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

 

 

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October 3rd, 2012

TouchOSC Design Mod

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.

The “Beatmachine” layout.

 The “Keys” layout. I have added some octaves.

 The “Mix 2″ layout.

 The “Mix 16″ layout.

 The “Simple” layout.

Download 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.

 

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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.

 

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June 18th, 2012

Music For Puppet Theatre

Out of two songs from a good beginning have become ten now, making up a complete CD called “Wusel und seine Freunde” and featuring all of the ten characters of the “Wusel” trilogy by Puppentheater Katinchen.

Starting with copyright problems for the music on the second piece I began composing the first two tracks, then added some more for the first run of the third piece and finally wrote the rest, to also feature the characters of the first part, and to round up the whole thing. From the finished album we then took parts of the tracks to get the theatre music we actually needed for the scenes. As the tracks were composed with this in mind, it was no problem to get the right mood in the right place, by simply adding some loops and fades.

You may listen to the whole CD here. You can’t download it, but you may order a CD at the Katinchen Website. For the actual theatre music watch out for one of Puppentheater Katinchen’s performances.

 

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March 21st, 2012

Lovely Tunes

I just finished two tracks I composed and produced for my girlfriend’s puppet theatre “Katinchen” and of course I don’t want to keep them secret from you! Would love to hear how you like them.

Enjoy listening, and in case you want to find out more about the puppet theatre, have a look at the website of Katinchen, featuring a friendly educative style of puppet theatre for children.

This first song I composed in a way that should resemble to the music from the soundtrack of “Amelie” by Yann Thiersen.

The second piece is based on a traditional children’s song about elephants in a forest, which is already in use in one of the theatre pieces.

 

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January 12th, 2012

Strange Fluid New Album

With Strange Fluid we released our brand new studio album “Freak Licensed Unit IDentity“.

After two long years of working into depth and detail it has finally become a true picture of Strange Fluid as a collective, showing all of it’s facets yet still creating a unit.

We are going to present the ten tracks of this album live at our upcoming show at Supamolly, and of course you may also buy the album there. Be sure not to miss it!

 

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September 25th, 2011

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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