A little track I made using a sample from the amelie soundtrack. Just a rough mix …

westlicht – amelie

Today I stumbled over the newly announced AKAI APC40. Looks like a very promising Ableton Live controller, and seems to be just what I was planning to build myself if I’d find the time …

After I have built myself an LN1176 compressor a few month ago, which I used quite often for the last album I worked on with a friend, I decided to build myself a Pico compressor. I have ordered the PCBs a few days ago, they will probably arrive next week. My intention is to use this compressor to gently compress mixes at the beginning of a mastering chain. I’m still looking for a decent DIY EQ, but I did not yet find what I’m looking for. Anyway, I’m really looking forward to build the Pico.

This weekend I took some time to experiment with my Arduinome, primarily using the pages application. This is great stuff! I did a little setup consisting of Ableton Live, pages, my BCR-2000 as well as some external gear, the x0xb0x and the Korg Radius. I routed the MIDI signals from pages through Live to my x0xb0x and the Radius, and routed the audio output of these synths back to Live, spicing them up with some effects controlled by my BCR-2000. Also I added an Impulse patch in Live to get some drums. A rather simple but very effective setup. Fun to jam anyway!

Note to myself: I really need to get myself a camera, so I can video document things like that.

My Arduinome is finally alive! With a little tip from Nils, I got the current firmware working. As I suspected, the firmware is broken with the current Arduino release. Using Arduino 11 solved the issue. Unfortunately I connected the columns of the matrix in reversed order, so I had to do some soldering too.

Initial tests with some Max/MSP scripts as well as Seven Up for Live are very promising. Although the keypad feels a bit flimsy, the keypresses seem to be accurate and to the point. I have not had any missed keys yet, fine! I’m very happy with it.

Now it’s time to do some practicing with Seven Up and maybe a first video on youtube.

Thanks to all the people involved in the Arduinome project. You did an awesome job!

Today, I had some time to work on my Arduinome. I already have prepared the button and led matrix as well as the shield PCB two days ago. Initial tests with the current Arduinome firmware were not that successful, leading to a strange led patterns on power up, as well as random crashes of the software. So I was worried about some mistakes I did with the hardware. Checking all the leds and switches manually revealed that there were no mistakes on the hardware, therefore there had to be something wrong with the firmware. Some initial hacking on the firmware allowed me to test the hardware, and proofed that basically everything is working. My current guess is that the firmware is broken with the newest arduino framework. I will have a better look and try to fix it. Maybe I’ll even rewrite the firmware from scratch, not using the arduino framework. Stay tuned …