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One-Hand Jam at LAX

Bore­dom at the air­port can be pret­ty oppres­sive, but, lo! A charg­ing station!

This isn’t a great video on any lev­el, but it is a proud moment.

I think it sounds a lot bet­ter after 0:50, but I could­n’t not include the moment that lead there.

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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.)

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much love for the widget-as-collaborative-tool

This prob­a­bly won’t work too well in your RSS read­er, but if you’re actu­al­ly look­ing at my site in a flash-sup­port­ed web brows­er, check this out:

It’s a very sim­ple step sequencer you can write pat­terns in and embed on your web­site. Then oth­er peo­ple can not only hear your cre­ation, but use it as a spring­board to launch into one of their own. (the entire­ty of your sequence is snap­shot to a very short ASCII string, which they include in the embed code. it does­n’t remem­ber your vol­ume and pan­ning set­tings, though)

There’s room for growth, but this is excit­ing. And a huge dis­trac­tion at work.

Play around, change up the music, and post your results as a com­ment on this post!

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Take 4

This track is a bit unusu­al for me in that I’m actu­al­ly work­ing with record­ed audio instead of inter­pret­ed note information.

What the heck does that mean?

Well, nor­mal­ly there’s an added lay­er or two of abstrac­tion, let­ting me change wrong notes, adjust tim­ing, and gen­er­al­ly tweak every aspect of per­for­mance in post-pro­duc­tion. Here, I just had to play well.

I found the process cre­ative­ly lib­er­at­ing, but the end result feels a lit­tle raw to me.

Any­way, take a listen: