Thomas Leisner

About Beauty and Bright Ideas

Archive for the ‘Discoveries’ Category

September 20th, 2012 by Thomas Leisner

TouchOSC

TouchOSC is an app for mobile touchscreen devices that offers onscreen controller elements to interact with your computer via OSC and MIDI. You may build your own controller layouts or choose from a list of existing layouts.

TouchOSC is one of my favourite Apps. It’s cheap and efficient, it’s very well programmed and designed, and it offers a functionality many of us have dreamed of for a long time: To have a touch controller for our music software, and even to be able to very easily build personallized controllers ourselves. And to add one on top: It all works remotely and stably.

The software package comes in two parts. First of all the app for your mobile device that shows the controller elements on screen and establishes a wireless connection between your mobile device and your computer without the need to install any other sofware on your machine. This works flawlessly out of the box with some included layouts of control surfaces. Secondly an editor application running on your machine that allows you to edit layouts or to create your own from scratch.

The app for your mobile divice is available for iOS as well as for Android, and the editor application runs on MacOS as well as on Windows or Linux. Both pieces of software run very stably and I couldn’t discover any bugs so far. They are programmed to contain a stable basic functionality without many extras, yet offering a wide range of possibilities including all you usually need without getting confusing.

As the name suggests, TouchOSC uses the modern OSC protocol to communicate with your audio or video software. It can communicate directly with software having the OSC protocol implemented. But as the older MIDI protocol is more widely used it also may send MIDI messages over OSC, which makes your TouchOSC control surfaces appear as a normal MIDI device on your computer.

In case you are interested have a look at the  TouchOSC website for more details, pictures, explanations and a clear and very straight forward documentation. As I like this little piece of software so much, I have made a bunch of design modifications to the standard layouts, as well as some basics layouts for my projects, which you might try to get started.

 

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August 16th, 2012 by Thomas Leisner

Transsylvanians

Another discovery of my past. For twelve intense years I have been touring Europe with the hungarian speed folk band Transsylvanians.

Ty-Maus

I left the band four years ago. When cleaning my hard drives I found the backups of our website, which I had developed, maintained and administrated over the years. Besides, nearly everything you will find on this website has been designed by me. This web archive shows the state of the band and the website when I left the band in 2008.

 

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November 25th, 2011 by Thomas Leisner

My Tiddly Wiki

I was curious about what a „Wiki“ might be, and I was surprised to learn and find much more than I had expected. Say hello to TiddlyWiki, your free personal advanced notepad!

A Wiki in general is a system to store and retrieve information, especially when working together in groups. Therefore Wikis are web based and they do not only show their contents but also allow you to edit them. If you think about Wikipedia for a moment, the special thing about it is the fact that you may not only read an article, but also may write one yourself, which makes this collection of information so big and still growing.

Tiddly Wiki is a small Wiki designed for personal use. It runs in your browser and stores information in one single file on your computer. Now the cool thing about Wikis is that they store information in a non-linear way, Which means that you don‘t have one page after another, but you write an entry and may hide it and forget about, but can easily retrieve it by searching for keywords or tags you have given it or looking in a timeline, where every entry is stored in chronological order.

There are many ways to customise Tiddly Wiki, as it is developed by a large community adding content and plugins to expand it‘s functionality. Just as a Wiki‘s content may be read and edited by everyone, the Wiki itself may be used and extended by everyone. This is perfect for me! As you might have noticed I like to edit the software I use to fit my personal expectations and needs, so of course I made some little tweaks, and of course I offer my personal edition for you to download.

So here we go, just download „My Tiddly Wiki“ and try it! A short introduction to basic functions is included. It‘s more or less original version of Tiddly Wiki with just a few tweaks in colour and one plugin which shows your entries in tabs (which is what I was looking for since a friend asked me for just that functionality which he missed in any other software he knew). If you want to learn more about Tiddly Wiki you might also want to look at Wikipedia or visit the original Tiddly Wiki Website.

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September 25th, 2011 by Thomas Leisner

Qualita Rossa

Some weeks ago, when I went to my cellar, I found a CD that I had forgotten about for many years: A demo of my former smooth-jazz trio „Qualita Rossa“, and I was surprised how much I liked the sound – much better than I had it in mind.

Qualita RossaI don‘t remember exactly, but it must be about 15 years ago that we went to a recording studio for this demo containing three songs. The trio covered jazz classics, especially latin stuff, and arranged it mostly in a soft bossa-nova like style, to fit in places like the background of a hotel bar.

For me it was the first project in which I consequently played drums the way a left-handed drummer would do. I had just recently decided to concentrate on a very basic drumset consisting of just bassdrum, snare, hihat and one cymbal. A perfect setup to learn the very basics of drumming – and compact enough to easily turn it from right to left and back again to learn those basics both ways.

In that context I mostly played with brushes, which made the drums sound more like percussions and softly integrated them into the sound of the band. I like that sound very much. The only thing I didn‘t like in this recording were dynamics in the final mix. I remember we wanted the sound to be as natural as possible, avoiding effects. But listening to it today I definitely missed compression. It sounded thin, weak, and wasn‘t loud at all.

So I decided to master the recording using my high quality analogue compression and mastering equipment. It‘s originally meant for recording my drum samples with perfect quality and level, but it‘s actually perfect for mastering, too. I used the FMR Audio PBC‘s for adding density and character, enhanced the sound with the great old Behringer Ultrafex and finally limited it with the UREI LA-22 to get it loud.

All tracks were recorded at Greve Studios Berlin, not exactly sure when, but maybe something like 1995, when Volker Greve had just opened his brand new recording studio. The musicians are Bo Wällstedt on vocals and guitar, Harald Zawuski on bass, and myself, Thomas Leisner, on Drums. Volker Greve did the recording and mixing. No mastering was applied back in those days.

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