Getting Patches Under Your Fingers: The Livid Ds1

The world is full of things which are obvious in retrospect, but less so before the epiphany. In my case, I can tell you the exact moment when I realized that getting the Max patches I worked with "under my fingers" was the thing I'd not thought about sufficiently - I was visiting my friend John Eichenseer (jhno) in his loft on Natoma St. in San Francisco around the turn of the century (we were working on a project together during my early days at Cycling '74). He had a Motormix on his desk, and I innocently asked what he was working on mixdowns for.

"I'm not mixing," he said. "This is what I use when gigging with Scott Amendola in Crater."

He obligingly launched his Max patch (a patch that became the product radiaL), and proceeded to take the top of my head off. Although there were plenty of dancing things on the screen, the work was in his hands rather than on the screen. The heavens opened, the giant blue bolt struck me and temporarily blinded my third eye, and here I am today talking about MIDI controllers for Max users.

I loved the Motormix, even though it was heavy and bulky. Life for Max users was greatly simplified by the appearance of Darwin Grosse's suite of MotorMix control objects back in the day, which consolidated working with the object's MIDI note and CC messages (in fact, I learned a lot by tearing those patches apart). But my Motormix (with an assist from European baggage handlers) proved to be mortal.

Like a lot of users back then, I wound up with "Grey," my trusty plastic Evolution UC-33 controller. Cheap, extremely straight-ahead MIDI implementation (I never even changed the MIDI controller layout from the out-of-the-box version), and it fit easily in my knapsack gig. All was well.

And then the product was discontinued.

And then my UC-33 died.

By this time, the MIDI controller market was an interesting playing field. Beyond the usual "Version 2 cost-reduced race to the bottom" price strategies, the field had filled up with more specialized controllers (e.g. the APC-20 and APC-40 Ableton Live controller boxes) that I could repurpose, along with a new generation of MIDI keyboards that included banks of dials and faders and automapping software to program and run (e.g. The Novation SL series). That's still a reasonable description of the current market - repurposing, integration of function, and the cost-reduced tango.

I wound up with the Livid Instruments Ds1 - and I'd recommend it to you for your own consideration for Max-centric performance rigs - for a couple of reasons:

I wanted something that was more or less application-agnostic - something whose physical control layout wouldn't require a lot of repurposing (somewhere between mixing functions and control functions) or re-imagining. Given what I knew about the Ds1 being a collaboration between the folks at Dubspot and Livid instruments, I figured that it was likely that this would be the case here - and it was. In addition, my years with the UC-33 told me that I wanted a nice throw distance on the faders (those keyboard controllers really didn't do it for me), and that I needed a good mix of buttons (toggles and momentary) and knobs (lots of knobs). For me, the Ds1 hit all the right notes: 44 knobs, 25 buttons, 4 push encoders, 9 nice 60mm faders, and USB MIDI.
Since I was almost certainly going to be working with automapping software, I wanted something that was flexible and straight-ahead that would let me set things up quickly, download the results to my controller, and then not have to worry about my setup again. The Ds1 has been an absolute joy to work with in that regard - I can't even recall the last time I had to reprogram anything or re-download settings [although I keep the templates on my laptop just in case]. I plug the thing in, the LED buttons dance, and I'm ready to go.
Despite my love for it my old UC-33, I wanted something whose build felt a bit more solid. The Ds1 was certainly a little larger than my old box (part of the reason that the fader throw distance and the inter-controller spacing was a lot nicer), but its aluminum construction has proved to be a lot sturdier in use. I can put up with the size. Oh yeah - the rubber feed screw into the chassis instead of those stick on feet that fall off the week after you buy it, too. It's the little things....

While I was working on this article, I got a note from Livid announcing a drop in price for the Ds1, which is timely. It may or may not meet your needs (it's sure done well for me, personally), but I do want to encourage you to consider adopting the use of some external controllers for live work - I've found that getting my patch under my fingers (instead of a mousepad and keyboards) has been a move that's changed the way I work and the way I think.

by Gregory Taylor on February 2, 2016

jhno

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Gregory...!

I am a big fan of the DS1. I love the mixer layout, combined with the flexibility to assign anything anywhere in Max.

I re-created most of radiaL in a Max patch, using the DS1 as a controller, just to see what it would feel like. The results were pretty interesting... I have to say that, in a way, radiaL's technique of loop manipulation feels somewhat dated these days - ! I know a few radiaL fans that would disagree, but I guess I have spent so much of my life making things go twice as fast, or twice as slow, that after a while I wonder if my time might be better spent doing other things.

Think of it this way: if you are performing live, you can only be adjusting one - or perhaps a few - parameters at a time. What parameters of your live set are 'worthy' of your attention? What kind of manipulation will resonate with the audience at all?

In this case, I decided that in a performance situation, I would want channel 'strips' to be partially customized according to the material at hand. The idea is to strike a balance between 'this row of knobs always does this' and 'this knob does something special depending on what track it is controlling.'

So, radiaL-style, a DS1 channel strip could have the fader controlling gain, one row of knobs controlling a low-pass filter, one row controlling a high-pass filter, and the other two knobs changing their function depending on the sound that is loaded.

I would humbly request that one of these days you post a description of one of your live performance setups: how the controllers are mapped out, and what happens over the course of the piece. I am curious!

jhno

PS - I have also been having great fun with the Livid Code V2.

Graham Dunne

As somebody who discovered Gregory's music and radiaL after radiaL became obsolete, I've been trying to recreate the functionality of radiaL in Max for the last year or two, with some degree of success (file management and menus presenting the greatest challenge).

I'm constantly wondering how Gregory does what he does in terms of working his way through each individual track so any insight into that would be his best writing yet!

While radiaL may sound dated to some, it has a sound and playability I like which I haven't managed yet in Live. I prefer the immediacy of the radiaL interface...

Thank you both for endless hours of patching, guessing and much bewilderment!

Graham

Gregory Taylor

Actually, when radiaL died, I wandered in the wilderness. Then I decided to try duplicating things in gen~, and made a bunch of mistakes. The mistakes were more interesting than the thing I set out to copy, and here I am now.

It's a little scary to say that I've laid my controller out almost exactly as jhno describes, although he and I haven't spoken in ages (cue scary theremin music): similar controls for different channels in rows, with the other knobs left over for channel-specific assignments.

I initially spent a good deal of time creating a version of the rig that would let me load *any* kind of channel processing on any of the 8 tracks. That took forever to to do. When I finally had it done, I realized that I never really went out and did anything with 7 granulators or anything like that. While they might be loaded in different orders from left to right, I honestly tended to use a very consistent configuration. I also built a flocking controller into the beast to take over so I could go grab a pint mid-gig, and felt utterly foolish once it was up and working (although I still do this in the studio a lot). It, too, took a VERY long time to do, and it's gone now, too.

I've probably built four or five times more things into every corner than I have retained. Stewart Brand calls this "how buildings learn" when applied to architecture. But I think that the lesson I learned from watching jhno work is that the idea has to be balanced with its instantiation. I am slowly learning to have ideas that are sized properly to the intention. Too slowly, probably.

Working so slowly has also provided an odd side benefit. I work so slowly and am so dim that I forget everything and have to relearn what I meant when I did the original work whenever I return with a grand idea (as I am doing this very evening). This has taught me that being straightforward and simple beats being clever every time. Your mileage may vary.

And I am as envious of jhno's talent as I was that first afternoon over on Natoma, only now it involves hearing his duduk playing (I can recall when you first got the instrument, even)!

https://soundcloud.com/jhno/cicadaduduk

Thanks for the kind words, both of you. Here's some recent work with my friends Brad and Terry in PGT.

http://music.columbia.edu/~brad/PGT/PGT-postEABD2015/

Graham Dunne

And thank you Gregory, for your insightful response, it's cheered me up no end!

Keep up the good work.

Graham