dromama from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo.
Turning one knob and bouncing up and down may work for some, but virtuoso electronic performers want more live control out of music. Why? Because we have more fun. Raymond Weitekamp is a monome power user based at Princeton who has organized like-minded monomists. As with Edison’s performance work yesterday, Raymond is working to develop real performance technique.
He’s already got the monome doing more that button mashing, thanks to clever mapping of tilt controls. (Check out the custom housing, too.) But to provide additional timbral controls, Raymond makes use of the Korg nanoKONTROL and the humble MIDI Remote Scripts I made and documented here on CDM. The nano provides some compact, accessible controls for adjusting the active rack. Details below.
If you want to learn from this setup, Raymond is sharing everything he’s doing, so you can take this in a direction that works in your performance rig. Here’s the full setup:
Software:
-smack-a-duck: vimeo.com/4739761
-mlr_aes_mdb: princeton.edu/~rweiteka/mlr_raw_0.2.zip
-midi_bends: princeton.edu/~rweiteka/midi_bends_0.3G_RAW.zip
-midi_bends midi remote script: princeton.edu/~rweiteka/MIDI_Bends_LiveRemote.zip
-nanokontrol midi remote script: createdigitalmusic.com/files/media/files/korg/korgnano_live.zip
-ableton liveDiscussion:
post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=5458Samples:
Drums from the “droms” sample pack by ro: post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=5414
Beach Boys – Mama Says
Viktor Vaughn – RaedawnThanks:
ro, tehn, soundcyst, peter kirn
From that discussion thread (well worth checking the whole thing out), here’s the basics on how the bits fit together:
Since it may not be immediately obvious what’s going on, I’ll elaborate for the curious amongst you:
mlr_aes_mdb => soundflower => live
midi_bends => IAC midi bus + midi remote script => live
nanoKontrol => midi remote script => live
smack-a-duck => soundflower => liveI modified Peter Kirn’s midi remote script for the nanoKontrol, and wrote my own for midi_bends. The tilting of the monome on the left (Tuppernicus) is controlling the 8 encoders of whatever the active FX rack is. The knobs on the nanoKontrol control those same 8 encoders. This way, I can use either to control the same FX parameters. I like this a lot better than 1:1 midi mapping, because it allows multiple methods for controlling the same parameters. Tuppernicus also controls the FX toggles (4 FX x 6 channels), drum rack, and active channel/effect rack. The monome on the right (Tupperbot) is running my slightly tweaked (added rowfix) version of mlr_aes_mdb 0.4.
Ableton Live is just one choice, of course. I’m actually trying to get some similar tools together on the Linux side, where this sort of combination fits naturally with the JACK audio server. I hope to have something to share by mid-fall.