Interpol, the superstar, New York-based band (not the international anti-crime organization) have been touring the world with an intensive, live rig, powered by Kore. Our friend Jonathan Adams Leonard aka sleen, a technological superstar himself, put together their current digital setup, and sends along copious notes on the hardware and software rig. Jonathan has plenty more to share as far as how to make Kore work for live players, but first let’s have a look at the details of the rig itself.

And yes, prepare yourself for some serious hardware and software pr0n from one of the world’s best live bands. No DJ sets here.

(For our previous chat with Jonathan, see Free, Modular Power Tools for Kore 2: A Guide to the Reaktor Toolpack, covering his must-download Reaktor ensembles for use with Kore.)

FM8 is a really brilliant tool for synthesizing electronic drum kits. And because it’s using live synthesis, you can make all kinds of variations in the sound easily in ways that don’t work with sampled kits. Our friend Gustavo Bravetti is a huge fan of FM8 and has added it to his workflow in Ableton Live.

Gustavo’s such a big FM8 fan, in fact, that he’s made up a special FM8 drum kit setup exclusively for CDM, to share with y’all. Because Gustavo works in Ableton Live, he’s set them up in that environment:

The sounds are contained on an Ableton Live dj set, also there is a demo clip for each instrument.
Instruments are copyright free, clips are only intended to preview the instruments.
Let me know your thoughts about the FM8 electronic drum kit 1

File download: (zipped Live ALS file with presets; we’ll have a Koresound soon)

bravetti_fm8drums_1_als.zip

Here’s what it sounds like:

fm8kit.mp3

And just to demonstrate how much change you can extract from synth parameters, here’s a quickie "messed-up" demo I made just by changing synth and effects options in FM8:

fm8kit_2.mp3

Be sure to check out Gustavo Bravetti himself, too. He did an interview for CDM in which he shares all his tricks for using unusual alternative controllers, gestural gloves, and gaming devices for music making. He also talks about the scene in his native Uruguay. Liz McLean Knight did the interview:

Interview: Gustavo Bravetti, Playing Music with Light and Interactive Gloves

How can you make the most of this FM8 kit? Here are some quick ideas, which I’ll follow up in the coming days:

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: