Hello, I’d like to describe what Im looking to do to make sure that its feasible before I go down this road because after a weekend of looking through the software and working on tutorials, I can see that to achieve my goal will take quite some time and quite a lot of work on my part. So, here we go:
I play in a four piece psychadelic/stoner metal band. I am also a software engineer. That being said, I have absolutely no experience with graphics or 3D rendering, but I do obviously have quite a bit of experience with logic and math. What we want to do is set up different sequences of “scenes” per song in our live set. I would like to be able switch both switch between “song sequences” as well as between scenes within a song sequence through the use of MIDI. I am defining a song sequence as a chronological set of “scenes”. Scenes would be moving 3D art, video, etc. A live set would consist of multiple song sequences. All MIDI switching would be achieved via a footboard.
I would also like the scenes to react to the music we are playing live. We DO NOT play to a click track, so some sort of constant BPM generated via Ableton will not be possible. We would however, be able to “tap” a BPM in from MIDI if this is possible. I suppose some sync is better than none. Another option that I thought of would be to attach a piezo MIDI trigger or a mic to the drummers snare and kick. I do not think a single mic on the room will be effective. Because of the nature of our music, multiple instruments are constantly covering up the same frequency range and within passages of music, all instruments are playing loudly, so regular peaks from a single source seem hard to isolate with band passes and paraEQ’s etc. It might serve as a loose measure of overall dynamic, but not any sort of regular beat.
So, my main concern would be the MIDI switching between both song sequences as well as switching between scenes within songs. We could do interesting stuff without being audio driven, but that would be really really nice. Is Touch the appropriate product to suit my needs?
It might suit your purposes, however, there’s a question if it’s the best choice. TD is capable of all the things described, but Resolume, for instance, might be a better choice for AL sync/midi triggering video and such.
Im not familiar with Resolume, but I can say if it has any particular control/performing feature that you prefer ,TouchDesigner does have extensive capabilities for handling MIDI, OSC, audio, joystick, keyboard, serial, custom ethernet messaging etc (in and out). You could build a bridge between one app and the other this way as one solution.
That being said, TouchDesigner has successfully been used to perform synced + live visuals to audiences of tens of thousands for multiple projects.
Thanks guys. I can tell the learning curve on touch is going to be quite significant for me, having not had a lot of experience with visual and graphic design, but as I said, I can not sync the songs to Ableton or any other static tempo because we do not play to a static tempo. Perhaps someone could just answer the following question for me.
Say we were going to do a three song set. I have a midi board that can send program changes numbering 1-30. Say the set structure looked like the following
Song Sequence 1: Scenes 1-10
Song Sequence 2: Scenes 1-10(program change 11-20)
Song Sequence 3: Scenes 1-10(program change 21-30)
What is the best way to achieve that? Some sort of switch statement that maps program changes to the render flags on various render TOPS or outputs? Do you see what I’m getting at? A simple example would be the song starts by my sending program change 1 to touch which makes touch render a sphere then later in the song program change 2 is sent which causes touch to render a pyramid. And additionally, instead of having just a long list of scenes, I would like to group them by song and be able to make a song “active” which could also be selectable via midi. I know I’m having a hard time conveying my goals and I appreciate you guys taking the time to help me.
triggered by one of using MIDI during a song.
Ohh, and also, I noticed that in the beat dialog there is the ability to tap a tempo out and I was wondering if its possible to do the same thing by tapping a MIDI event and mapping it to that tap functionality in the beat dialog.
By the way, even if touch ends up not suiting my needs, I think what you guys have done is amazing and I’ve had a real blast messing around with it for the past few days. The way I described it to my bandmates was that it reminds me very much of a modular synth, except you can replace oscillators with visuals and filter them in a number of ways. Really really cool.
Hi eonblue.
In terms of your first question, you could use a MIDI In DAT to parse out the specific message you wanted, to launch a custom script to turn on display of whichever objects you needed.
Alternatively you could use a MIDI in CHOP to parse out the same signals as numeric channel values as use those values to export elsewhere.
As far as the global tap functionality,this is mainly scripted behind the scenes, so you could use the same tap calculation function based on any input an set the BPM accordingly with another script.
Thats kind of what I thought, something of that nature, but I was wondering if I ended up with like 30 scenes and was just switching displays on and off, if the processing would still be going on in the other scenes even if they werent displaying and consequently, whether I would end up seriously bogging things down.
Hi eonblue.
By default only operators whos content is requested cook.
For example, a TOP that is not being displayed is not cooking.
However in cases where this is not the case, you can always script locking of any type of
nodes, as well as bypassing, or its cooking.
I’d say yes, it can do it.
several other tools can probably get you there a bit quicker but learing to do it in touch is not so bad as there are a lot of quite mad and gifted people on this forum who also happen to generous. A lot of people use touch for doing live visuals for music sets. simply firing off a bunch of video clips from MIDI is not rocket science in Touch but the cool stuff happens when you generate the 3D and 2D stuff on-the-fly so it a behavior of a model could potentially be linked to, say your midi footpedal or whatever. I think that’s where touch is really fun and addictive.
that said, it’s an investment. The free version lets you do a lot with a max image size of 1280x1280 but it does take a little while to get your head around the basic concepts. after that, it depends on how deep you want to go.
You can of course spend years getting to know the ins and outs of it but it is one of those things you can just sit down with and start noodling around without a specific idea and to surprise yourself with what comes out.
the other thing is that it really needs a reasonably quick computer with a Nvidia graphics card to be reliably usable. people are trying it with some ATI cards but it’s a matter of trying and seeing with the free version.
Thanks a lot Rod. I actually have the free version installed on my DAW at the house which is a reasonably fast machine with a GeForce 9800 in it. It seems to be running the program really well and I have actually done a bit of work with the program. I am finding it really enjoyable…like REALLY addictive. I hope your assertion that people here are generous turns out to be true, because I am going to have a lot of questions thats for sure. Especially given the fact that I have not background in graphics. But hey, at least Im a software engineer…otherwise I don’t think this beast would be tamable for me.
So, I guess get ready for questions because they are about to be coming.
This is quite a late reply, better late than never though… I can assure you I don’t doubt TD’s ability to do all of these things in any way, I just propably didn’t put it the right way. What I meant is that Resolume Avenue is a piece of software more in terms of Ableton Live (that means more user friendly), while TD is more in terms of Max/MSP (that means… well you know what does that mean). RA is better for people not looking for getting more in depth.