Playing – using your musical tools and toys as an instrument – is what it’s all about for a lot of us. And for many computer musicians, making the computer more playable live, whether onstage or improvising in the “studio,” is a reason to choose Ableton Live as a host.

From the day I first saw Kore at a pre-launch press conference, the pitch was that Kore was portable: you can move it from host to host as a plug-in or use it as a host itself. Lately, I’ve been putting that to use myself, playing some sets in Kore 2 alone, and moving into hosts, particularly Ableton Live. Before talking about the how, it’s worth covering some of the why.

Naturally, if you’re not into the full version of Kore 2, you can easily inject some extra sounds into Live with the soundpacks. But here, I’ll cover the all-stops-pulled complete version of Kore.

Live + Kore: How They Can Work Together

The reasons to use Ableton Live are probably most evident, since it does many of the things that Kore itself does not. I’ll go through what I think is important – if you’re a beginning user, don’t worry about this too much as it’ll make sense when you see it.

Last Spiral post for a while, I promise!

I noticed in the NI forums that user Jedinhopy couldn’t record Spiral’s output in FL Studio. I checked, and found that this was the case… fortunately, there’s a workaround. This is Windows only, but then, FL is also Windows only.

First, get MIDI Yoke installed. This creates virtual MIDI input and output ports. You will find a million uses for this, I guarantee.

Then, in FL Studio’s MIDI settings, make the following adjustments:

I’m putting together a setup to compose my hockey theme masterpiece (yeah right), and here’s how it’s shaping up; I’m using Reaper as my host, Kore 2 as a sub-host and Koresounds as instruments. Two things I like about Kore for this project - one, it has just about every sound I’d want ready to go, so I won’t spend too much time in the black hole of sound design. Two, my instrument setup is abstracted away from the DAW as a Kore performance so I can easily migrate it to another DAW if need be.

Why Reaper? I’ve used Cubase and other spendier DAWs in the past but I don’t have access to those at the moment, and having created a couple of mini projects in Reaper in the last little while, it looks like it has everything I need. BTW, there’s a beta available for Mac now, so don’t feel frozen out.

I want to keep all my sounds bundled together in a Kore performance so I’ve created just one instance of Kore - the multi-out plugin version that has 8 stereo channels of output. Then my plan was to create 8 separate audio tracks and route the channels to them… I noticed that the Reaper plugin wrapper has a function to do exactly that:

Bam! That was easy. It builds the routing and creates the tracks to send to - no mucking about with the routing dialogs and matrix. So now it’s a simple matter of configuring my sounds in Kore - choosing sounds and setting the MIDI in and plugin-out settings for each one:

Nice and simple - first sound takes input from MIDI channel one and goes to plugin output one, second is on channel two and goes to output two, and so on.

Now, what about MIDI channels routed to Kore? You probably noticed the “Build 16 channels of
MIDI routing to this track” entry in the Reaper plugin wrapper. Guess what? It works. Only thing left to do is set up the MIDI input sources for the MIDI tracks.

Here’s a zip file containing my preliminary Reaper setup and Kore 2 performance if anyone wants to have a look. It’s in a pretty raw stage but the routing works.

So readers, are any of you using Kore 2 in Reaper? Have you learned any interesting tricks or pitfalls doing so? Let me know… in the meantime, I have a theme to compose!

Fans of the tracker/music production tool Renoise wanted to make use of Gustavo Bravetti’s free FM drum kit on their tool of choice, too. Renoise is a unique environment for music making, a modern take on an alternative generation of sequencing applications called “trackers,” as can be seen from the interface above. It should be a lovely match for some FM8 synthesized drum sounds. Torben, a reader of this site and member of the Renoise forum, went ahead and did the work of porting Gustavo’s instruments to Renoise:

Free Fm8 Drumkit For Renoise, Gustavo Bravetti Exclusive Drumkit for FM8 [Renoise forum]

Being such a friendly guy, I copied the arrangement from Live into Renoise - setting up the 9 instances of FM8 with the drum-patches and the example drumloop.
For info on the drumkit check this link: http://kore.noisepages.com/2008/07/24/free…stavo-bravetti/
For downloading my Renoise-file, get it here: http://vibrants.scene.org/gustavo_bravetti…_1_renoise.xrns
And here’s how the drumkit sounds (in Ableton Live). http://media.createdigitalmedia.net/kore/s…ries/fm8kit.mp3
FM is lovely indeed
Cheers,
- Torben.

Thanks, Torben! Hope this is of use to some people. (And maybe it’ll give you an excuse to try out Renoise.)

Part of the appeal of Kore, of course, is to be able to move a sound setup from one host to another, so you could easily switch between Ableton Live and Renoise.I’ll be getting the Koresound version and straight FM8 preset out this week — I promise. And I’m especially curious to try pairing up Kore with Renoise as a host. That said, there are also times when some my prefer to drop an instrument directly into their host, minus Kore. Gustavo’s choice of Live was entirely personal; he likes dropping the different FM8’s directly into Live tracks for assembling beats. So, when I release that Koresound, perhaps we’ll compare how these different workflows function.

Got another host to request? Say so in comments. (Obviously, FM8 presets will work in any host, but I’m curious to know how you like to work.)

Maybe you’ve heard about the CBC’s contest to create a new Hockey Night in Canada theme… well, I’ve decided to take a kick at that can. $100,000 plus half the royalties is nothing to sneeze at.

I’m going to be using Kore 2 for the sounds - it has a lot of great sounding meat and potatoes sampled content for band and orchestral sounds, and it’s easy to find and change instruments as you compose. So far I’m in the planning stages - I have some sounds in my head and I’m making notes. I think I’ll be using Reaper as my DAW because of the flexible routings; I can use one instance of Kore and route its outputs to various tracks for mixing and creating stems. I’ll post some information on how that all fits together after I’ve got it sorted, and keep you up to date on my composing progress.

This is a huge challenge! I’m rewriting Canada’s second (some would say first) national anthem, and it’s iconic.

But maybe all this is a waste of time - how can I compete with this entry?

Be careful, Peter; as with hockey teams, rich American investors might decide to buy up this tune, import it to the US, and then discover Americans aren’t all that interested. Hmmm… maybe someone needs to write a song that helps us Yankees get hip to soccer, too. -PK