Ableton Live Users Group

Posted on November 30, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

I will be presenting and performing at the Minneapolis Ableton Live Users Group on December 8, 2009, 7:00pm at the Nomad in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In my presentation I’ll be showing what I do with custom built applications and Ableton Live, including the GMS and my new Wavetable Glitch Machine. Currently I interface my custom built applications with Live, using MIDI via the IAC drivers in Mac OS X, and Soundflower for audio. Soon I’ll be converting my audio based Max patches over to Max for Live, so I can use them in Live directly.

Also appearing is Ali Momeni who’ll be showing some of his Max for Live patches, and JP Hungelmann who also organizes the event. Last time the group met it was held at IPR and there was an excellent turn out. The speakers were terrific and they gave away Ableton demo discs and t-shirts at the end of the event. If you use Live, have any interest in it, or electronic music in general, I highly recommend attending.

Getting Reacquainted with the GMS

Posted on August 6, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

triquetra_rehearse I have had a number of problems migrating my Processing.org application known as the GMS from my old MacBook Pro running OS X 10.4.11 to my new one running 10.5.7. The first issue was alack of support for the IAC drivers in Java, next were some funky conflicts with the Java class I was using to load and save presets. With the help of Grant Muller I have solved these problems.

While I was at it I took on a couple of other issues as well in preparation for my performance on Sunday. All that’s left is for me to become reacquainted with the application in tandem with Ableton Suite 8.

This is actually the hard part because I have use the application effectively as an instrument and real-time visualizer. One problem is running out of hands and fingers while producing the visuals and capturing the MIDI clips. Another danger is the music becoming repetitive while making adjustments. Here’s a quick recording I made while practicing.

Reacquainting Myself with the GMS

Synth Pad Automation

Posted on July 19, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

nano Recently I have been endowed with a fortunate amount of new gear. After upgrading to Ableton Suite 8 it became apparent that my first-gen MacBook Pro was not going to pull the plough. So I have upgraded to the latest model. I have yet to put 8 through its paces to see how well it performs on the new machine, but I have found some time to get it installed and play around a bit.

This audio experiment is a result of that. It consists of a patch I created using the MDA JX-10 emulator. I did little to process it other than some delay, but I used a Korg nanoKONTROL to control the filter and volume of the device. Before I attached the controller I was playing with the filter using the track pad on the Mac. When I wasn’t getting the control I wanted I hooked up the nanoKONTROL and felt a bit more confident manipulating the cutoff and resonance with knobs.

Synth Pad Automation

Automated Mysterious Instrument

Posted on June 10, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

fern I came across this set while browsing through my Ableton Live documents. Glitches and clicks slowly melt into metallic tones, back to glitches, and finally auto filtered before fading out. I could not find this experiment from last October posted on ACB, so it must have fallen through the cracks.

Mysterious Instrument

External MIDI Control via XML

Posted on May 27, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

After a few performances live looping with Ableton and the GMS, I have found it cumbersome and frustrating to have to repeatedly swap between the two applications. To solve this, I have added he ability to control the GMS with an external MIDI device. I achieved this by creating an XML document with the parameters included as tags with a CC attribute to designate what control change value to use for each setting here’s a few lines out of the XML document.

<GMSMidiController>
    <MIDIControllerName>Korg MS2000</MIDIControllerName>
    <MidiChannel CC="31" type="knob" />
    <TopOctaveIncrement CC="82" type="button" />
    <BottomOctaveIncrement CC="78" type="button" />
    <Preset useProgramChange="true" />
    <ToggleFreeMode CC="77" type="button" />
    <StartStop CC="89" type="button" />
    <Sustain CC="64" invert="false" type="pedal" />
    <SetDuration CC="30" type="knob" />
    <ToggleDotted CC="92" type="button" />
    <SetScale CC="29" type="knob" />
    <ToggleMirroring CC="86" type="button" />
</GMSMidiController>

As you can see I’m using knobs to adjust some settings and buttons to adjust others. It’s really fun to turn a knob on my Korg MS2000 and see the sliders in my software start to move in response. Program change for presets and note on for transposition will work from any old controller, but the rest of the parameters need to be mapped to knobs, sliders or buttons. In total I have around thirty-six specific parameters that are now adjustable with a controller.

GMS Performance Excerpt #4