I haven’t been particularly active as of late. An unfortunate side effect of the lifestyle i’ve led over the preceding years has been that of general stability being a rarity. Factor in habits dying hard and changes in personal circumstance, and it becomes even harder to maintain the focus, time, and energy to indulge in ones technical pursuits.

Thankfully, things are starting to settle down, and with that, the mental bandwidth to get on with things becomes more readily accessible. So what’s new?

Terribly lit, but what studio isn’t?

Late last year I settled into a new house, where, for the first time ever, I have a small space to myself. I’ve set up a desk, and have begun to accumulate useful things, including a 24″ LCD screen, keyboard, and mouse for posture, and a number of  loudspeakers.

Two pairs are visible in the photograph above. The upper pair are my primaries, and with the little audio interface have been lent to me by a nearby friend. The lower pair are somewhat of a mystery. They need disassembling in order to establish their impedance and power rating, however they’ve clearly been built by someone who knew what they were doing, and so I suspect  that they’re going to sound quite pleasant.

There’s more to gather, however for now all this is a massive upgrade, and slowly but surely it’s helping with keeping myself productive. So what have I been working on?

The first thing i’ve gotten back into has been Ableton Live itself. I’m still not feeling very compositional, so I’ve been stretching my technical mind and piecing together a collection of simple yet effective audio and instrument racks in order to streamline production work. I’ve also been putting a lot of time into Max programming, an invaluable asset to any Live user.

Without getting into too much detail, here’s a few of the devices i’ve been working on:

• A flexible percussion synth
• A versatile dub-style stereo delay unit
• Spatialisation tools
• OSC ~> MIDI devices (a continuation of the Vive/Live project)

All to plan, i’ll have at least one of those devices complete and ready for release within the next two months. I have thoughts to use them as fundraising devices for an upgrade to Live 10 and Max 8, at which point i’ll start working on developing ambisonic tools, seeing as  that’s an area of interest to many these days, and one rich for exploration.

Hopefully, I’ll have a detailed update on those devices some time soon. Until then, here’s an amusing image taken at a party I played a DJ set at a little over a week ago.

~ OM

Another questionably lit office.