The WaveDNA team is incredibly happy to have Jason Spanu back at the office. For a period in the past summer, we lost Jason, he went completely dark, as he was on tour across Canada, US and Europe. Jason is also known as DJ Shine, he is an Ableton Certified Trainer, and he is an incredibly passionate musician. It is always inspirational when Jason is at the WaveDNA Lab, simply because he pushes the development and design team to the edge, and sometimes makes us cry. ‘Can we add knob where to increase beat complexity? Lets add two knobs? Oh, lets drag and drop directly from the BeatBuilders barform list into the arranger. We should be able rotate all of those with a single button!’, the feature lists goes on, and on. Jason’s never satisfied. Welcome back to the team, as we look forward to many long Hackathons. 🙂

The first task across his plate was to understand our current MIDI scripting capabilities. MIDI Scripting is when Liquid Rhythm not only responds to actions on a MIDI device, it also has code to update the state of the device. Thus aspects of the user interface state are clearly visible in the device, and the hope is to allow seem less music composition without the need of a keyboard and mouse. We are currently actively scripting the following devices: Novation’s LaunchPad S, Keith McMillen’s QuNeo and Livid Instrument’s Base. All really amazingly fun devices to play with in Liquid Rhythm.

The first one Jason grabbed was the LaunchPad S, and went through to master it (and of course a whole bunch of new feature requests queue up for MIDI Script version 2 — how does he do it?). He couldn’t remember what all the buttons do, so Jason grabbed accounting’s label maker, and desecrated the our rented Launchpad S. Now all the little buttons have littler feature names (why didn’t we think of that?). In his first deep dive, of what I suspect will be many deep dives, he got his multi-cam setup, and quickly put together this LaunchPad S demonstration video. This goes through the default mapping of Launchpad S when you connect it directly to Liquid Rhythm Standalone mode, as of version 1.2.4. Keep in mind, this feature is currently marked beta, but it is available to our entire user base. We are absolutely looking for feedback and improvement ideas for future scripts we will be creating.

This scripting support is currently limited to Standalone mode. We are working to extend our ability to support MIDI Scripting to work in the Ableton Live 9 Max for Live mode, as well, if possible, in the plugins (VST/AU/RTAS). Keep an eye for updates along these line.

Author: Adil Sardar, Lead Developer