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GTZ Hydra

GTZ Hydra is a MIDI rout­ing util­i­ty. It is cur­rent­ly only avail­able for Able­ton Live. 

There will be oth­er ver­sions (some day), includ­ing a basic hard­ware solu­tion, but their func­tion­al­i­ty may be cut down to meet the func­tion­al lim­its of those oth­er platforms.

The Able­ton ver­sion requires Live 8.1 or high­er, and the Max For Live add-on.

DOWNLOAD THE LATEST VERSION:
GTZ Hydra v1.11

Now. What the heck are we look­ing at? What does it do, and how can you use it?

Here’s the first part of that:

Expla­na­tion — Part 1 from GreaterThanZe­ro on Vimeo.

The “how can you use it” bit is up next. Watch this space.

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my first monome video

Expla­na­tion Pend­ing from GreaterThanZe­ro on Vimeo.

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Able­ton Live pro­vides a some­what non-lin­ear, mod­u­lar approach to cre­at­ing music. It’s pop­u­lar amongst DJs in par­tic­u­lar, and pro­duc­ers of hip-hop, but it has some great tools for my work­flow as well.

Max/MSP/Jitter is a visu­al script­ing lan­guage which cre­ates and manip­u­lates audio and video. It’s tra­di­tion­al­ly been pop­u­lar in exper­i­men­tal avant garde cir­cles, but a new gen­er­a­tion of elec­tron­ic musi­cians have adopt­ed it, thanks in part to the monome.

The monome is a grid of but­tons that light up, allow­ing you to tan­gi­bly manip­u­late any idea that can be expressed in a two-dimen­sion­al grid over time. It’s min­i­mal­ist in design, and open-end­ed in func­tion. This makes it an ide­al inter­face for some­thing as open-end­ed as Max/MSP/Jitter, and in many cas­es, the ide­al instru­ment for musi­cians who work with sam­ples. This cre­ates a strange over­lap in the user base, which makes their com­mu­ni­ty a fun place to be.

Recent­ly, these worlds have merged fur­ther with the release of Max for Live, which allow Max/MSP/Jitter devel­op­ers to re-imag­ine what Able­ton Live can be used for, and build new inter­faces inside it.

I’m involved pret­ty heav­i­ly in the monome com­mu­ni­ty, most­ly help­ing peo­ple with Max for Live. I’ve cre­at­ed some tools of my own in it, and sev­er­al of those are at work in this video.

Tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion of those will be found here. At least in the­o­ry. Thus far, it’s just me in there.

(This hap­pens a lot when I post some­thing too far out­side of the norm. Does silence con­vey rev­er­ence, or pity? I’ve left the world dumbfounded.)