nckn.music.

Since my last band split up two years ago, my solo-endeavours were nearly the only musical activity I followed. Looking back on the results of that last period, I must say, that there is not too much output. There is Mixed Sessions, which I now can’t really listen to anymore, since it’s so old and kind of nooby and dilettantish in some regards (excluding These Days)
And there is LifeB, which got signed to Om Records. And then? Some experiments here and there – that’s it.

But why? Why didn’t I manage to put my musical ideas (which I guess are still there and vital) into actual pieces you can listen to?

Last weekend it became clear, that it was form. In the days of playing in bands everything was quite fixed. The band setup consisted of drums, bass, two guitars and vocals. I was one guitarist with some songwriting-responsibilities. Time I spent for the band was either practicing guitar, writing songs or riffs and attending rehearsals. Note: 100% of that time is directly connected to music. 100% of my ideas were direct musical ideas.

Now switching to music done with the computer. Just adding this device into your music makes everything a lot more complicated. You have to question everything that was kind of pre-set in your band. What kind of music do you want to do? What is your sound? How do you perform this music? Adding to that, computer is technology. And technology needs to be adapted to your needs. So you have to learn about programs, underlying principles and interaction-patterns.  These topics are all barriers in your way of developing musical ideas.
And this is the reason I look back on not too much output. I did not find answers that satisfied me. So I looked further. More energy and time was consumed dealing with stuff surrounding music than focussing on actual music.

Hopefully this will change now. I finally found a setup that fits my needs. A first version of a setup, that is Ableton-centered but not screen-centric. Actually I can turn off the screen and put the laptop aside.
It makes use of  all of the MIDI-equipment I have now (M-Audio Keyboard, NanoKontrol, PadKontrol, Nocturn and FCB1010) and is all about looping both external input and sounds I collected. It uses multiple instances of Ableton Looper, a self-hacked Step-Sequencer for the PadKontrol and some instrument racks. One for key-sounds, the other for collected sounds.
I guess I will do some sort of video tutorial round-trip of the setup when time is right.

The most important thing, though: I finally found answers to all conceptual question and solutions to all technical problems. I now know, that I can spend my time again thinking about music, not about technology. And when I have enough pieces done, I can now easily perform them.

So stay tuned…

There are many people out there using the Novation Nocturn (me included), since it was one of the first controllers that did a lot for little money. The tight integration between hardware and software does the trick. Having read about the Automap-feature made me really looking forward to get this device into my hands, since it’s always such a hassle to manually assign each and every control you have.

However, the Automap-feature turned out to be useless for me. It works only with AU/VST-Plugins. Not right in Ableton itself. You can control Live with it, though: Turn on a Midichannel in the Automap server software and manually map Midi-controls within Live (see Novation FAQ for this). But this technique clearly has not the same ease-of-use and awesomeness as the Automapping feature.

I want to easily control Rack-Macros on the fly. Without assigning the knobs individually! And guess what? There is a way! There is a small hidden feature inside Live called Midi Remote Scripting. I recently read about it on CDM, did a custom script for my Nocturn, and – tadaa – Automapping inside of Live. Peter shared his Config-files for both Korg’s nanoPAD and nanoKONTROL. So I will share mine for the Nocturn, so you will not have to read the whole article on how to do it yourself. Just follow the steps!

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