compusition

This is a follow up to my previous posting on the hunt for a good keyboard controller.

I checked out the Novation Remote 37SL, M-Audio Axiom 49, and Akai MPK49 in person.

I've needed a better compact MIDI controller for a long time, but keep blowing my hobby money on software (damn you Max for Live for turning me into an Ableton user... ). It's about time I got a decent input device. Right now I mostly use an M-Audio Oxygen 8, and it's a cheap piece of crap. Maybe "crap" is too harsh; it was inexpensive entry-level hardward and I got what I paid for. To it's credit, it has served me well for the past 7 years. Now I'm ready for more. My software tools are incredibly powerful, I don't want my input device holding me back.

There's a lot of options out there these days, so I'm doing research to make an informed decision. Since many computer musicians have to make this somewhat difficult decision too, I'm going to post my notes here. Just keep in mind my decision will ultimately be based on personal preference.

MIDI is one of the most common formats for computer music. It's incredibly useful. But there's one place it's seriously lacking support: on the world wide web. Wouldn't it be nice if Flash could serve as an interactive MIDI playback engine (potentially with MIDI I/O) right in your browser? It could... Adobe just needs a little prodding!

Want to help? Sign up for a bug tracker account on Adobe's site and vote for this issue: https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-123 (there's a Vote link on the left side of the page). You only need to enter a name and email address to signup. It will only take a moment.

Tonight I threw together a little Max/MSP patch so I can control preset changes in the modular sequencing program Numerology (http://five12.com) with my monome. I think this will be a nice performance interface. It's designed for a monome 64/40h (http://monome.org/40h) but the technique could certainly be extended for one of the larger versions.

The basic idea is there are 8 racks in Numerology, each with 8 presets. The Monome's columns correspond to the racks and the rows to the presets.

I'm kicking off 2009 with an update of ajm objects: version 0.8.6. Everything has been reworked for Max 5 and I've added some new objects for sequencing with the transport system.

The new comers include ajm.metro, ajm.makenote, and ajm.midi2coll. Together they allow for transport-synced sequencing using coll objects.

This pattern:

is these notes:

where for each note, these relative intervals are played:

The Cosy sequencing language can express this concept like this:

(C4 F4 G4 C4)@($ M2 m2 p5 -M2 -m2)

Hot off the presses! I've been working on this one pretty regularly for the past month or so.

Here's the permalink and some more info.

This pattern:

is just these notes:

where for each note, these notes are played:

The Cosy sequencing language can express this reductive concept in a straightforward way:

(C Db D Db)@($ F G Ab G F)

People occasionally email me questions or feedback about the content and software on this website. Then we have a private email conversation, which often contains information that would be of interest to other people. I've always know a comment system would be a better way to handle this, but I didn't want to deal with spam. I have a reasonable solution now, so comments have been enabled on this site.

I introduced Cosy in my previous post.

Now an online preview is available. Try it right in your browser!