Gadgets Plugged. (Lots of audio nerdery and some music.)

I gave up on Ableton Live. Yesterday was my official FU. I've been pirating it for the last year or so because several hundred dollars is a lot of money to be spending on something that I don't make any money doing. I don't mind paying decent money for guitars and other hardware, but software... eh. I suppose if I knew I could get guitars for free, I'd probably be pissed about paying 700 dollars for one too...

Due to my pirating, the program starting freaking out on me about copyright violations. And then my audio streams started getting choppy and glitchy. After a while, it was too much to bear. Ableton, I am no longer a (non-paying but possible!) customer. You almost had me, too.

I am now a Plogue Bidule user. Ultra-modular and ultra-flexible. Visual routing. Programming logic that far exceeds anything I've used previously (except Max/MSP, but again, too much money for me.) It's slightly less stable than Ableton Live was, but that's okay because Live was rock solid. The only time I've had any Plogue issues was when I was doing some weird routings during setup. Oh.... and it supports all the VSTs that Ableton 5.2 wouldn't. And only $75 with a fully functioning demo that will operate until June 1st.

I was able to prototype my entire Ableton setup in Plogue in a little less than 20 minutes. I've since spent a few days reprogramming all my control surfaces. Last night, I got the guitar section completely done. Here's the setup currently:

Guitar In => Audiowish Octaver => Audiowish Reverse Sampler => MDA Leslie => Apple MatrixReverb => Expert Sleepers Augustus Loop => Essej.net SooperLooper

From SooperLooper, the output is split three ways. One output is just the raw sound from SL. The second output is sent through MDA Degrade to give that nice low bitrate sound. The third output is processed by MDA Dub Delay. All of these are mixed together and sent out of my main output and into my amp or whatever sound production device I'm using that night.

I've got almost all of the important controls to the various playing surfaces available to me and I still have 25 buttons, 8 knobs, and 50 footswitches that could be configured. Yeah, it's a bit ridiculous and probably a bit of overkill. I love it.

Anyway, after I finished getting everything programmed yesterday, I turned on the MacBook and let my mind flow. Not surprisingly, I made multi-layered drone. When you have 3 delay/loopers in your signal chain, it's hard to do anything but drone, I suppose. It starts out semi-melodic and ends mean and evil.

Here it is: Surrent - gadgug.