I got word from my awesome Sweetwater rep. today that my APC40 will ship on the 29th or 30th of the month. I can’t wait to get my hands on this thing.

Thankfully, it works with Ableton Live 7 as well as 8 because I am still stuck on 7 at the moment. Upgrading has not been in the budget with Capitals playoff tickets being added to the expenses. They should just add 4 rounds of playoff tickets to season ticket packages, and simply reimburse or credit account holders the difference if the team is eliminated early or doesn’t make the playoffs. Would make budgeting much easier.

I’ve wanted a monome for a long time now, and this just makes it worse. So many neat things you can do with this device. If I was more confident with a soldering iron, I’d buy a kit and make one. They aren’t really *that* expensive.

Polygomé demonstration from stretta on Vimeo.

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.

I’ll throw up some video/audio later tonight, probably.

At any rate, I have been able to get my interface working with Leopard using M-Audio’s FireWire driver version 1.8.2 (available here). This is not *fully* functional, as there is still some wierdness with the interface. For example; in Live I can route the Master to channels 1 and 2 and the Cue to channels 3 and 4, and have output from 1 and 2 and monitoring in 3 and 4 on the headphones as expected. I cannot, however, use the A/B switch on the front panel to switch the headphone output from Cue to Master as I used to be able to. This is significant, but not a deal-breaker for me.

Here’s how I did it. These instructions worked for me, and I make no guarantees as to whether or not they will work for you. If you break something, I’m sorry, but I can’t be held responsible. I’m sorry I don’t have screenshots or specific filenames, but I wasn’t really thinking this was all going to work at the time.

Moving on…

1. Download FireWire OSX 1.8.2 from M-Audio’s website
2. Close all your other applications (I don’t know how important this is, but I thought it was a good idea)
3. Repair your disk permissions using Disk Utility
4. Uninstall the current driver on your system using the Uninstall application in the disk image
5. This is where we break a little bit from what M-Audio Support told me to do. In the uninstall application, at the end when it tells you everything is finished, click the “More Information” button. In there, you will see what the Uninstaller couldn’t delete. Find those files on your Mac and delete them. Then tell the uninstaller to finish, and it will prompt you to reboot. Reboot.
6. Repair disk permissions again
7. Run the Uninstaller again. Do the same thing with the More Information button, and delete the offending files. This time for me it was a kernel extenstion (.kext) called MAudioFireWireSomethingsomething.kext. Delete it, making sure you’re only deleting the file that the Uninstaller told you it couldn’t delete. Tell the Uninstaller to finish, and it will talk about how it is doing something with the boot cache. Let it do what it is going to do and reboot.
8. Repair disk permissions again
9. Install the new driver
10. Repair disk permissions one more time
11. Shut down, connect the 1814 and boot up the computer

M-Audio recommends NOT using an AC adaptor, but rather letting the 1814 draw power over FireWire.

Anyway, from there everything should be reasonably functional. Good Luck!

Here’s the video.

(via AnalogSuicide)

via Deviant Synth

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.