Thomas Leisner

About Beauty and Bright Ideas
November 4th, 2012

TouchOSC Oxygen 8 Emulation

The 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.

oxygen8

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 Download TouchOSC Oxygen 8 for iPod

 

 

September 20th, 2012

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.

 

August 28th, 2012

Strange Fluid Magnet Video

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“.

 

August 18th, 2012

Strange Fluid at Magnet

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.

 

August 16th, 2012

Transslyvanians

Eine weitere Entdeckung aus meiner Vergangenheit. Zwölf intensive Jahre hindurch bin ich in Europa mit der ungarischen Speed Folk Band Transsylvanians unterwegs gewesen.

Ty-Maus

Ich habe die Band vor vier Jahren verlassen. Als ich jetzt meine Festplatten aufgeräumt habe fand ich die Backups unserer damaligen Webseite, die ich über die Jahre entwickelt, gepflegt und verwaltet habe. Ausserdem habe ich so ziemlich alles, was man auf dieser Seite findet gestaltet. Dieses Webarchiv zeigt den Stand der Band und der Webseite im Jahr 2008.

 

August 16th, 2012

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.

 

July 12th, 2012

Strange Fluid at Gretchen

We are going to play a concert on August 11th, 2012 at Gretchen, Berlin. You are welcome to join us and to invite your friends, of course!

It’s going to be a live electronics night between Dubstep, Drum’n'Bass and Techno, featuring quite a bunch of artist and two bands: Besides us there will be Olivia FX, as well as Moog Conspiracy, Rainer Guba, Marc Schütt, Abelha Supersónica, Kommando Beretto and others. The final line-up and details are going to be announced at the Gretchen Website. There is also a corresponding Facebook Event as well as an announcement at Resident Advisor. See you soon!

May 14th, 2012

Strange Fluid Gabba Live

With Strange Fluid we also produced a second live video from our show at Spartakus, Potsdam. The song is “Gabba”, taken of course from our new studio album “Freak Licensed Unit IDentity“.

May 12th, 2012

Strange Fluid No Pope Live

With Strange Fluid we released a live video of our new album’s first track “No Pope”, taken from our last show at Spartakus, Potsdam.

 

February 4th, 2012

Strange Fluid at Spartakus

I am proud to announce a concert with Strange Fluid at the renowned and renewed Potsdam club Spartakus at February 24th, 2012. Besides Strange Fluid DJ’s Wou_Masta, Petroschi, ICEA, and Heinz von Mecklenburg are going to present some of the finest Dubstep and Drum’n'Bass.

Doors will open at 11pm, entrance fee is 7 Euros. To find the spot check out this description. It’s close to Potsdam Hauptbahnhof, so maybe that’s a good way to get there.