August 26th, 2006 | mosquito
i’m well beyond open that i am a hardware junkie. if asked, i’d likely say it heads into to the realm of fetishism. i’m not ashamed of it at all, because the movement towards the all software world of music makes me cringe. it is nice to know that people are dumping their hardware left and right. makes it much easier to find and buy. there is some software that i am drawn to of course, that being steinberg’s cubase, ableton’s live, and cycling ’74’s max/msp.
so this morning while reading the create digital music blog, i came across this post about a diy commodore 64 beatbox/bass synth box. needless to say, my interest was more than piqued. i’m finding myself researching these types of devices more and more, not to mention how to create them. for some reason i’m starting to see the circuit bending being in my not so distant future as well.
now, this was after i spent about thirty minutes drooling over the monodeck ii, a custom ableton live controller by monolake. maybe it’s the number of buttons and lights, or maybe it’s the construction of it, but to see that many controls with visual feedback on one control surface is just beautiful. makes me want to start using the soldering iron for more than just reparing our gear when it fails. there’s also the monome control surface that is an 8×8 grid of backlit buttons.
and speaking of control surfaces, this talk by jeff han from february of this year showcases a conceptual surface that is under development within the educational sector. it sure would be nice to see such a device at a price point that wouldn’t make me shudder, though it will likley be quite some time before it’s on the street. right now the much smaller and compact lemur from jazzmutant is over $2k. i have to give it to the lemur for it’s flexibility as a control surface. it makes the price point “bearable” if the money was available.
but while all these devices are just great, something has to be done about all the wires required to connect it all. the studio is essentially our live show rig as well (for now until we start adding studio specific gear), and it is no small undertaking to wire it all together. we do have the drums and synths submixed through two 16 channel line mixers, but that was really out of neccesity since we ran out of channels on the board. i’m not super comfortable about the idea of sending any audio wirelessly other than live guitar, bass, and any in-ear/headphone monitor mixes. midi though, well it appears that cme makes the widi-x8 wireless midi interface. that might help out tremendously on the midi snake front. we already have to pick up another midi interface as we’ve filled one.
seems like there is always something new coming out in the hardware market, it just doesn’t seem to be heavy in the realm of audio generation. thankfully we still have some, and most of them seem to be of the digilog synth variety (which are my favorites of course).