Building Blocks

Megasoid x Blingmod @ Mutek 2008, photo: fairlyawesome

To start off, I figure I should let you all know where I'm at, where I hope to go, and what I'm working with for my live av/pa set.  

I've been performing fairly regularly for the last two years; focused more on the musical side than the visual side.  Until last weekend (my test run at Super Aqua Club), I had never performed both visuals and music together, nor both off of the same laptop.

For my music set, I've always used Ableton Live.  My set has essentially consisted of triggering audio loops from bounced stems of my songs and then I've experimented with a variety of live chopping/filtering/processing techniques.  This summer I plan to explore new processing techniques as well as start running live synthesizers and drum machines (software based) and experiment with live MIDI filtering and arpeggiation.

With my live video, I built from the ground up a somewhat extensive patch in Max/MSP/Jitter in 2007/2008.  I performed with this alongside my friends at our Turbo Crunk parties and was even honored to play the Mutek Festival last year with Megasoid opening for Modeselektor.  In the final version of my patch, I was taking live midi and control feeds from Megasoid's Ableton set as well as a chopper/filtering patch that they had written and were running live off of a Nord G2 Modular Synthesizer.  All of this I controlled from a patch that I built on my Lemur.

I hope to build upon ideas that came about during these performances, utiliizing more cross-modal connections between my musical and visual softwares in ways that effectively balance interest between both mediums.  For now, I am stepping away from using or developing a standalone visual environment in Max/MSP/Jitter and have been exploring the possibilities of (mostly) developed software such as Garagecube's Modul8 and Vidvox's VDMX5.  However, I still use Max as a routing/scaling/processing device for controller information between applications and my Lemur.

To give you an idea of what I'm working with, here is my current performance hardware and software that I am using and plan to use this summer as I develop this project...

Hardware:

-Apple Macbook Pro

-Presonus Firebox

-Jazzmutant Lemur

-Faderfox LV2 (soon to be replaced by...)

-Akai APC 40 (next week!)

-G-Tech Mini FW800 Hard Drive

Software:

-Ableton Live 8

-Garagecube Modul8

-Vidvox VDMX5

-Cycling 74 Max/MSP/Jitter