Lots of progress on two parts of this project has happened in the last few months. I have a working prototype of the Traktor/mixer controller, with 3 fully operational channels and good Traktor integration as well as a USB 4ch (two stereo pairs) audio interface. They are not integrated yet but that will happen sometime after Burning Man.

Continue reading “DIY Music Machines – Mixer/Traktor contoller and 4-ch Audio Interface” →

Since I wrote the previous post about this project I have made significant progress on the Ableton Live auto-mapping modular controller I am building:

Continue reading “DIY Music Machines – Ableton Live Controller Update” →

Intro

Music has always been a significant and influential part of my life. I have been listening to music from as far back as I can remember myself. Like most people my musical taste has changed throughout the year, but my affection towards electronic music, and particularly Techno remained pretty consistent. When I was a teenager I became interested in DJing, and continued doing that for many years. In addition to the musical and party/cultural aspects of DJing, I was attracted to the technical aspect of it – and of music production in general. Producing music, or remixing other people’s music, is done using tools. As it happens in the Electronic music world, those tools happen to be, well, electronic – which was and still is a passion of mine. For whatever reasons (one, notably being spending many hours in front of a computer screen as it is), I wanted to keep my musical hobby separated from my computers hobby. That meant using vinyls to DJ (gave up eventually and switched to digital), and attempting to produce music using anything but a personal computer (I say “personal computer” because, of course, many of the machines I used throughout the years had computers in them). I never took the music production part seriously, and even today I only toy with the drum machines, sequencers and synthesizers that I own. At some point in life I learnt enough software and electronics to be able to build those things on my own, and I find that very exciting. This intersection between music and technology facinates me. It helps that there are plenty of people around the world doing exactly the same – for example, and these are just the tip of the iceberg: MIDIbox, Axoloti, Mutable Instruments, x0xb0x, and the list goes on and on. Throughout the years I started many projects of this nature and never completed most of them, a lot of time due to lack of time and money, or simply not enough sustained interest. After enough iterations on various prototypes that never led to any usable devices, I feel like I have matured enough to start completing some projects, and making my contribution to the DIY music maker community.

In the last few months I have been working on a modular audio/MIDI platform that currently consists of three projects going in parallel, having some shared infrastructure. They are detailed below and the purpose of this post is to introduce them. They currently do not have a catchy name, but that is on the never-ending TODO list.

Continue reading “DIY Music Machines – Introduction” →