I offer private lessons for drums. See here for details.
Thomas Leisner
About Beauty and Bright IdeasThe attached file is for TouchOSC, the touchscreen control surface app for your mobile device. It emulates the functionality of the famous “Oxygen 8″ keyboard when used together with Ableton Live.
The Oxygen 8 is a small Midi controller keyboard with a keyrange of two octaves and eight rotary knobs for controlling parameters in your audio software. It became popular as one of the first compact mobile studio solutions when everybody started to produce music on the go with a laptop. As one of the first devices of it’s kind, it offered power supply through the computer’s USB port.
This simple emulation has the Oxygen’s eight knobs. This fact in itself isn’t very impressive, but if you use it with Ableton Live and in Preferences/Midi you select “Oxygen 8″ as a control unit, these eight knobs will be automatically mapped to the “Best Of Parameters” set of parameters predefined by Ableton for every device. So without any manual mapping you will have access to the most important functions of this software.
As a bonus the TouchOSC system is not only smaller and more light-weight than the original keyboard, but it has TouchOSC’s relative mode enabled, which means that you won’t have any parameter jumps when switching between devices and touching the knobs. And if you are missing the keys: Well, you may of course add them into some other tabs in the layout. Simply refer to my version of the “Keys” standard layout and copy and paste it to the Oxygen 8 layout.
Download TouchOSC Oxygen 8 for iPod
TouchOSC comes with a selection of useful controller layouts to choose from. They are pre-installed and can be used immediately. After modding the two big controllers for Ableton Live and Apple Logic, I also changed the colours for the various other basic controller layouts.
In case you’re wondering what TouchOSC might be, have a look at my introduction to TouchOSC. In case you already own TouchOSC you may simply download the attached collection of layouts I have modified, open the included files one by one in your TouchOSC Editor application and upload them to your device from there in order to use them.
Download Neutrum Design TouchOSC Mod for iPod
These colours are just my personal preferences, but in case you like them too, here they are. I only have the iPod versions here, as I only have an iPod. Please leave a comment in case you are interested in the iPad versions, they are easily and quickly done.
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.
With Strange Fluid we had a good time performing at Berlin’s Magnet Club last week, as you can see, or better hear, from this little quick and dirty bootleg video compilation:
Featured songs include Gabba, Fragile, Creep Through Lies, Prove Your Knowledge and Mighty’s Face, all taken from our new Album “Freak Licensed Unit IDentity“.
With my band Strange Fluid I play a hybrid drumkit for more than ten years now, as the mixture of electronic and acoustic sounds belongs to the concept of this band. The symmetry of this drumkit is based on my personal preferences.
The perfect symmetry of this setup means there is no preference of right or left. It allows me to play everything with my right or left hand or foot at any time. It helps me to get equal performance on both sides which always was my first goal in drumming. It also was part of the concept for Strange Fluid from the beginning, as it helps to play unusual combinations that occur when using electronic equipment.
The electronic part on this latest update of the drumkit for our 2012 concerts is not quite obvious to see on these pictures. Of course the self-built pads on the outsides allow for playing samples. But the most interesting part is hidden in the acoustic instruments, the sound of which is beeing picked up by microphones and can be used as is.
Using my self built Quadra Pad switch in the top middle of the set, I can now add up to two layers of samples onto the acoustic sound and spice up the whole thing by using time-based and colour-based effects, usually delay and distortion. The Quadra Pad controls the software on my laptop and indicates by red lights if a layer of effect is currently active.
Our next show will be at Berlin’s Magnet Club, upcoming Wednsday, August 22nd, 2012.
“We Love Bass” is a series of Jungle and Drum’n'Bass Nights, organized by the Bass Station Crew every wednsday at Magnet, usually featuring our friends from Human Sampler as a live act. This time it’s going to be Strange Fluid instead.
Magnet Club is located at Falckensteinstraße, Kreuzberg. Doors will open at 11.30 PM and entry will be free until midnight. Later on it will be 4 Euros.
Another discovery of my past. For twelve intense years I have been touring Europe with the hungarian speed folk band Transsylvanians.
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.
Random Rhythm Reading is a series of downloadable text documents containing rhythmical phrases that can be rearranged for creating infinite variations of the reading text. This is very handy for practising purposes.
The musical text consists of pictures which represent one bar each. Using a simple text editor like TextEdit on Mac or WordPad on Windows you can copy and paste, drag and drop, duplicate or delete bars to rearrange them. As one bar is the smallest unit in this system, I offer reading texts in 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 metres, each in 8th and 16th notes. As each package for one metre and subdivision is presented in a new post as I gradually expand the system, please use the Random Rhythm Reading category to get all of them.
As Mac and Windows systems use different techniques to incorporate pictures into a text file, I had to create different versions for Mac and Windows. The one for Mac is a .rtfd file that opens in TextEdit. TextEdit offers very cool drag and drop support for the pictures, which is really fun. The one for Windows is a .doc file that should open in WordPad, and as far as I know you can’t drag and drop pictures there. But this file format offers wider compatibility, also suitable for mobile devices.
Download Random Rhythm Reading 3/4 in 16th Notes, Part A for Mac
Download Random Rhythm Reading 3/4 in 16th Notes, Part A for Win
I will add packages to the system from time to time, so stay tuned – don‘t forget to subscribe to the RSS-Feed at the bottom of this page so you will always get notified when something new is out – and don‘t forget to „dice“ your reading text from time to time: Remember that you can reorder the text by simply dragging bars around.