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
I was tempted to name this post something like “Get off our case” or “Cold case” but it seemed so mid 80′s rock and roll. But yeah, we’ve got cases. We have been trying for years to come up with a nice sturdy case at an affordable price, and we finally have our answer! This isn’t just any hipster hand woven hemp carrying bag, but a rock solid, travel ready, professional road case. These are really well made cases custom designed to fit the Ohm64 (both wood and metal body versions) and OhmRGB. The cases are constructed from high quality birch ply, have a protective foam lining, heavy duty ball corners, stainless steel latches, and are made in the USA. For more information and ordering please visit our online shop.
