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.

I’ve been using the Winamp-VST Bridge plug-in on PC to browse and preview large collections of sample source material. (Ed.: Winamp is the fantastic music player software for Windows, predating — and arguably, better than — iTunes. -PK) It’s great for testing out how things will sound when run through an effect without having to laboriously convert, slice and import files into a sample map.

Here it is running some audio, which I recorded on a Zoom H4 handheld recorder, into the granular delay we’ve been constructing here at Noisepages. If you’re like me and you have folder after folder of field recordings and vinyl samples, this is a super fast way to sift through them to find those golden moments where a combination of a sample and an effect become something new and exciting. Throw things against the wall and see what sticks, quickly and easily - primarily because of things like right clicking on a folder and choosing “enqueue/play in Winamp”, being able to skip around in a file quickly, navigate a playlist, save a playlist of favorites - all without having to worry about file formats. A “real” host is for later, once you have a goal or direction in mind. You can even browse shoutcast mp3 radio streams through your VST effects.

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!

There are now plenty of ways to assign controllers to software, via old-fashioned MIDI learn and new automatic mapping features. But one major strength of Kore is that you get a number of benefits these methods don’t generally have (or don’t have all in one place):

• Hardware control with the Kore controller, not only for individual encoders but even navigating between pages and parts of the interface. (You really don’t have to touch your mouse for many features.)
• Visual feedback and navigation using the hardware, so you can always see what you’re controlling.
• Eight things: Because the layout is always eight encoders (4×2), you never have more than eight things to keep track of at a time – much easier on your brain. And you can choose those eight things:
• Custom pages: Rather than paging through the dozens of parameters in many plug-ins, you can make custom pages. This lets you choose which parameters are important and organize those parameters however you like.
• Host automation support: In addition to using control pages for physical control with the Kore controller, you can use these pages to better organize which parameters are accessed by your host. That makes it much easier and more fun, for instance, to draw in control curves in Logic or SONAR or use envelopes in Ableton Live.

Initially, though, you may find the various levels of pages Kore lets you use confusing. Before you can be productive with Kore, it helps to fully comprehend what’s going on with the different pages.

There are three basic kinds of control pages:

1. Channel pages (automatic)

2. Plug-in pages (automatic)

3. User pages (editable)

The only pages you can custom edit are actually the user pages. Both channel and plug-in pages are automatically populated by Kore’s software. It’s easier to see what this means by walking through each. I’m duplicating the manual a little bit here, but I think seeing this stuff in action is a little more manageable.