Pro Tools 11 Announced: Do we Care?
We’re certainly not saying there aren’t any dance producers who use Pro Tools, but, in comparison to the likes of Logic, Ableton Live, Cubase, FL Studio and Reason, the size of Pro Tools’ dance music user-base is negligible. Version 11 doesn’t look like turning that situation around. What do you think? Is Pro Tools relevant to dance music?
No.
Via Attack Magazine
Great interview with the Ableton Push co-creator, Jesse Terry:
That’s right, I used Lego and sugru (a silicon putty). We attached Lego pieces to MIDI buttons with LEDs, connected to a Livid Brain. So, there were many burnt fingers and burnt Star Wars pieces along the way. My wife would always hear me digging away in the Lego bin and she’d wonder if I was actually working up here! The Lego prototype made it very easy to test out ergonomic setups as we could move the buttons around. We tried all kinds of different layouts and, we were able to user test the entire thing and learn to play it before we had a hardware version to play with. I’ve been playing this Push Lego layout on plywood for 2 years now.
Read the rest for a great view from people who are trying to redefine the idea of a Musical Instrument.
Courtesy of DJ Tech Tools:
“The buttons are a lot more playable than I thought they’d be”
The video makes it look less like a rubber pad and more like some sort of kevlar-headed piano key. The triple finger gesture he does with the drum pads is pretty convincing – I haven’t tried one of these for myself yet, but those pads look like a decidedly higher-end product than the older APC and LaunchPad offerings.
Big week in the “too big to be a plugin, but too small to be a DAW” market segment.
Anyone out there using Reason by itself still? Ah well – the MIDI out feature will be cool to people who are into that sort of thing. I’ve never been a huge fan of USING either Reason or Komplete, but the sounds both packages can make are formidable.
Via Resident Advisor, because it’s an awesome site.
After rewatching the Ableton Preview Event video, in which Dennis DeSantis gives a great demo of the Push’s scale mapping capabilities, I decided to see if I could mimic this on my Launchpad using Max for Live.
With the help of some of the Novation tutorials and a little inspiration from the MaxforLive.com repository I figured out how to place a diatonic major or minor scale on my User 1 mode. The grid goes stepwise on the X axis and in diatonic 4ths on the Y axis. The lighted pads represent the tonic note. The layout is exactly like the one shown in all the push videos, although the lights aren’t accurate when the key is changed. Like I said, it’s a hack. And a dream.
I’ll post more details on how I did this later if anyone is interested. In short, it isn’t pretty, and it isn’t a workflow I’d probably use in practice. But it did let me make this cool jam:
What kills me is how fast it is to play scales. Just by learning a simple finger pattern I can play multiple octaves of scales or modes. I can also do sequences (of the music theory variety) and chord blocks very easily. I can’t wait to try this kind of thing on a device that’s actually designed for it!