There is an interview about me and my controller now on youtube, courtesy of the Ableton User Group Zurich aka modul8tor. I give some insight into how my setup works and what I think is important when performing EDM live. The viedo is the first one in a new series of features, really looking forward to hear more of that and have some discussion on the stuff that we do.
UPDATE: Please note that the music played right at the beginning of the interview is mainly Pettinato’s and not mine, that kind of slipped me when I reviewed the video. Here is the link to the soundcloud track.
Archive for the 'Things' Category
Wohooo, what a nice surprise in my inbox: some weeks ago I participated in the open call for submissions of the In/Out Festival, and guess what, I’m in. Therefore I will be playing in the Knitting Factory in New York this November. The festival is from the 11th to the 13th, do not miss it if you are in the area. I am absolutely exhilarated to play there and meet some fellow tinkerers.
UPDATE: Well, M4L is great, but for live performance it is pretty much unusable if you want to use more than 4-5 M4L effects in your setup. An empty M4L device, be it MIDI or audio, uses about 5% of a single CPU. M4L runs inside the Live thread and consumes memory that would otherwise be available for Live. Moreover, it seems to be completely unoptimized for multiprocessor environments. All M4L devices run on the same core. This is a huge drawback, I will not touch on M4L again until they fix this in a future update. What a shame.
Well, I am not always producing music or listening to gorgeous new tracks. Actually, quite a lot of my time I am optimizing my setup, especially my Ableton Live set. I use a rather large set (I am desperately waiting for the 64bit version of Live) and have a couple of hundreds of devices in there. Now, with the new version of Max for Live from Cycling74, I actually started to build some devices to make my life a little easier. First creation is a so called one knob filter: Turn it to the left, it’s a lowpass, turn it to the right, it’s a highpass. It comes with all kinds of parameters to twiddle with and a nice graph to show you what you are doing. Download and enjoy. By the way: They are right when they say Max for Live is the best invention since sliced bread.
Have a look at a short performance on my selfmade MIDI controller. Like it?
UPDATE: Not on soundcloud anymore, ran out of space. Get it here.
Whew, the last 45min of the show were full of clicks and pops. What a shame. That’s why I cut the last show down to about 60 minutes before I uploaded it to my new soundcloud subscription. Look at the new player below, you get a nice overview, and, if you go to the soundcloud site, you can leave comments on specific points in the timeline. Pretty neat. You can also download the mp3 in the new player. Enjoy. Or go and listen on my page on audioasyl.net.
Finally. Station is working. After two years of development the first show with my new controller. A rather small set of material put together in little time, but a nice photo to go with it. Check out my latest live set from last Friday: Download the show or go and listen on my page on audioasyl.net.
Remember the big box of bags of parts? The last two weeks I spent my afternoons and nights putting them all together. Halfway through I stopped counting and became one with my soldering iron. One short visit into mass production land is enough for me, the next batch (if there will ever be one) will be outsourced to mindless robots. But now I have all my circuit boards ready. This is going to be one mean mother of a MIDI controller. The only thing that I still need to wait for is the case. Then we’ll be talking.
Tonight I am going to participate at the Sonic Wargame performance in Rote Fabrik in Zürich. Since yesterday, the Pool Loop Festival is exploring new ways of using selfmade electronics for contemporary art and music. Solder iron meets surf techno, or something like that. The game itself is still a bit a mystery to me, but it sounds like fun. Four teams make music, including sampling their opponents. Via a voting system the audience gets to hear only one party at any given time. Should be a very good test for my live performance skills. Well, come and see it. You can also solder your own noise devices in the DIY Musical Hacklab from the people of SGMK. I can really recommend it, its fun and my electronics journey started with one of these workshops. You get addicted really quickly.
UPDATE: I won! At least the last round of four. Not the others. Enormous fun anyway, I can really recommend it to any live performer. Altough I do not think that the audience gets what is really going on (I didn’t, either), I enjoyed every second of it. Putting live music performance in a game situation is quite demanding for the musician, although I think that most of the points I made were thanks to my skilled operator.
Yep, this is the first module prototype of my new controller project. Look at these colors! This shiny case! Isn’t it wonderful? More pictures of the whole thing pretty soon (hopefully).
That’s it, I’m off to Portugal for the next two weeks, to finish my programming work on the Knoepfli prototype. Learning how to write a program on Mac OS X is not very easy. I hope getting some sun and rest will help me. See you in May with a fresh audioasyl remix.
