steve cooley presents

This isn’t quite ready yet, but… Check out this one-shot recording of the new 64 step length capability

Hey there, it’s Steve Cooley from Haptic Synapses and Beatseqr.com.

Here’s a trick that I’ve been playing around with using quartz composer to generate curve data and send it out to osculator, and then from there you can send it out as midi cc to whatever music app you want that will accept that data to control various things. It’s pretty neat, and there’s a lot of room for exploration here. As required by the Rules of Ideas Being Spread On the Internet, we have to have a silly name for this, so let’s call this a “quartzillator”.

Load up quartz composer. I think even 10.4 had the OSC sender patch, so it should work that far back. 10.5, 10.6, and presumably every version after should be able to do this.

In a blank composition, place an “interpolation” patch and an “OSC Sender” patch. The options of these patches are ok at the default, just find out what port quartz composer is going to be using to send the OSC data out on so you can tell Osculator to listen on that port.  Add a new float OSC argument with whatever name you want.. I called mine “/oscillator”.

listen to the port sent from QC in osculator and set it up as MIDI CC

Connect the interpolation patch’s Result output port to the OSC argument’s input port. Quartz Composer is now sending curve data out on that udp port with that argument.

Connecting the interpolation patch to the OSC send patch

Launch Osculator and set the OSC Input Port to whatever the output port number was in the OSC Sender patch in quartz composer.   The argument that you made (in my case “/oscillator”) in QC should show up automagically.  Set the event type to be a “MIDI CC” output and set the value to be zero (for now.. there may be some conflicts on some numbers you choose.. most seem to be ok).

listen to the port sent from QC in osculator and set it up as MIDI CC

Ok, so if everything is working correctly, you should be able to go to your music app of choice that will accept MIDI CC messages, and assign the new “quartzillator” to whatever parameter you like.  Here’s a video of the effect in Propellerhead Reason… again, this should work in logic, live, reason, VSTs with midi learn, AU’s… pretty much anywhere that will accept midi cc.

ENJOY! Happy exploring!

Hey, so I’m switching off soundcloud… so look for the links to the audio recordings as below:

Live at Works 2009-11-09 ———————————————————————————–

Another great set!

We had a beatseqr user meetup at my house on friday night. Check out the photo!

Also, I wanted to mention that Derek and I did some great work and managed to get chase lights working while the sequencer is running. This feature will give you a sense of where you are in the sequence.

On display at Heart Of Chaos – “Uproar 2009″ show at first street billiards:

Here’s a short video on how to use beatseqr’s midi note number slider mode to access all 25 instruments in Logic Ultrabeat!

Here’s a video demo of me using Beatseqr v3 with Propellerhead Reason…. but you could use pretty much any app that accepts midi.

hey, while i have everything set up to record video demos.. here’s another one for using redrum to control Thor. I thought that was a cool trick.

I recorded a short video to show off the interface of the version 3 hardware. Here it is:

Beatseqr v3 interface tour from stevecooley on Vimeo.

oh, and.. solo mode is done…

Two updates:

1. Up until now I had been working on an objective-c/cocoa desktop app to handle the serial communication with the Beatseqr hardware. I was doing it to use objective-c and cocoa for a really fun project, and because I wanted to build on the “Rosco” platform that I’d built before Roxor and Beatseqr. For whatever reason, the snow leopard upgrade was not very kind to the serial communications functionality, so I downgraded back to leopard until I could figure out what the problem was or figure out an alternate solution. I don’t believe my preference of operating systems is necessarily *your* preference, so I knew at some point I’d have to tackle creating an app for Windows, at the very least.

So I took the opportunity to solve all of these problems by writing a new app called “Ubirox” (or “ubiquitous roxor”) using the extremely awesome Processing IDE. So now there are Mac, Windows, and Linux versions available. The downside is that the user interface that I’d built to mirror what was going on with the hardware is not present, but the upside is that I have two additional operating system platforms that I can support now.

Roxor will continue to be a downloadable app for the Mac, and will continue to work in conjunction with Steppa to give you a taste of what the Beatseqr hardware is like to use. I made one of my recent tracks released on Dobox Recordings with Roxor and Steppa, and without Beatseqr, so Roxor is still a really fun tool to play with.

2. Mute mode on the voice select buttons is operational! I’m working on a “solo” mode too, so I’ll write up a post with illustrations soon. Ubirox is affected by these developments, so links will go up when they’re all done.