SenseSurface lets you attach physical controls to an LCD screen directly over the on-screen controls. Pretty neat in theory but not sure how it would work in practice. Perhaps a secondary monitor, with all these stuck to it would be handy? Not very portable though.

I just grabbed Intua Beatmaker for my iPhone. I’ll post up a review and maybe some samples in a bit.

Jamming with folks again reminds me that I need to upgrade my copy of Ableton Live to take advantage of the tempo nudge feature, if nothing else. Playing with folks that aren’t midi-synced to your perfectly synced performance makes things a little wonky and that tempo nudge would simplify staying in sync with live musicians.

I need piles of money so I can get all the gear I want. Still need a padKontrol, and I’ve been eyeing tons of other stuff… I also need more space so I can start bending these toy keyboards I bought months ago.

I’ve got a gig coming up at Beyond on July 23. My set will be a combination of live and DJ stuff, and should be good times. Come out and buy me a beer!

New demo mix coming soon, hopefully.

For the 3 or so of you that read this, I apologize for the lack of content. I went and upgraded to Leopard after waiting a while and reading comments of people with my gear that weren’t having problems, even though I knew M-Audio hasn’t updated their FireWire drivers yet. Of course, I was not as lucky as some others… So I can’t really put out recordings of on-the-fly DJ mixes, as I can’t cue at the moment.

I am working on some non-DJ stuff more along the lines of live performance and live remixing with some actual hardware (keys, guitar, etc) but none of that is ready for public consumption yet. Soon I hope.

A few DC locals are starting a little something up that I hope pans out. Our first jam session/get together is tonight. I can’t wait!

This has been out for a while, but I have been torn between the Korg padKONTROL and M-Audio’s Trigger Finger. I was looking at the Trigger Finger for DJing because it has faders and more assignable knobs… But now I’m thinking I can just keep using my UC-33 for levels and grab one of these for live drumming and sample triggering. It’s less knobs, but the ease of programming and the X-Y controls make it much more desirable to me.

Since I got into Ableton Live, I’ve really just been DJing with it, with some looping and effects and running more channels of audio than I was able to do with my traditional vinyl or CD setups. More and more though, I’m getting a little “bored” with just playing someone else’s music quite so much so I’m wanting to get more into production and live remixing again. I’m thinking the padKONTROL lends itself to that quite nicely. Would be great for live drumming, sample triggering and studio drum programming at the very least.

I just bought an Axiom 25 this summer to use as a main keyboard. It’s only 25 keys, but I’m really just getting started so I don’t need a full keyboard just yet. I could definitely use the X-Y controls and the nicer pads on the padKONTROL though. The Axiom 25 has pads, but they aren’t very nice.

Unfortunately though, all gear purchases are going to have to wait until after the holidays, which means I need to figure out how to get the pads on the Axiom to assign to another channel different from the keys. I’m pretty sure it does that… And maybe I can program my really old Kaoss Pad (I bought the first version, ages ago) to act as a simple X-Y control.