Examples of live keyboard playing enhanced with Max?
Hi everyone,
No, I don't mean Ableton Live in the topic title! ;-)
I've been slowly chipping away at a low-priority project using Max to enhance live keyboard playing. There's no MSP, Jitter, Gen~, or any sequencing or prerecorded notes or loops at all - it's 100% live. (Although, MIDI echoes can sound like loops, can't they? Still, they're not prerecorded.) A couple of little examples:
Playing single-note lines, but whenever there are 3 keys held down at the same time those 3 notes are also played as a chord with a different sound. Good for e.g. adding the occasional brass stab to a piano line.
All notes played fairly short are sent to one sound + any key held for more than 600ms plays a note with a different sound for 4000ms or until another key is held for more than 600ms, whichever comes first. This enables a sustained melody plus accompaniment broken chords to be played with one hand.
I've got a few little abstractions that do this sort of thing. They often don't do much each, but by the time there's a few of them it can sound quite rich. And I use, say, the bottom 3 notes on the keyboard to switch things on and off easily.
Finally, question time: Does anyone know of (and can point me to) anyone else who's doing (or has done) anything even similar to this? I imagine there must be few, as Max is so perfect for this sort of thing. All answers will be gratefully received! Even good search terms to use - I haven't found anything yet.
Cheers, Bill
Hi Bill, my piece "Ostinato" was performed at the 2013 Live.Code.Festival. There's a video of it, it's track 11 on this listing in iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/live.code.festival-2013-hd/id821590153?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4#
herbie hancock comes to mind
https://cycling74.com/articles/taking-max-on-stage-with-herbie-hancock
Thanks guys. :-)
@Marcel Wierckx: That's exactly the sort of thing I meant. Well done, too! (Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I do like to see a musical instrument being played at a music performance.) Interestingly, too, I may soon have the chance to use a Disklavier in a kinda similar way.
@CptnFantasy: And he should've come to my mind, too! That article's about a different thing but is still interesting and impressive. I know he used to use a couple of Korg Karma workstations in live performance, and they have a lot of the live MIDI processing I'm asking about. So he seem to be at least in that general area - I'll check him out a bit more.
A couple of people spring to mind, like Robert Rowe and Roger Dannenberg, and of course the brilliant Bitklavier etudes of Dan Trueman.
https://wp.nyu.edu/robert_rowe/text/interactive-music-systems-1993/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/bib-interactiveperformance.html
http://manyarrowsmusic.com/nostalgicsynchronic/
Ah, names and links... Yummy! Merci beaucoup und vielen danke, Marcel! :-)
G'day Marcel, I've had a quick look at the first 2 and there seems to be a lot of info, references and further things to explore. Plus a better search term, i.e. phrases with "interactive" in them.
The Dan Trueman stuff is, so far, the most similar to what I'm doing. And brilliant, as you said. Also, conveniently, his albums are on the iTunes store ready to be previewed.
Now to check out the first 2 links more thoroughly. See you in a month or 2!