some sounds we like

YES. NOW. WANT.

Lily Turntable is a Lily implementation of the aforementioned QT Turntable of old. It’s main function in life is to give you fine pitch control over audio file playback… which can be any kind of time that quicktime understands. Short audio loops seem to work ok. Long audio clips are great. It’s *possible* to use this to DJ with as a standin for a turntable. You’ll still need a mixer and another audio source, but that’s how QTTurntable came into existence, so maybe you will use it for that, or maybe you will use it for something weirder.

And I realize how “0.2 beta” this looks at this time. My intention is to dive more into Lily and make this patch do more…

Download Lily Turntable Version 0.2b

Installation instructions:

short and sweet

* download the lily app
* drag the file into firefox
* restart firefox once it’s done installing
* look for the new app in the Tools -> menu.

Longer, but still super easy

• Download the .XPI file to your desktop or where ever you normally would. Just make sure you can locate the file once it’s downloaded.
• Make sure Firefox is running. If not, launch it.
• Make sure Firefox has a browser window open. If not, open a new one.
• Find the .XPI file you downloaded on your computer.
• Drag the .XPI file into the open Firefox browser window.
• There will be an unusual prompt asking if it’s OK to install the file you dragged into the browser window. Hit yes and it will do it’s job.
• Once the file is installed, it will tell you that you need to restart Firefox. Go ahead and hit the “restart” button.
• Now that Firefox is restarted, look for the new application in the Tools-> menu.
• Done! Enjoy!

Known issues:

• there’s another slider below what I’m showing you in this screenshot. It doesn’t do anything yet. I’m working on it.
• the loop button doesn’t reset when you load a new file. I think I know how to fix that.
• the pitch sliders work. they’re compounding on themselves, so for instance if you have the +-10 slider at the top, it’s set to be -10% of the pitch speed. Then you can add an additional -2% by setting the other slider to the top. I think the +-2 pitch slider should reset to the center if you change the main pitch speed at all. I’m working on that too.

Technorati Tags: lily, stevecooley, turntable

I had a much smaller box that I was working with, originally, and then I discovered how insane it was to try to cram all the stuff in there I needed to… I found these project boxes at Halted for $0.25 each. Ha ha! Normally these kinds of cases are somewhere in an unreasonable $12-25 range. So what if they have a few extra holes in them that I won’t be using. Meh. I know a bargain when I see one.

so I have a few things going on here… I have two rocker switches. One is for power, and one is for a persistent toggle. I’m not even sure what I’ll end up using the black rocker switch for yet, I figured it would be a good idea. Maybe I’ll use it to toggle between two different sets of midi notes to send out from the pads. Something useful like that.

Next to the black rocker in the back are 4 pushbuttons. Like the black rocker, those red buttons are all hooked to digital-in pins on the arduino. This will let me trigger drum sounds from directly on the box if I like…

I left all 6 of the PWM pins unattached to anything at this time. I think I’ll probably put an LED on each one to correspond to each of the 6 analog in pins… sort of a visual feedback for each of the possible drum pads.

There’s a hole towards the left side of the front side of the box. This is open for FTDI Serial->USB cable pins on the freeduino board I’m using from Modern Devices..

The silver port in the foreground is the midi port, which I figured out and have fully functional now. (woot)…

the 8-port bank of RCA jacks are what I’ll be plugging the drum pad sensors in to. That leaves two ports empty, so I’m planning on wiring up an LED to an RCA jack, then using one to indicate power, and the other to indicate MIDI data being sent from the box (from the TX pin).

And theeeen we open up the box.

Oof. And I’m not even done getting everything wired up yet. Now I can see where those flat-flex cables (FFC) would come in handy. I guess I should trim down the midi port cable, now that I know where it’s going to live. Then I suppose I can use some cable ties to organize things once everything is wired and verified to be working. I’m putting in one of my two 3V->5V battery packs to power the box, so that means I’ll need to get into this box to replace batteries, so having the cables tidy and repeatably positionable is important.

Technorati Tags: arduino, DIY, drum, e-drum, electronic, engineering

here are two ideas I’m working on for a DIY electronic drum kit kick pedal. I just looked yesterday at how much a “real” one would cost, and it’s $345!! Ha, I laugh in the face of this craziness. Mine will require a laptop for sound, but will cost a fraction of what a “real” set costs, and will arguably sound pretty awesome because I can use all kinds of onboard effects through garageband and/or Main Stage/Logic Pro.

Technorati Tags: arduino, diy, drum, e-drum, electronic, kick, pedal

This concept has been knocking around in my head for about 10 years. I don’t know why it took me so long to make a graphic for it.

Basically, the triangle of skills represents the three things you need to be doing if you want to be DJing properly.

* Beatmatching : if you’re not on beat, you’re going to drive everyone nuts with your trainwreck.
* Timing : If you come in at the wrong point of the outgoing song, even if on beat, it’s going to structurally sound weird.
* Selection : knowing what songs go together is definitely an equally important skill as the other two. Creating a flow of tracks that mesh together well is critical.

If you fall down on any one of these three skills, you fall down as a DJ.

This doesn’t even pertain to any particular style of music. Try it against your favorite style of music: Hip hop, drum and bass, house, techno, minimal, Reggae, dub, rocksteady, dancehall, or any of the other subgenres that have sprung from these main branches…
And I’m certainly no perfect DJ. I’m far from it. I just have an appreciation for people who rock all three skills at once.

One of the first things many people say about guitar hero is “this is cool, but it would be so much better if it actually taught you how to play guitar.” Well, I think it’s sort of like algebra. You need to prepare your brain for increasingly complex tasks, and I think guitar hero does that for guitar playing the way algebra does for advanced math.

I’m hoping to put this to the real test soon. After beating 40/40 songs on the hard setting in guitar hero 2, I’ll be making the jump to a real guitar with the help of http://www.guitarvision.com/ …

My interest in playing guitar have not too much to do with the genres they’re focused on, but I’m hoping to get my head around the guitar with their tools so I’ll have enough experience to explore the genres I *am* interested in.

Technorati Tags: guitar, guitarhero, howto, guitarvision

I know I’ve been completely asleep for the past 5 years, holy hell, take a look at this:

I’m… speechless. That was freaking amazing. Get to about the 1:20 or so… WTf?!?!?!?!

Technorati Tags: djwoody, skills, turntable

Back in the day, I was learning how to beatmatch using the one turntable my family got me, a ScratchMaster mixer, and a program my brother wrote for me with my design direction. It was called QT Turntable. It was built on quicktime back when you had to upgrade to get it to understand MP3 files. (o-o-old school.)

The big thing about QTTurntable was that it was barebones. It had the basic audio file playback controls you’d expect, and then it also had some very specific DJ controls. I wanted an audio file player that I could adjust the pitch of like I could on my Technics SL1200-mk2, so my brother built it for me like the above screenshot. The most major feature aside from adjusting the playback speed was the temporary pitch adjustment (horizontal slider with the pointy indicator). This simulated grabbing the spindle of a turntable platter and spinning it up just a bit or putting your finder on the side of the platter to momentarily slow it down. This is a super-basic DJ skill that you use when you’re trying to get your track beatmatched with another.

This program was awesome, and I DJ’d 3 parties with it successfully. When Mac OSX rolled around, you could still sort of watch it not work in Classic mode, and then recently I got the “circle-slash” icon on it to let me know that this program isn’t really a program anymore. So sad. I got to take a weeklong cocoa training class at Big Nerd Ranch, but recreating this is slightly out of my scope of possibility currently.

I’ve since gone on to buy or use many digital DJ solutions including Final Scratch 1.5, Hercules DJ Console+traktor, and dj1800. The all have very good tools for all-inclusive DJing, but sort of fall down on something. It’s usually the interface. Heck, even ours was challenging to use, I’ll make no claim otherwise.

I know there’s nothing like DJing with vinyl, and I sure wish I had the money, back strength, interest in physical media, time to go record shopping, and physical space to keep doing that… but I don’t. My beatmatching future is digital.

So many people are into this digital djing thing now, and I think that’s way cool. I just wish I could get this kind of pitch control. Maybe not even all of the pitch control we had, just nice big horizontal sliders, and my temporary pitch nudge controls.

Technorati Tags: qtturntable

Derek Scott and myself (Steve Cooley) will be presenting our findings on “Making DIY music tools control DIY visuals” at the Maker Faire, 2007. We’ll be showing a combination of Pure Data (PD), Open Sound Control (OSC), Processing, and Quartz Composer. Hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: diy, make, makerfaire, makerfaire2007, osc, processing, processing.org, PD, puredata, quartz composer

My friend and coworker Fred pointed me to: the Do-It-Yourself Smart Radio Station. The general gist is that you set up several smart playlists that feed off a core playlist of your favorite tracks, then you randomize through these smart playlists. The effectively giving you a “radio station” of your favorite tracks. Lots of cool ways to tweak this idea! I don’t know why I never really poked around the smart playlists, but they seem really powerful. So, I’ve set this up, and I’m giving it a try.

Technorati Tags: itunes