making music

Playing (Live?) with Ableton

~ Clicky Steve ~ Leave a comment

On Saturday morning I had a Novation Launchpad delivered, and spent a good chunk of the rest of the weekend trying to figure out how to make use of it. I could easily get it to act as a MIDI input device for the Gameboy (which is sweet), but I really wanted to use it as it was primarily intended: to load up a bunch of chip loops and trigger them live as a sequencer.

After much swearing and frustration, I finally managed to get the loops synched up and laid out for one of the most recent tracks I’ve written. I just need to plug the Launchpad in, and I can play the whole song with the pads – triggering different combinations of sequences from about 1 to 4 bars long.

Much like a lot of the stuff I’ve been playing with lately, I wasn’t really sure why I was doing it in the first place; there was no real end game. I just wanted to see if I could do it. Being able to play with and manipulate songs/sounds that you’ve created on a tiny Gameboy screen in a more ‘live’ or dynamic fashion is pretty cool.

Now that I’ve managed to clear the biggest hurdle of getting it to work, it’s gotten me thinking. Theoretically I could now play a lot of my chiptune tracks live without just hitting ‘play’ on LSDJ – but I don’t think that would really be all that big of a draw in Glasgow. However, it does mean that I could set up chains of melodies, stick them into Ableton and then play them live as more of an instrument, as part of some kind of band setup. I’d just need to find some folk willing to play guitar and potentially drums in a weird quasi grunge electronic band.

Could be interesting.

Staying up far too late and for far too long

~ Clicky Steve ~ Leave a comment

clockresized.gif

I’ve been staying up way too late this past week, trying to do as much actual music writing as I can. It’s way too easy to get distracted by all of the cool things you can do with and to Gameboys to get different sounds, and forget about the actual composition bit.

I’m working on a track at the moment which it turns out lasts about six minutes. That’s a ridiculous length of time, and is probably the longest song I’ve ever made. It’s about three times as long as the average track time on the last all-chip album I did. I’m firmly of the school of ‘keep it short so people don’t get bored’, but it seems too late to turn back now – and I kind of want to keep it purely because I’ve never written anything this length. I’ll just need to plow ahead, though it can’t be a coincidence that it’s proving much harder going to get it to a point where I’m happy with it than usual. For now though, I need to give my ears a break.

Setting up a dedicated music making space

~ Clicky Steve ~ Leave a comment

Over the past couple of years I’ve hardly written or recorded any music. Part of this is because I’ve been so busy doing other things: moving flat, grappling with the UK immigration process, getting married, and travelling a lot. On top of that though, was the lack of any dedicated space where I could leave my recording gear set up, ready to be used whenever.

The time has come to do something about it, and I’ve reclaimed space in a corner alcove that previously was home to our washing and a couple of bikes.

Behold, the new studio:

I’ve set up the Kaoss pad, along with the mixer and Gameboys – all illuminated in some bright LED lights. It’s amazing what having a decent area set aside for making music can do to your motivation.

Unsurprisingly, I ran into a whole host of new issues when I went to record some tracks – both related, and in addition to the ones that I listed last year.

  • My M-Audio Firewire 410 has finally become properly obsolete. The workarounds that people have developed online simply aren’t working anymore. It’s frustrating as the hardware was still perfectly good – but since it was released over 10 years ago, it was probably a reasonable time to invest in a new interface. This time, I’ve gone for USB.
  • My Gameboy USB cartridges that house LSDJ are acting up. One of them has crashed and needs the ROM re-flashed (which is a pain in the ass on a Mac), and the other seems to get stuck on the second ROM that is loaded (Pokemon Gold!), rendering LSDJ inaccessible sporadically.
  • I’ve lost a couple of my Phono couplers, which I used for splitting the signal from the Gameboy so I could run it through the Kaoss pad as well as bypassing it. A stupid minor thing.
  • I no longer have a keyboard with a MIDI DIN connector, and all of the newer ones that have been released only have MIDI connectivity via USB. That’s all well and good, but not much use if you’re using a hacked together arduinoboy to play the Gameboy as a synth. I had to work out how to use my laptop as a MIDI thru device, which is thankfully up and working now.

It does make you stop and wonder why the hell you go to all this bother to use vintage hardware rather than sticking in some samples and being done with it, but there’s just something so satisfying about using the Gameboy that it’s all worth it in the end.

Maybe.

Everything is coming together nicely now though, and I’ve got some new gear to experiment with too: A Pocket Operator PO-14 (the Sub one), and probably an Ableton Launchpad. My plan is to dive into the MIDI side of things a bit deeper, as it’s something I’ve never really understood that well. Time to change that!

Hopefully this dedicated space will make a big difference. Watch this space.