Curiouser and Curiouser!

Max for Live, Launchpad, and sequencing

For my birthday this year I bought myself a copy of Max 4 Live. Even though I already had Reaktor it seemed pretty clear to me that, because I use Ableton Live a lot, M4L would prove to be a superior MIDI handling environment. And I really like the look of the devices that came with M4L (at the time I was mostly interested in Buffer Shuffler but it turns out that the Loop Shifter is considerably more interesting, a real gem in fact).

The last month or so I've really started hacking into M4L. It started with my wanting to do some track routing in Live to make it easy to address multiple Kontakt instruments from a single keyboard. That lead to my first M4L device MIDI KeySwitch.

Recently I was very interested in Audio Damage's Axon plugin. For $59 it seems pretty good value except that I wasn't really interested in the built-in synth and I'm trying not to buy any more plugins for a while. It seemed an ideal opportunity to improve my Max chops, so I thought I'd have a crack at reproducing Axon's neuron sequencer as a M4L device.

Neurotik was duly born and in fact worked pretty well. Here's an early prototype playing a hybrid guitar/piano patch from Omnisphere:

In fact I think this is so promising that I heartily recommend that you buy Axon and have a play with it. Audio Damage have a no-fuss refund policy in the, I think, unlikely event that you don't find Axon pretty inspiring to play with.

Neurotik doesn't have Axon's lovely interface or the Audio Damage attention to detail. What it does have is an extra neuron and a more flexible (and possibly less well thought out) design. The extra neuron is because...

Recently I bought myself a Novation Launchpad. I'd been hankering for one as a way of making it easier to launch clips in Live but, at £149, it never justified it's cost. However, when I saw the Novation StepSeq device and realised how the Launchpad could be used to interact with M4L devices I was sold.

As soon as I started thinking about the button matrix on the Launchpad and the connection matrix in Neurotik I realised I had to be able to configure the device from the Launchpad. Then I started thinking about adjusting thresholds in terms of adjusting levels. It just seemed like such a great fit.

This weekend I've taken the first steps towards integrating Launchpad control into Neurotik. So far I have the Launchpad button matrix controlling the connection between the 8 neurons along with the ability to switch the device between 3 sub-modes: connections, thresholds, monitoring.

Probably not a lot of this makes sense unless you (a) know a little about Axon, (b) a little about M4L, and (c) have some passing idea what a Launchpad it. The gist is that I am about 25% of the way towards having my software sequencer entirely controlled by my Launchpad & not needing to touch the computer or look at the screen at all.

That turns a rather geeky sequencer with a dodgy interface that you can tinker with using the mouse into something more akin to a fully-playable instrument with feedback right on the Launchpad.

I'm finding the combination of Max for Live & the Launchpad really rather powerful and exciting.

My kind of noise

For about the last 5 months I've been wanting to get a Novation Launchpad but I kept putting it off because I wasn't sure if it would turn out to be an expensive gimmick.

Well I'm about to buy a new Mac Pro and that's going to be expensive. I figured that, after that I do that, it's going to be very hard to justify buying anything & this was my last chance. So, yesterday, I went to Dawsons in Reading and picked one up.

So far I'm very pleased with it. Clip launching in Live is much easier than using a mouse. I often found it very hard to deactivate one clip and launch another, in a different track, using the mouse and that becomes trivial with the Launchpad. From this admission you can tell I am not a hardcore gamer. The mixer mode looked useless in the video's I've seen but, in fact, I think it could be useful when I'm more used to it.

For the basic functionality I'd say the Launchpad is great, but probably not worth £149 to me. But I don't regret the purchase because I've already found extra value in two ways:

First I played with StepSeq (Novations Max for Live sequencer for Launchpad users), you get some idea what monome users have been enjoying all this time. StepSeq is a bit rough around the edges (it is a beta) and I found it messed with the other modes of the Launchpad when I was using it. But it hints at what I might be able to do with my own Max for Live devices. I have some specific things in mind that I will be trying to develop in the next month.

Second I've found that the Launchpad actually makes a better keyboard for playing LoopShifter than my keyboards. I'm a bit of a LoopShifter freak so this is actually quite cool. I've found that it's easier to remember clusters of good regions in the shifter and quickly swing between them. It makes Loopshifter into a more playable instrument for me.

To that end here's a piece I made last night playing 3 Loopshifter's directly with the Launchpad. Effects used are Dubstation on a send, fed from the 3 Loopshifters, and Eos on the master channel (along with compression & limiting).

The only downsides of the Launchpad I can see so far are that (i) it's not a class-compliant USB device so it requires a driver from Novation, (ii) it's only an 8x8 grid and you quickly realise a Launchpad-128 or Launchpad-256 would be better :)

Glitchy with a laid back feel

I've been playing a lot with LoopShifter which is the main instrument that comes with Max for Live.

I'm still a vastly inexperienced piano player and most of what I try and improvise on the piano sounds really bad as music. But I have a great piano sound and some parts can sound okay (e.g. I play short arpeggio's that sound nice). So I've been feeding little bits of music to LoopShifter and playing with the resulting timbres.

One of the things LoopShifter does really well is a kind of crackly, spitting, granular sound that is often an unwanted by-product in other granular effects/instruments but sounds really good coming out of LoopShifter.

So I've been doing my thing... turning snippets of straight piano into glitchy improvisations and then adding some backing parts with Stylus RMX. In this case a very minimal kick drum with some EQ, delay, and some Replicant.

I felt an urge for it to sound more musical and turned to Omnisphere for some accompaniment parts. Really Omnisphere is such a great idea factory. It's hard to browse the sounds available not find things you want to use.

In the end one of the steel guitar patches, run through Omnisphere's Retroplex delay, had the perfect kind of lazy, ethereal, quality I was looking for. I went about arranging that and then continued rummaging for some more sounds to fill it out.

The resulting track is rather longer, at a little over eight minutes, that I intended and, if i were in a critical mood, i'd say it needed another element to justify that length. But overall I think it's not bad. Hope you enjoy it.

Ode to a Speck

New track I made yesterday:

I'm still on a granular kick and messing about with Loop Shifter a lot to see what different types of source material come out like.

Update: fixed confusing typo in the title.. i do not make odes to specs!

Easy interaction with Ruby code

I really wanted to be able to interact with some Ruby code I was writing in a back and forth with TextMate. So I added this command as "Interact" (and bound to Cmd+Ctrl+R) to my Ruby bundle:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'appscript'

$TERM = Appscript::app( 'iTerm' )
$SESSION = $TERM.current_terminal.sessions.end.make( :new => :session )
$SESSION.exec( :command => 'bash -l' )
$SESSION.write( :text => "/usr/bin/irb -r #{ENV['TM_FILEPATH']} && exit" )
$TERM.activate

Since I use iTerm and always have at least one window open what this does is to tell iTerm to spawn a new window with a bash shell and then execute IRB, requiring my code.

The net result is that hitting Cmd+Ctrl+R gives me my code in an IRB session ready to test via the REPL. I can poke around, hit Ctrl+D to get rid of the IRB session, go back to TextMate & make some changes, then hit Cmd+Ctrl+R to get a new IRB with the updated version ready to test.

I'm finding it makes for a very easy back-and-forth.

iPhone4 family packs?

I just watched the latest Apple iPhone ad for FaceTime and it's brilliant. FaceTime is not a feature I have any particular interest in but even I was feeling sentimental by the end. Apple seem to, finally, have the feature that will shift a lot of iPhones to people who don't get wet about technology.

It also strikes me that they finally have something viral about the iPhone. If you want to FaceTime the new baby with the grandparents they're going to have to have not just a smartphone, but a shiny new iPhone. That'll only apply to the wealthy for the moment but it will probably shift a lot more phones for them.

In fact it made me wonder whether Apple might bring out an iPhone "family pack" like they do for Mac OS X.

A different kind of voting system

I was reading the comments on a site and there were a couple of folks who, quite clearly, hadn't read what they were responding to but were parroting out a knee-jerk reaction from deep in their gut.

It made me think about how you could moderate such a thing and that lead to a thought which is somewhat akin to an idea I've had for how I want my Twitter client to work.

The idea is this, you vote on a post but not for how much you like it. Rather your vote is:

• the minimum length of time before you'd want to see another post from this person

So you might vote 0 meaning good stuff or tomorrow for someone who has written something in poor taste or ranty or next week for someone constantly irritating or next month for a real asshole.

Now here's the thing, the site would then use some function f with the input being incoming votes for that user and use the output of that function as the minimum time before the user could post again. A naive example might be median time.

Instead of down-voting individual posts which is kind of negative and, anyway, useless (because you were forced to read the garbage before you could vote it down) a community could muzzle idiots who insist on posting without thinking. They could still post but would have to wait increasingly long between such posts. Maybe they'd learn.

I guess this would depend to some extent on it not being super-easy to create an maintain a whole bunch of accounts.

Anyway just a random thought.

CoreAudio is not Apple's best work

Chris Randall of AudioDamage is pre-rant about developing 64-bit plugins for Apple Logic.

Shit is in some serious drama up in that bitch right now, with the massive bloated pile of failsauce that is Logic Audio leading the way, so we're gonna just let sleeping dogs lie for as long as we can.

Which I think means developing AU's for Logic is a massive screw-up.

I can well believe it. My own experiences dealing with anything Apple and Audio are that it's complicated, poorly undocumented (where it's documented at all), examples are spotty, and bugs are to be expected.

I want to build an audio host application and I've been looking at some of the available code and boy do I think this is a world of hurt I am looking at.

A note to my future self

Okay so sometimes when you're doing a git rebase you will end up with a conflict. Git will be all:

You must fix the conflict then add the file.

And you will do that and then git rebase --continue and Git will be all:

You must edit all merge conflicts and then
mark them as resolved using git add

And you'll be going But I did!!! and thinking Git doesn't love you any more.

The answer my friend is to just ignore the error and git rebase --continue a second time. There's some foolishness over timestamps, second time round it will work and you will breath a deep sigh of relief.

Soulver v2

Nice to see Acqualia have updated their calculator pad app Soulver. It's my favourite app for doing scratch math. Recommended.

When you don't have a mandate

A little while ago I was listening to the Today program and John Humphrys interviewing Home Secretary Theresa May when the subject of repealing the Human Rights Act came up.

Not long ago Paul Walk tweeted that he thinks JH is a rotten interviewer. I defended him on that occasion since I do think JH can do a good interview. This was not one of those interviews.

The crux of JH's argument appeared to be this:

• it was a Conservative manifesto pledge to repeal the act
• the Liberal Democrats pledged to do the opposite
• if the government fails to repeal the act they have betrayed Conservative voters
• if the government fails to repeals the act they are "bending over" for the Liberal Democrats

Allow me to say that Theresa May is my MP and I've no special regard for her. While I tend to believe she has worked for our constituency it is also true that we disagree on 98.75% of the points I've written to her about (thank you WriteToThem.com!)

That said, I found JH to be at his most rotten in this interview. He continued to worry away at this point seemingly without regard to reason.

It put me in mind of the comments of a political analyst just after the election. When asked what might happen next he replied the press would leave no stone unturned to find a breach between the partners and work it into a chasm. Disappointingly it seems that the Radio 4, the Today program, and JH are all party to this.

Is it not obvious that the results of the election mean that no party received a mandate to carry out it's program?

If Conservatives who support repeal of the Human Rights Act feel betrayed then they should look to themselves because they didn't muster enough support to give their party a mandate to carry through it's manifesto commitments.

Short of such a mandate, compromise is a requirement to govern and while the LD's are the "junior partner" if they're not going to be Cameron's bitches then they must be getting something more worthwhile than a desk and a red dispatch box out of the arrangement.

While I am already heartily sick of the New politics slogan the coalitionites trot out at every opportunity let us at least acknowledge the facts of the election: neither party, individually, has a mandate and they must agree to compromise in order to govern.

When you criticise them because they are compromising (or, in this case, about to compromise) rather than about the specific policies that arise from that compromise it leads one to consider if you are ignorant, boorish, or both.

Planet Piano

I took up piano lessons in January 2009. I have an hours lesson every week and it's been great. I went from being convinced I would never be able to play anything to surprising myself by the complex things I can do. My sense of rhythm, always an embarrassment, has developed into something that can pretty much keep time (at least at a quaver level) without me thinking about it. In short the idea of being a musician now seems like a matter of sweat.

I've started listening to a new podcast, Planet Piano, by Dan Starr who, as well as being a veteran teacher, has produced a book for adults learning piano that I bought recently. The topic of the first podcast is, loosely, can you learn piano online?

For me, having a teacher, is essential for a number of reasons:

1. I want to learn the piano but I also want to do a range of things like build synths in Reaktor, or learn to produce music, or read psychology books, or watch The Mentalist on TV. Having a regular lesson with a teacher gives me a focus for practice.
2. Keeping me motivated when I feel like I am failing or falling short. Reminding me that what I am doing is really hard and that it's normal for me to make mistakes, have problems, etc...
3. Keep me interested. He's taken me into blues piano which I would never have considered myself and it's been very interesting.
4. Tell me how I am making mistakes (I may hear that I'm playing wrong and, yet, not know exactly what I am doing) and suggest things I can do (or not do).
5. Answer questions. And the great thing about my teacher is that he's not afraid to say when he doesn't know
6. Be a partner in my labours. Piano is a skill of performance, at some level it's nice to have someone else there when you get a part right and tell you that you did.

Dan thinks learning online is fine if you already play piano and are looking to add new style or techniques but for beginners having a teacher is best.

I'd go further and say that learning to play piano entirely, based on online lessons, seems like it would work about as well as learning karate (another hobby of mine) from the web or videos. You can follow the moves but it's a shallow kind of learning. A teacher, in a regular class, offers so much more than that.

I can say with some certainty that without my teacher there is no way I'd be playing so well (relatively speaking) or so often as I am now.

A step too far

I haven't ordered an iPad and I'm not sure I will. It looks lovely but I can't justify spending hundreds of pounds on something to browse the web from my bed. Maybe when they make version 2 and I've found out what the compelling use case is.

But at the back of my mind there is also an unease about what the success of the, increasingly locked down, iXXXX machines means. At each step Apple have, rather than loosening the reins, tightened them.

Locking down the iPhone OS seemed relatively justifiable to me. My iPhone is, first and foremost, a phone. I'm happy to make a lot of small compromises to ensure that it works well in that role. Compromises I wouldn't dream of accepting in a laptop.

But I wonder whether those compromises are the very things that have robbed me, despite my familiarity with Objective-C & Cocoa, of any desire to build for the iPhone platform. It doesn't feel like a playful space to be in.

Now it would appear that Apple are trying to control the tools used to build applications for the iPhone OS platform, blocking developers from using things like Flash or .NET even as creation tools.

Nobody who knows me will be under any illusions that I have any love for Flash, Adobe, .NET, or Microsoft. I don't want to see applications written using those tools on my devices. I'd rather people learned the native platform and used Objective-C & CocoaTouch directly. But I wouldn't wish it to be so at gun point.

Apple appear to consider complete control and dominance of the platform as the No.1 priority. It's understandable I guess, why let other people drive your agenda. But, at the same time, if they successfully execute this strategy I wonder what kind of sterile future we are looking at. Innovation grows in the cracks and Apple appear to be plastering over them as fast as they are discovered.

So part of my problem with the iPad is that it's not really a computer. It's more of an Apple-terminal, nice but expensive. And I don't just mean the price ticket.