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:

What would you most want to know about Kore? What would you most want to see on Kore if you had just a few minutes? (Beer and drinks would be available.) What would you want to show other people?

I’m putting together a short workshop for the Warper Party in New York, a (roughly) monthly get-together of laptop musicians of all types in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Now, NI has done an official workshop tour, but well-done as it was, that was a sales event. I’m talking to fellow musicians, and even some non-musicians.

I’ve got some ideas for what to put together, but I’m equally interested in what you think. And in addition to doing this event live in Brooklyn (I’ll post info for those of you in the area), I think a short, all-encompassing workshop would be ideal to add to this site.

We’ve already got some stuff in our “101″ thread:
101 tag @kore.noisepages
…and of course, on Kore in general:
Kore tag @kore.noisepages

But there’s plenty more to talk about. So let’s have it: what would you most want to know?

My focus will be on using Kore as the hub of a live performance rig, in conjunction with Reaktor, and using it for really playing electronics live.

Photo at top: me playing Boston’s Beat Research, all in Kore, as part of the Mind Meld get-together earlier this summer. Photo by Todd Thille.

On NI forums: Since some of you like to chat there, I’ve also opened a thread on the NI forum. What I may do, as well, is get the outline and some content for this workshop up and allow people to comment on it, so in the end we’ll have collected some community wisdom (and questions!) for the results.

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!