First, the traditional view – this is what every one of our competitors looks like; you’ve seen it a hundred times before, the ribbon style waveforms for the two turntables on top, then filters, effect, cue point, track info and other controls in the middle, and your iTunes library on the bottom. This view is coming along quickly – so send us what you would like to see!
Our other view is one not seen anywhere else; a rendering of the turntables as turntables – a circular disc with the waveforms running along the side. Here we let you get creative – because every element on the turntable view is moveable, and the turntables themselves are resizable. This allows you to customize this however you like, placing items where you need them to help you visualize scratching. Soon you’ll be able to add / remove effect here just by dragging and dropping, and customize the color scheme. Here is a simple plugin that checks out the incoming audio and determines what pitch is being played. More specifically, this plugin calculates the Fourier Transform (which is the frequency spectrum) and looks for the greatest peak. The VST version of this plugin also outputs a midi stream indicating the current note it hears.
Juce allows us to create a plugin that works and is easily compilable as an AudioUnit, VST or RTAS plugin, on Mac or PC or Linux. This plugin code is based on the plugin example code in the Juce libraries and should be immediately familiar to any Juce programmer. Juce is the only project dependency.
The plugin itself is downloadable here, and the source code is available on github: download the source from github
Livetronica Studio offers several ways to scratch, and a broad array of effects and parameters not available in other applications like Serato or Torq. Still, one of the coolest things you can do with this new software is to play around with some old school scratch turntablism ala the style of DJ Qbert.
Here I show how to scratch with Livetronica by just setting a couple samples on the turntables. For scratch DJs Livetronica offers control in several new ways; for example, you will notice some of the loops in the video fade with the crossfader as if on a turntable but do not scratch. You can add any element from Livetronica – loops or samples or probability drums) to a turntable but specify whether the audio will use that turntable for mixing/scratching/effects, or any combination.
This way it is possible to have two simple clips scratching, while beats and other audio elements fade and take on the effects of the turntables but do remain steady (don’t scratch). This provides a dynamic background for the artist to scratch over.
This video demonstrates scratching with a midi controller (the Xponent), but Livetronica will very soon be able to use time coded vinyl as well.
A couple weekends ago I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at SF Music Hackday, and SF MusicTech Conference. One company featured heavily in new music technology is EchoNest – a company devoted to a music metadata API for developers.
Echonest is one of the frontrunners in this new industry. You can use APIs like Echonest’s to quickly look up the metadata for most songs. Within milliseconds you can get and save not just the key, bpm, and duration of a song – but also the exact location of each and every beat, the pitch information at every moment, the overall danceability of the song, and more.
Echonest also has library of “remix” functions that perform a wide variety of impressive transformations – for example, reconstructing the a bit of music without using any of the original material (by finding the most similar bit of sound in some other bit of audio), adding cowbell or changing the beat of a song, as well as constructing my favorite – the infinite james brown machine (which does basically what it sounds like … taking a James Brown song, splicing it up into soundbites, and constructing them in such a way to make an infinitely long song by cutting at just the right spots).
My other favorite (and slightly more useful) remix based program takes two songs with different BPMs and fade from one to another while morphing both songs tempos to match. That is, beat matching two songs at different BPMs while fading from one to another.
Unfortunately, none of the current remix functionality is available in real time (until now).
Shown here is an open source C++ project that uses Echonest data to automatically beat match two pieces of music. The crossfader is an xcode project, and uses several basic, open source, libraries to achieve this. Primarily:
You can download the source at: https://github.com/aaronleese/beat-matching-crossfader.
You may notice a lot of new business around Livetronica Studio (and a few “under construction” signs).
A quick update to everyone (and thanks for the emails):
1 – Turntable filters – now you can map XY effects like the turntable filters to midi controller with a single touch. The filter you see is designed to cover the entire frequency spectrum (20Hz-20kHZ), and allow the musician to simply touch the pad and apply a filter to either (or both) turntable(s).
2 – Library – Livetronica Studio now remembers recent projects / turntables / beats and places them all on the right hand side of the screen. Drag and drop the items into the views to load them. Additionally, soon you will be able to browse projects online (and share you’re own).
3 - Effects – Available VST/AU plugins are listed on in the library and can now be dragged onto most components, even other plugins (so you can add reverb to a VST piano, or drop a distortion effect onto a loop or turntable).
When a DJ runs his hands across a turntable, he doesn’t think about the pitch he is aiming for, he just feels it. Move your hand quicker and you get a higher pitch, pull the vinyl back at high speed and get that high pitched vinyl scream that has defined so many grooves.
In this way a turntable is an instrument more like a violin that a guitar. No notes of off limits, you can spin the vinyl to produce frequency shifts of any magnitude. With Livetronica Studio you can turn the turntable sensitivity up to well beyond that of a realistic turntable, and even hit freq shifts that are unrealistic or impossible on real turntables.
But lets go a step further. What if, like the instrument woodworker putting the first frets on a mandolin you could produce a new instrument, one that was prone to certain note intervals, one that allowed certain notes but not others? The answer is pitch quantization. Just as guitar has frets for every semitone, you can quantize the virtual turntables in Livetronica Studio to produce pitch shifts the correspond only to semitonic intervals. Or, like some other instruments, you can quantize to only the major or minor intervals, or the blues or jazz scales. There are even options for modal, flamenco and middle eastern scales in Livetronica Studio.
Not satisfied with sticking to a scale? You can also set how strictly the turntable adheres to the scale. You can push and pull the notes … sliding like a guitarist bending a note from one pitch to another to strain to hit that perfect blue note between the intervals. It’s all there, Livetronica Studio has the most advanced pitch quantization of any tool in the dj’s arsenal.
As a real time instrument, it is important to be able to customize FlyLoops control to allow you to set up midi control and keyboard shortcuts quickly and easily. Just completed for the new FlyLoops release is a versatile system for mapping virtually every command at the click of a button.
Just right click (or CTRL-click) on any FlyLoops button, knob or slider and you get a dropdown menu with a list of the currently mapped commands and the ability to change them.
All the parameters of the Beat Splicer are now midi learnable, so you can easily tweak your beats as you play.
The same is true of the visualization suite. All the parameters can be mapped quickly and easily to midi control surfaces so you can control the waveforms in real time. Or map the FlyLoops drums and turn any midi surface into a drumset.
In midi learn mode, you can see what items have been mapped, and what other items can be mapped.
Livetronica Studio just got a brand new drumset (complete with its own drummer). No really, every drum can now be easily programmed to play very precise beats, with as much or little variation as you desire. Start out by dragging the mouse across the probability matrix on the drum – altering the chance that the drum plays at a given point within the measure. Not satisfied? How about adding a little swing, subdividing beats into triplets, or four or five subdivisions/beat. Maybe change the clustering (causing drum hits to clump together). Now drop the overall chance adjust and get a sparse rhythm that comes in as quick bursts.
It’s all possible with Livetronica Studio, and whats more, it’s all very easy! Take a look at the new video.
The filter variables are mappable to Midi commands, or controllable with the mouse, allowing users to change the way loops are EQ’ed in real time, using just one or multiple nodes so that you can choose to drop the middle tones but ramp up the high pitches and maybe just the lowest of the low notes – or grab a thin band of frequencies in the middle of the spectrum and let just those few notes bleed through each time the loop comes around. Special thanks to Gopal E for his help on this project.
The Loop Tracks