steve cooley presents

I made this video last night. I was just running through some of the features that I use when I’m using a beatseqr.

My brother in law posted a really cool video of him playing a new song with beatseqr and Ableton Live… check it out!

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Yeeeeah, check this video out! This is my friend DJ Mojo in L.A. He was a major guy in the underground electronic music scene in the 90′s, and since then has been documenting the history of our slice of the musical history spectrum, thinking very deeply about new music interfaces, producing remixes, and mix sessions. Here Mojo is demoing Beatseqr on a Windows machine using the Sonar DAW. Awesome!!

Find Mojo on Facebook, YouTube, and Soundcloud

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Here’s a video of me playing around with the new features I wrote into the beatseqr v4 firmware. You can now change the midi channel per voice from a new mode on the faders, and you can also now offset the octave of the midi note numbers from a new knob mode. I’m still working on the interface on the LCD to make it clear what’s going on when you’re jumping around modes but as soon as it’s ready, I’ll make the source available.

Oh, and then I also have an iPad with Korg iMS-20 running.

Steve Cooley beatseqr arduino based drum sequencer plus reason & iPad + iMS-20 from stevecooley on Vimeo.

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My good friend Solarno made a couple of really nice videos, check ‘em out!

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Jonathan’s back with another video! This one shows how he set up beatseqr in his studio to work with his hardware audio devices. Sweet!!

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Yeah, check this video out!!

from Jonathan’s youtube description:

This is me playing around with Steve Cooley’s amazing beatseqr hardware controller. I’m running it through a Macbook Pro, with Roxor and Steppa, the open-source software designed specifically for the hardware. The Macbook is sending MIDI out to an Emu ESI-32, and I’m also adding Space Echo, spring reverb and digital delay to individual tracks. I spent about 10 minutes beforehand programming the step sequencer, otherwise everything is live.

SUPER sweet video, dude!!

Some back story … I met Jonathan back in 1997 when he was one of the guys running the legendary and seminal weekly internet radio broadcast show called the Beta Lounge. In fact, the beta lounge continues to broadcast, and they have, gasp!!, every show in their archive?! WHOA, they even have my very first DJ set in front of people, which consisted of me playing one turntable with vinyl, and a laptop running a program my brother wrote for me called “QTTurntable”… in 1997. Think about that. That was some cutting edge stuff for the time! But I’m sure my set sounds awful. I don’t even want to go listen to it, but it’s there. Too embarrassing for me.

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YES! GarageBand is controllable from external midi devices like keyboards, so that means that Steppa, the sequencer that runs with Beatseqr, can sequence drums, synths, and DLS sound fonts! It’s pretty cool. GarageBand makes setup pretty simple. Follow these steps:

0. FOLLOW THE ONE TIME, FIRST TIME SETUP INSTRUCTIONS
1. plug in your Beatseqr.
2. launch Steppa, Roxor, and Garageband. The order in which you do this doesn’t seem to matter.
3. Once everything is up and running, turn a knob on beatseqr so that Roxor and Steppa are displaying the same numbers. Go slowly if it doesn’t seem to be working, or try the other knob until it does. When you hit the play/stop button on beatseqr, you should see the chase lights running across the step sequence buttons, and the beat count lights (right above the tempo readout) should be lighting up in steppa.
4. In steppa, change the “Midi out device” drop down list to “from Steppa”.
5. Garageband may actually already be ready to play sound, so hit some of the sequence buttons on beatseqr. If things are working, you’ll probably hear the world’s best piano solo.
6. In garageband, double click on the software instrument track to bring up the controls to change it. Change it from whatever it is (probably a piano) to Drum Kits. Now your piano sounds should be drum sounds. Program in some more steps for the different voices, and you should get a drum sequence up and running pretty quickly.
7. Rock the heck out.

BONUS: Ok, so you want to rock more beats, but you don’t want to rock more bucks. Welp, you have a few options, but I can tell you that you’re entering into some fringe territory. Garageband has an instrument called “DLSMusicDevice”. You can research how to find, download, and extract free soundfont files from around the interwebs, but no guarantee that they’ll work particularly well. What you CAN do, for not tooooo much money is purchase a piece of software called “PolyPhontics GB”. What it does is let you create soundfonts that you *know* will work in garageband. The setup process is a little bit of a time eater, but for the price ($35), it’s actually really great! The catch here is that you’ll need to already have some samples, but those are pretty easy to find out in this great big inter wide world tube web of ours. PolyPhontics GB will even let you try out building ten 8 sample sound font packs for free, which, if you’ve noticed, matches up to Beatseqr’s 8 voice sequencing capability perfectly.

CHECK IT OUT:

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Derek and I were out in NYC for the first ever World Maker Faire, and on our extra day in the city after the show, Derek put me on with my beatseqr for an improvised unscripted demo… Normally, we play as a group with a couple of beatseqrs going, so it became somewhat obvious to me half-way through that I need to tweak my live solo set up. But it was fun and then Derek of course played an awesome set of techno as per usual.

Catch Moving Air on Common Ground Radio, monday nights 7-9pm PDT http://bit.ly/commongr8

yeah, nice video!!

Almost done! Just need to go buy a couple of knobs. I’m getting a really good feel for what materials work and how to use them. Woohoo!! Also, i did this track with it, using reason:

Serial number 8 final assembly test by stevecooley

the new new stuff is “four pattern mode” where all 4 patterns will run in a row for an effective 64 step length sequence, and being able to clear a voice sequence or a whole pattern sequence.

Here’s an early and very simple example of how you can take the midi loop transmitted from Steppa to drive some visuals. Every sound you hear in this video is doing something to the visuals. Some are obvious like making the main shape jump around and spin, and then there are some other effects that are more subtle, like the crystallize filter that appears later. The way I did this was through Quartz Composer via the midi note receiver… it’s a really cool effect!

Programmatic visuals from a midi loop from stevecooley on Vimeo.

What I like about this is that unlike a “music visualizer”, it’s not reacting to bands of the audio spectrum, it’s reacting directly to the midi loop, so there’s absolutely no question about what instrument is driving what visual element. More to come soon!