tuned larsen guitarist do by putting their guitars close to their amps. It starts with a full heavy chord and then goes slowly to a pure chords, an effect actually not too different from the deep note effect.
The idea of today was to recreate this effect using a DAW, ableton live in this case and see where it’d lead to.
Let’s go back to the physics for a moment: When a guitarist comes close to his amp, the sound field radiating from the amp puts the strings in vibration and creates a feedback loop. The closer to the amp, the stronger the feedbacks get. Also, since each string of the guitar is vibrating to the note that his held on it, each strings acts as a tuned resonator providing the “chord” effect.
Since Ableton has the possibility to both do feedback loops and has a resonator plugin, it needed to be tried. Let’s go through the steps to reproduce the basic physical system:
Setting up feedback:
To reproduce the basic feedback in Ableton, we’ll need 3 tracks:
The first one is going to be our source. It could be either some internal clip playing or picking up sound from the external input. Instead of sending it directly to the master, we’ll feed another track first (track 3 -mix). That allows us to use track 2 (feedback) to pick up the output of the mix track and feed it back with the feedback processing. Since the feedback and mix track work on their inputs rather than track audio, we need to toggle the monitor on In for both of them. Before doing that, you might want to pull the volume of the feedback to zero, otherwise you won’t have any ears left.
Taming the beast
Since digital feedback has no kind of loss nor attenuation, you will need to be able to control the feedback level to a reasonable level otherwise it’ll go out of hand and clip everything. A good way to do that is to use a compressor at the input. It will ensure that as the sound level creeps up, the compressor lowers its and the result will end up oscillate to some level, depending on the attack, release and treshold values of the compressor. I also like to put an utility upfront to have some kind of control on the general feedback level, pretty much mimicking the distance between the player and it’s amp. So right now, our feedback track looks like this:
Emulating the strings
Now we are going to emulate the resonant filter done by the strings. In Ableton, it dead easy since we have a resonator plug-in that does exacly what we need. It’s very flexible and we’ll be able to tune our feedback to whatever chords we’ll want. Let’s add the resonator plug-in and turn the dry/wet all the way to wet:
Giving it a life
At this point, you can already pull up the feedback volume, start a sound source and play with the feedback chord and compressor settings. You will however most likely find that the result is a bit dull. This is because the wonderful digital processing works all too perfectly and each cycle is pretty much the same as the previous one.
A good way to breathe some life in a feeback loop is to add a reverb in it. It’s decay being way longer than the feedback itself, it will bring tiny oscillations and ambiances changes that will make everything sound a lot more organic. As per usual, I used Audio Damage’s eos because it sounds wonderful and is a modulated reverb so I can use a slow lfo to make it even more organic.
Re-strumming
Whenever a guitarist strums his guitar, the vibration he induces is way stronger than the vibration from the amp feedback. This is why the sound goes from the original timbre to a raising feedback chord. To emulate that, we need to pull down the feedback level whenever the original sound is strong and let it raise as the source’s sound level go down.
The perfect way to simulate this is to use a compressor with side chaining, using the original source as compressing signal. Live 8′s compressor has this feature, so it’s pretty easy to setup if you got it (I used the demo version) but there are free side-chain compressor available out there
In this case, the attack will determine how fast the feedback dies each time you produce a new note while the release will control how fast the feedback will raise as the source sound level goes down.
Some examples
Let’s now put this to practice. The first sound byte is trying to reproduce the guitar feedback on a chord coming from the sound input (some littlegptracker quick setup) and there’s a big amp distortion on the master to give it the rock out feeling. By changing the various compressor timing and/or resonator notes, we can get quite a bit of variation and the whole thing is pretty much what we wanted to do:
But this is not the only application of playing with this kind feedback. It works also really well to setup a strange moody ambiance running behind a main sequence. You can for example quite easily reproduce a dark-ish/out of tune background that will spice up a otherwise pretty basic sequence (this one really makes me feel like having an onde martenot to control the filter’s pitch)
Since the recent port of LittleGPTracker to the Chinese Dingoo handheld (69 euros boys) and therefore me owning a unit, I keep being blow away by the small boot time of the unit. Here’s a video showing the 5 seconds it takes to go from off state to “ready to make music”:
If it boots that fast on a 360Mhz machine, imaging how fast a small computed could startup, making it a more than perfect host for hardware or dedicated music machine environment. Of course, the dingoo build doesn’t have any kind of real-time kernel settings but it certainly something to look for. Compared to the 2 mins it takes to boot the Windows-based DMS-20, it’s a no brainer.
Today I’m releasing the small monosynth, the “Arduino Piano Squealer”, I made for Critters & Guitari’s fantastic pocket piano. Examples and the code, released under GPL V3, are available from the APS’s own page.
Hope you’ll enjoy it. If you got any comments, flames or WOW’s to say, please let me know !
We all know THX’s trademark sound called “Deep Note“.
I don’t think there’s any sound obsessed person that hasn’t been fascinated by it. It’s a classic, mixing the intriguing with the beautiful and I remember I used to look forward going to the movie just so I had a chance to listen to it again.
The music-dsp mailing list got sent a really nice post that tries to recreate the original sound from the various informations available on its creation. It’s clearly documented, with sound samples of each step along the way, and is a pleasure to read. Additionally, it’s done using SuperCollider and is not that complex so if you are looking for a good tutorial on SC, combined with fun stuff go ahead:
and you will have that row to play with without any interference to the session view.
Just as I wrote yesterday’s 
Going to my google’s anal today – after way too long time off Mustakl – I found 
