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.

Building instruments and effects in Reaktor is a lot like building your own hardware. But ever wished those fabulous UIs you’ve seen could be used via something other than … ugh … your mouse? View Reaktor with a touchscreen or touch-controlled projection, and it’s an entirely different game. We already knew Tim Exile was a fan of touchscreens, but here’s what it can do in the hands of another Reaktor master.

Above are videos of Metrognome a.k.a Karl White getting down with a custom ensemble on a touchscreen. Karl reveals on the NI forums:

That was a huge undertaking and is one very complex Reaktor mod. I’ll be making more stuff public on the user library once I get the documentation lined up.

In other words, new goodies on the horizon! Here’s a better look at the Intelectualist ensemble (click for the full-sized version):

Live performance granular drum machine. My inspiration was the intelekt in the NI user library and various works by Clist, Program Child, etc.

I like the use of recordable touch-faders in the upper left - looks like an implementation similar to my own Freshmaker macro. If this isn’t exciting enough, here’s a video of Karl working with his ensemble on a wiimote whiteboard - I’ll be keeping an eye out for his work in the user library.

TRIO SOWARI
Uploaded by Ornitoto

Phil Durrant is familiar to most Reaktor users as Sowari on the NI messageboards, a helpful and knowledgeable presence there. He’s also a renowned experimental musician, having performed with, among others, Ticklish, Trio Sowari and MIMEO, the music in movement orchestra - a collective that includes Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Keith Rowe. Phil is currently working on his PhD dissertation, which involves building virtual instruments for improvised laptop performance. I interviewed Phil by email shortly after Trio Sowari performed a series of shows in France. Phil not only answered my questions but shared a screen shots of the Reaktor instruments he uses in live performance, with detailed explanations. Here’s what he had to say.

Part of the appeal of using Kore is as a meta-host for multiple plug-ins. But that means, particularly in live performance, that you’ll want to conserve CPU resources. I personally don’t like to make things too unwieldy with Kore, keeping things to 8-12 channels and consolidating wherever possible. But even with a couple of instances of Reaktor, CPU conservation is a good idea.

Enter the power of the Channel On/Off switch. It’s actually in two places – see the X in the top left of the image here, as well as the one on the Audio tab at bottom. What’s nice about it is that, by “pulling the plug” on a channel, you prevent plug-ins on that channel from consuming CPU resources. (Many third-party plug-ins will keep using CPU resources even if no signal is routed to them. The “X” in this case switches them off entirely.)

So we know that switching off channels entirely – rather than just avoiding routing audio to them or switching off MIDI input – is the best way to conserve CPU when switching between instruments and effects. But how do you automate this in performance?

You can’t directly assign controls to the on/off switch, so your best solution is likely to enable and disable channels with performance presets. Performance presets will store the enabled/disabled state of all channels when they’re saved. To access them, click the Performance Presets button on the toolbar: