Those of you that use Ableton for looping know how nice it is to have a foot pedal to start and stop recording when your hands are full playing an instrument. The problem is, many MIDI pedals are expensive. So I developed a workaround solution that involves using Ableton’s great keymap feature. By gutting the inside of an old PS/2 keyboard, and rewiring the keys to a series of buttons, you can make a great footpedal for very cheap or even free. Keep reading below to find out how!
Posted in DIY Music Projects, Hardware, How-To, Looping
Tagged Ableton Live, DIY, Foot Pedal, Live Looping
This post is a brief overview of a design project done for a senior design class at the University of Louisville. The idea originated with Paul Faget and Seth Tucker. In addition to Paul, Seth and myself, we also had two mechanical engineers on the team: Shawn Day and Phillip Shepard. All the information below is drawn from some of the documentation we had to do for the course credit. It should be enough to give a brief overview, but feel free to comment or email me for more information.
Background
A plasma speaker is an audio playback mechanism that uses an arc between two electrodes as a sound source. By modulating the current through the plasma channel in conjunction with an audio input, thermal changes are induced on the air around the arc, resulting in a sound wave.
Traditional speakers are limited by their mass and directionality. The inertia in a traditional paper or film tweeter causes small distortions when playing back high frequency audio. Using a plasma speaker in place of a traditional tweeter provides a possible way to create a more accurate audio playback system.
Posted in DIY Music Projects, Hardware
The very awesome grid controller you see me playing with here is the Novation Launchpad. I’ve been eyeing a Novation Launchpad ever since they came out. My relationship with Ableton Live as a live looping tool has always been very love/hate. Sometimes I wish for the simplicity of a loop pedal and was seriously considering the Vox VL-1 due to come out sometime in april. However, finding a used launchpad at less than half the price inspired me to give Ableton one last shot. I’m proud to say that I’m very happy with my decision so far.
Looping with Ableton requires more time setting up the sound and for me so far is a little less improvisational in that I have to put more thought into what is coming next and plan. The only prerecorded sounds in the video above were the drum loops. I’ve experimented on and off with using a click and generating everything live, but the most natural way i’ve found so far is to just record everything on top of preexisting drum loops. The only other feature I wish I had was a way to assign a keyboard key or midi note on a foot control to a genric “stop recording and play loop” button for any tracks currently recording. This would allow me to keep my hands on the instrument and play pickups into the start of the loop.
Posted in DIY Music Projects, Looping
In case you’re not familiar with the programming language processing, let me fill you in. Processing is an open source programming language with an included IDE. Processing is a sketchbook geared toward quickly creating advanced visual art.
In order to get better aquainted with processing, I decided to use it to help create a short intro animation for a youtube sports show some friends are working on. Processing comes with some great example sketches (programs), and it’s a good idea to try out a few to get familiar with what the language is capable of. Processing is pretty user friendly if you’ve done any programming before. Right clicking a command and choosing “find in reference” will take you to a webpage with common uses and information about the command.
Posted in DIY Music Projects, How-To
Tagged animation, processing, Programming, render, video intro, visual
The new version of Avid’s (I still always say Digidesign and have to correct myself) Pro Tools, Pro Tools 9, just came out. I just bought and downloaded my upgrade version. There are a lot of new improvements that I’ve been wanting to try out, specifically OMF import and some of the enhanced video features. However, my first chance to use it was a little unconventional compared to how I typically use pro tools.
In the worship band at my church, I usually end up playing a Yamaha grand piano with a Korg triton on top. I use a lot of pads, strings, organ mixed with the piano sounds. For a recent night worship service with a different stage setup, we ended up moving the piano offstage. The piano patches on my triton or any of the other keyboards we have around are pretty bad. The best sounding piano I have is the one from Avid’s Mini Grand RTAS plugin that comes with PT. So I decided to find a way to use PT to run some virtual instrument sounds live.
Posted in Software