Max For Live: Clock Divider Sequencer

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SO MANY WORDS, HERE IS A DOWNLOAD LINK (requires Ableton Live + Max For Live)

Some of my first exposure to (and fascination with) electronic music came by way of Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Eno, and Kraftwerk — mysterious towering walls of modular synths emitting dense and intricate rippling swirls of blips and pulses. Music that was mechanically rhythmic yet sounded almost organic in its complexity.

I filed those wonderful sounds away as “modular magic”, and even when I learned a bit about sound design and MIDI sequencing, those intricate modular textures seemed orders of magnitude out of reach. Over time I learned about arpeggiators and analog step sequencers (and acid house and the 303) and how to make a synth line groove. A skillfully sequenced bassline or lead synth is still one of the most beautiful and hypnotic sounds there is, and a little bit of filter modulation, effects, and swing control can make evoke a remarkable amount of rhythmic and timbral complexity out of a really simple set of notes. But even with all the swing and multi-tap delays in the world, it’s not That Modular Sound.

I learned about polyrhythms / cross-rhythms somewhere in the context of hand percussion, and knew polyrhythm was a thing in African music, jazz, and even metal, but never explored it much firsthand other than learning a couple of jembe rhythms. So it was a pretty big aha! momen recently when I figured out that a lot of That Modular Sound was sequenced polyrhythms.

I was recently made aware of the 4ms Rotating Clock Divider, a sequencing module for Eurorack modular synths. The RCD takes a clock pulse as input, and has 8 outputs which trigger at different subdivisions of that clock pulse. That is, if the input clock “ticks” at 1200ms, the outputs will trigger at 600, 400, 300, 240ms and soforth. This makes it easy to dial in a “4 against 3″ rhythm, or “2 against 5 against 6″, and once you dress THAT up with some modulation and effects, some deeply enticing regions of Computer World are revealed.

While I do not presently have access to a Eurorack setup, I realized this was a concept I could replicate in software. Specifically, I saw where somebody had created a RCD patch in Reaktor to drive a modular rig. I’m much more familiar with Max/MSP than Reaktor, so a Max For Live patch sounded like a great project. With a bit of searching I found Michael Hetrick’s Euromax collection, a set of Max/MSP patches modeled after Eurorack modules, and the Metro Divider patch was a perfect starting point to build into a M4L MIDI effect. Continue reading →

Music Visualization with Ableton Live and Processing

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For a long time, I have been interested in creating animations/visualizations to accompany music. As a teenager, I was utterly captivated by Jeff Minter’s Colourspace for the Atari 8-bit computers, then a few years later along came the wonderful Cthugha, and after that, media player plugins like Milkdrop. It surprised and disappointed me that the state of the art for music visualizers mostly lost momentum in mid 90s. CPUs and graphics hardware are at least an order of magnitude more powerful now than they were then, and I would love to see the crazy 3D eye candy mutations that ought to be possible by pushing modern hardware to the limits.

The main limitation to these kinds of visualizers is that, while they’re great for doing projections or adding to the vibe at parties, the visualizations tend to be pretty abstract and don’t have much “personality”. And if you want to write your own presets/visualizations, some pretty heavyweight coding skills are necessary.

There are some pretty snazzy VJ software packages that allow you to mix video on the fly to accompany audio, but these tend to be moderately expensive, and honestly this is an area I haven’t explored much. I HAVE tooled around with the Vizzable plugins for Max For Live which are extremely snazzy (you can see my Vizzable experiment on youtube). But while the Vizzable plugins are free, not everybody has access to Max For Live, and if you want to customize things, Max/MSP can be a bit daunting.

I was pretty excited when I discovered the Processing programming language several months ago. It’s a Java-based language that makes it extremely easy to execute graphical “sketches” in a high-level environment, with the comfort of a familiar curly-braces syntax, without all the coding overhead of a more general language like Java or C#. This post won’t try to teach you Processing from scratch, but there are some good tutorials on the Processing website, and Matt Pearson’s book Generative Art: A Practical Guide To Using Processing is a wonderful guide to Processing for novice-to-intermediate users.

Processing has some audio capabilities via built-in functions and additional libraries, but these are fairly limited. Fortunately, there are also libraries to allow Processing to interface with other software and devices, including the OSC protocol, thanks to Andreas Schlegel’s oscP5 library (the “P5″ is shorthand for “Processing”). This allows a full-featured music application (like Ableton Live) to provide some sophisticated sounds, and use OSC to sync up and exchange data with an interactive Processing visualization.

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Microphone Experiments 1

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It took about 72 hours from having cleaned my living room until it was happily populated with mic stands and cables for the evening. Historically I don’t always play a ton of acoustic music, which is a shame because it’s fun to play and enjoyable to record.

I recorded a cover of Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in a single take, using two mics. An SM-57 was used to mic the guitar, pointing the mic at the fretboard over the 12th fret from about 8″ distance. I used an AKG C414-B for the vocal mic, goosenecked a couple of inches from (and slightly above) my mouth. The guitar is a Washburn acoustic with a rosewood fretboard.

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Free Plugin Roundup: EQ

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I am a big fan of fan of free music software, not just for myself, but because it’s exciting when people who are just starting out, or are tight on cash, can still have access to high quality tools to help express themselves. Free plugins are nothing new, but honestly, historically, a lot of them haven’t been very good (whether the shortcoming is in sound quality, usability, or stability — all of which are important!). There are some good finds to be had, though, and some talented developers have taken to releasing some freebies as a way to promote themselves and give back to the community. The plugins discussed in this article are all good and useful in their own right, not just “good for the price”. (Also if you use and like any of these plugins, please consider giving these developers your business when you DO go shopping for for-pay plugs!)

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Game Music for Beginners (with Reaper)

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I see a fair number of indie game developers interested in making music/sound to add to their games, but unsure how to go about it all. Ergo, I’ve written this tutorial with roughly three goals in mind: to show you some good quality (free or inexpensive) tools for making game music, to give a brief step-by-step tour to the basics of using those tools, and to give you some tips on how to “work smart” while composing and arranging, to help you get better sounding results with less frustration.

In this tutorial I will be focusing on Reaper, a powerful program that will handle almost any aspect of making/recording music. It also has the advantages of being relatively inexpensive ($60 for personal use), there are versions for both Windows and Mac, and you can download the full (no feature restrictions) version with a very generous evaluation policy. Continue reading →

Ableton Live Audio Racks Tutorial

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Ableton Live’s “Rack” devices are among Live’s most versatile and unique features. Even though there’s a whole chapter dedicated to them in the Live manual, Racks can be a little abstract if you don’t go in with some idea of their usefulness and flexability. This tutorial assumes some basic familiarity with Live — if you’re new to the program you should at the very least work through the lessons packaged with Live before reading any further.

There are three types of Rack effects — Audio Effect Racks (which I’m going to talk about in this tutorial), MIDI Effect Racks (which I will probably talk about next time) and Drum Racks (which you can read about in the Live manual).

For our sample project, we’re going to build a simple little sweepable multiband EQ filter, like the sort commonly found on DJ mixers. To get started, go into Clip mode and create a new Live project with a single audio track. Find a simple little drum loop and drop it into a clip slot so you have an audio source to work with. Go to the Live Device Browser and drag an Audio Effect Rack into the effect bin for the track.

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Music, Culture, and Freedom

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(written in 2009)

The other night I was browsing through the book “Synthesizer Basics”, which is a great collection of articles from Keyboard Magazine, ranging from the late 1970s-mid 80s, including some articles by heavy hitters like Bob Moog. (I have stumbled across several Keyboard Magazine books over the years and they are all very good; a great balance between technical, practical, and accessible). One of the first pieces in the book is a 1979 article called “The First Synthesizer”, which opens with a quote from Hermann Helmholtz.

“Music was forced to shape for itself the material on which it works. Painting and sculpture find the fundamental character of their materials, form and colour, in nature itself, which they strive to imitate. Poetry finds its material ready formed in the words of language. Music alone finds an infinitely rich but totally shapeless plastic material in the tones of musical instruments. There is a greater and more absolute freedom in the use of material for music than for any other of the arts; certainly it is more difficult to make a proper use of absolute freedom.”

My adventures with OSC

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(written in 2009)
OSC — Open Sound Control — is a communications protocol designed primarily for passing messages between various music software and hardware. It’s sort of a successor to the MIDI protocol. Like MIDI, OSC is not concerned with passing an actual audio stream (you can use the ReWire protocol for that) — it’s a way to transmit controller movements, tempo changes, time synchronization, etc. between devices and applications.