Mad Zach from custommidicontrollers.com just released his latest custom creation built for an artist in Australia. This monster has 64 knobs, 32 buttons, 16 LEDs, and 16 sliders. It’s powered by our Brain and has a really nice finish with custom faceplate graphics.

We’ve been following Mad Zach’s work for a while, he’s building his controllers right here in Austin, TX, and we’ve seen this monster in person. This is a great example of a custom controller built to suit the specific needs of an artist, and encompasses the true spirit of our DIY Builder series. Check out his video demo of the controller

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news by Jay

 We get a lot of questions about how to use our controllers that go to our support system, rather than the forum. This works great, but sometimes, a question really should be asked publicly, because it’s probably an answer a lot of people would want to know. This particular question struck me as one of those, so I’m going to post it here on the blog.

I’m trying to figure out how I can trigger samples with my livid block using Live. Specifically, I want to trigger piano notes (each note a sample) across a row of buttons on the block. I tried using Impulse, but I cant assign a midi note to the play button in the sample block/space. I would definitely appreciate a solution if you have any. thank you!

There’s a few ways of doing this. If you drop an Impulse instrument into a track, it will listen to MIDI notes to trigger the various sounds. I’m pretty sure the default map is to trigger the sounds starting at C3, and continue using the notes of a major scale. In numbers, this would be:
60 62 64 65 67 69 71 72
If you want notes from the block passed to the track’s Impulse instrument, the block needs to be selected in the Live MIDI Prefs and turned on for “Track”, and the “MIDI From” menu in the track needs to have block selected (or “All Ins”). The track will need to be armed for recording, too.

1. Method One: Reprogram the block
You could create a preset in the blockEditor that would map those notes to a row, then save the values to the block. This might be the easiest way, but it’s the least instructive!

2. Method Two: Scales in Live
You could use one of Live’s Note Matrix midi effects (under Live Devices/MIDI Effects/Scale in the Live browser) to transpose the notes. This would be a nice result, and with different presets, you could have lots of different maps at hand, but would no doubt be challenging, as you’d have to do all sorts of fussing with the note matrix, the transpose, the lowest key, etc, and make many mistakes along the way! It’s not really designed for a subset of notes – it’s more for transposing an entire keyboard – thought I think it could be exploited that way.

3. Method Three: The Drum Rack
Another solution is to use Ableton Live’s killer app: the Drum Rack. I’ve made a video that shows how I build a drum rack from a simple piano instrument (this will work regardless of the type – you’ll see in the video), then transpose samples to create a scale on the first row of my Ohm64 (the note values and process are the same for the block).

The basic idea is to first add an instrument (doesn’t matter which one, really), group it to a Drum Rack (right click on the instrument title bar to get that menu), delete the instrument from its default placement, thus making a blank rack, then start dragging instruments to the Drum Pads that correspond with the notes coming from the first row of the block’s button grid, which happen to be:
0 8 16 24 32 40 48 56
You can see in the video that I used MIDI Monitor (http://www.snoize.com) to get the note names from the buttons. However, during the movie, I got smarter and realized that the appropriate Pad would flash in the Rack when I pressed a button on the Ohm64, rendering my cleverness obsolete.

I hope this helps!

Peter Nyboer.
piano image under creative commons attribution license from Piano image from flickr user pj_vanf http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanf/5321214369/sizes/l/in/photostream/

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uncategorized by Peter

Last month we made a few prototypes for an iPad docking controller and shared our prototypes with the public. While we never intended to make these controller available for the public, after an overwhelming response to make them available we made a short run of the Block Station available for purchase. Future Music Magazine contacted me to do a short interview on our public prototyping and it appeared in their July 2011 issue. You can view the PDF of the interview here.

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reviews by Jay

The OhmRGB come with our expansion module for added adaptability, flexibility and control. It is the same expansion jacks you may have seen on our latest block controller, and there are a few ways you can use the module. It has 2 1/4″ jacks that let you connect “roland style” foot pedals for expressive control with your feet. It also have a pin header that links directly to the Brain on the controller that lets you connect 8 additional analog controls. You can experiment with touch controls, sensors, accelerometers, faders, rotary knobs, and more. Of course, our Builder series BYOB boards can be easily integrated for a totally customized and modular setup.

In this video I show how the expansion jacks work and give you an example of ways you can utilize it. I am using Ableton Live and use my expansion controls for effects with Live’s device rack. The foot pedal controls an audio effect, and I created a module with four faders and four rotary pots to control two more devices.

This just scratches the surface of what you can do with the expansion jacks. You can check out my other tutorials using the expansion jacks on the block with a touch sensor, and fader module.

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My dad was a dentist, but in his heart he was a tinkerer, and in his tinkering, he found various ways to improve his work. One of the fruits of his imagination was the “dental bed,” which was a replacement for one of the two chairs in the modest practice. Flat like a bed, with no articulating back, the advantage of the bed was that it had fewer moving parts, placed “the work” in a better place for him to get into the patient’s mouth, and better fit patients that were taller or wider than average. Having been to several other dentists since he retired many years ago, I still wonder why this was never really adopted as a standard.

One of my dad’s other inventions that did find wider acceptance and an actual market, was the color-coded instrument ring. Made of high-temperature tolerant silicone rubber, these rings came in seven different colors, and were used to color code instruments for easier tool arrangement by assistants, provide instrument sequences for different procedures, easier identification of tools, and made to resist the tortures of instrument sterilization. The realities of the modern marketplace tanked that business sometime in the 90′s for him, but the genius of color-coding has stayed with me.

So you can imagine that I’m pretty happy that we at Livid are announcing the release of the OhmRGB. We’ve had a lot of users ask for multiple LEDs for each button and custom LED layouts, so we’re really happy that we can offer not just two colors on each button, but seven, and done so in a way that is flexible, thoughtful, and useful. With seven color choices on each button, there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained in better presentation of information, reducing possible error during a critical live show, and increasing focus in the controller, erasing the barrier between ideas and reality.

Of course, it looks really bitchin’ too:

That’s a result of using the OhmRGBEditor’s LED panel, using a quicktime movie mixed with a scrolling message. HD, 3D, Cinema Display: that’s all really nice, but there’s still a lot of fun in 8×8 resolution and 3-bit color!

So what else can you do with the OhmRGB besides trip out on the pretty colors? Like its singled-colored brother, you can create different presets for the LED arrangements, and organize your buttons for better feedback for different songs, scenarios, or parts of a set. You could also create a “score” in the form of a quicktime movie, and let that play in the movie player, and dictate how you use the controller over time!

The most popular software among our user base is Abelton Live. It also has the most challenging control surface setup, at least when it comes to creating the sort of sophisticated controller and software pairing that our users want. With those things in mind, we started with a clean slate, looked at the various ways you can use a controller with Live, and created the three-page OhmModes Live Remote script. This lets you mix, play, and DJ with your Ohm controller, using the crossfader buttons to instantly re-map the Ohm to Live so it works as needed. It’s like having three controllers, without taking up all your studio space, and we’ve made the mapping pretty intuitive and easy, so it won’t take several trips to the manual to learn it.

We also get a lot of requests to customize and modify controllers for people. “Can you make me an Ohm, but with more knobs?”, “I’d love to put some touch strips on the Ohm”, “I need more controls for Sends and EQ” are among the popular requests. Sometimes we take these mods on, but we have a whole line of products in our Builder series for building your own custom controllers. We recently introduced the expansion jack on our block controller so users can expand it with additional analog sensors and foot controllers, without having to add another MIDI device to their setup. We’ve added this to the OhmRGB to further encourage experimentation and expansion of digital media controllers, and make sure that our users can fully express themselves and control their shows. With two jacks for off-the-shelf foot controllers, you can make your feet do some work, and stop wasting those valuable extremities for mere standing and dancing around! And with a ribbon cable and a few boards from our Builder series, you can knock out a special module that does that one thing that you REALLY need, and free up the entire controller for playing.

These first tools with the release of the OhmRGB are, of course, just a start. We like to keep our controllers “living” and will add to the arsenal of tricks with integration into other software products, like our own CellDNA, Propellerhead’s Reason, Native Instruments Tracktor, Renoise, and others. You can get started on playing with the RGB colors in Cycling74′s Max5 because our Editor is an open source Max patch. Our community of users will no doubt continue to spark our imaginations with clever uses and mappings. We can’t wait to see what happens when this controller starts to get into your hands, so, with that, I gotta end this wordy blog post and get back to work so we can start shipping!

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news by Peter