Dedicated audio + video mixers, or all-in-one?

Jaymis examined the Numark AVM02 last month. It’s an innovative concept: one mixer for audio, video, and video FX. But it’s not without its shortcomings; most notably, there’s no MIDI, and some of the FX capabilities are lacking. And that raises a question: is it better to get one piece of gear that does everything, or mix and match?

Enter the Korg KM-202 and 402 audio mixers, previewed today on Create Digital Music. They look fantastic as audio mixers: simple mixing functions, plus lots of audio effects via an integrated KAOSS Pad — even vocoding, a little synthesis, and loop sampling are included, and everything can be beat-matched.

That’s the good news. The bad news: like the AVM02, there’s no MIDI input — all the more annoying, given it does have beat-driven capabilities. For MIDI, you have to upgrade to the pricier ZERO4/ZERO8, but those would be wild overkill for live visualists. Still, I still think, depending on the pricing of the KM-202, I might prefer a KM-202 for audio and (sorry, Korg) Edirol V4 video mixer to Numark’s all-in-one deal. Mixing simultaneous audio and visuals is a new area, of course. But it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

This, of course, brings me to a more important question:

Why the heck doesn’t the KORG KrossFour have a KAOSS Pad?

The KrossFour is Korg’s entry into the video mixing market. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s because it’s been somewhat overshadowed by Edirol’s wildly-popular V4. I’m sure the KrossFour sells, but there’s not much to say about it, other than it does have the plus of coming with a crossfader onboard. (Edirol makes you buy an accessory to replace their T-bar; which you prefer is a matter of taste.) I tried one, and it’s a decent piece of kit. It just lacks that extra something to make people notice it, like, oh, something really out-there with an X/Y pad and effects. (Now, where would Korg find something like that … not in the form of their KAOSS Pad Entrancer video effects unit, by any chance?)

Korg helpfully suggests you pair the KrossFour with their KAOSS Pad Entrancer for effects and KAOSS Pad mixing. Most VJs I know with Entrancers do just that — only they use the Edirol V4, not the Korg KrossFour. Besides, whatever mixer you use, this immediately creates a problem: where do you put the effects unit? Before the mixer? After the mixer? Either way, you can’t assign the effect to a mixer channel. If Korg would just meld the two, problem solved — and the KAOSSFour would become the instant, de facto tool for VJs.

Now, I need someone to translate that into Japanese and send a nice card to the Korg office there. Here’s a subtle hint, in case they’re reading; perhaps our Japanese blogger friends (thanks for the links; we do read them!) can start posting this on their VJ blogs:

Polling all readers: who’s with me?

Here’s a video roundup for you fans of Quartz Composer, the powerful, free live motion graphics synthesizer and developer tool on Mac OS X 10.4 and later. Korg KAOSS Pad 3s and game controllers prove again to be very cool controllers for visual performance. If you’re not a QC user, these will work well with other custom visual apps, too (Jitter, Pd/GEM, vvvv, Processing, etc.).

Korg KAOSS Pad as Live Visual Controller

Via Matrixsynth, the new Korg KAOSS Pad 3 proves to be a truly powerful tool for manipulating live visuals. As opposed to previous KAOSS Pads, which had only an undifferentiated X/Y pad, the KP3 has LED feedback that allows you to create custom grid interfaces. This gets put to powerful effect by mapping MIDI input to custom synthesized 3D visualization patches in Quartz Composer, courtesy YouTube user porchka66. Assuming you’ve got a Mac to run it (mini for six hundred bucks, perhaps?), you’ve got a powerful custom visual synthesizer with more flexibility than pricey options like the Edirol CG-8, at a tiny fraction of the price. If you don’t like the look of the visuals here, incidentally, you can patch your custom visuals to look like whatever you want (something that’s harder with closed-box hardware).

Game Controller as Visual Controller / Synth

Too poor to buy a KP3? Use a cheap game controller instead. That’s what our friend Surya Buchwald did in a recent experiment, courtesy the lovely game controller-to-MIDI utility on Mac, Junxion:

A/V Synth Controlled by Gamepad [The Lava Flow]

Simple results so far, but this should give you other ideas. I really like the synesthesia going here, with the patch acting both as visual and sonic synthesizer.

I’m surprised there aren’t more game controllers out there in performances; they’re cheap, there’s a wide variety of designs, and they’re reasonably easy to configure for use with Macs and PCs. (Xbox 360 controllers now work on PCs, too, and I expect might be adapted to Mac use, as well. PS/2 and GameCube controllers can be used with cheap USB adapters on any platform.) The results, again, can be anything you want them to be.

Quartz Composer Meets After Effects

In a combination you don’t often encounter, After Effects and Quartz Composer both got applied to this music video production, by Tim Jaeger (also on The Lava Blog; thanks for the correction). I love the minimalist, graphic look, with QC visuals evidently generated dynamically by the music:

Music video made with Quartz Composer, After Effects [The Lava Flow]

Got a favorite use for Quartz Composer? Upload some video and let us know about it!

Jackie Passmore is a talented VJ touring with Ladytron (and, in spring 2006, Stereolab). There are some talented genes in this family: her brother was the lead programmer of Acid. (Sorry, not the other Acid I was thinking of.) Thanks to sponsorship from Korg, she accompanies her Apple laptop with a Korg video mixer and microKONTROL keyboard. The heart of the setup is the superb Vidvox GRID2 software; Vidvox has a great interview with Jackie. (Watch for our own profile here soon.)

Vidvox Featured Artists: Jackie Passmore

Below: Jackie in China with Ladytron, showing off her rig. (Thanks, Jackie!)

First off, welcome readers of Keyboard Magazine, which has bravely taken on a new regular feature on VJing for musicians. Don’t read Keyboard? Check out online stories or subscribe at Keyboard’s site.

In the September issue of Keyboard, there’s not only a great cover story on Trent Reznor, but I did a two-page feature on VJ Holly Daggers. There were a lot more links that I wanted to talk about than I could fit into the article, so here goes:

Holly Daggers, Reflective Chroma-keying, and the Korg Entrancer [CDM]

Holly’s rig: Reflecmedia’s miracle surface, perfect for chroma-keying, Edirol V4, the favored 4-channel hardware video mixer of VJs everywhere, and of course the Korg Entrancer, the key to Holly’s setup

VJ resource list from community sites to VJ performance reports [CDM]

Hands-on with the Kaptivator, Korg’s beefed-up new video sampler (Holly? Have they sent you one yet?) [CDM]

Forward Motion Theater, Holly’s collaboration with Eric Dunlap that produces the Eyewash VJ event here in NYC

VJing: Now in convenient book form! Lastly, much to my surprise, we have a new VJ book to look forward to that features the Eyewash crew and many of the other top VJs and video artists, and provides essential how-to information:

The VJ Book [via share.dj]

Not only that, but the writer is Paul Spinrad, who I also get to work with via Make Magazine. We’ll have to all have drinks in the fall when his book, plus my upcoming (delayed) book Real World Digital Audio are both out!

Got other VJing tips or resources to share, technical questions to ask, or just want to brag about your demo reel? Drop me a line, because remember, “I don’t sleep.” (TM)

Search for “VJ” for more coverage at CDM, or check out the latest news.

Korg has formally unveiled the Korg Kaptivator, as seen here on CDM this spring. Unlike Edirol’s new VJ hardware, the “priced-like-a-car” CG-8, the Kaptivator is in the reach of mortals with a US$2500 list.

What’s cool about the Kaptivator is that it’s the first full-featured hardware sampler for video. You can record from analog video input or a DV camera, with storage of up to 800 clips / 106 minutes (40 GB hard drive). Clips are triggered from an Akai MPC-style 4×4 grid of pads. You can add effects, individually or via saved styles (essentially macros of specific routings and effects settings), cross-fade, and trigger to tempo via a tap tempo or even an audio input trigger. There’s MIDI I/O, too, so you’ll be able to jam with this thing while playing keyboards, etc.

I got a chance to sit down and play with the Kaptivator last week while visiting Korg headquarters on Long Island, NY. The video output looks great, and having LCD previews really helps out. Korg has packed a lot of details into how the sampler works, too: you can easily change sample length a beat at a time according to the master tempo, add to a sample so that it gets progressively longer, and even set it up for time-lapse sampling. (That last feature is particularly fun.) Real-time control is definitely the focus: you can record controller motions, map anything to MIDI, and in addition to the pads and crossfader there’s a touch-controller, too, for controlling effects. (A full X/Y/Z touchpad a la the Kaoss Pad would have been nice, but the single touchpad keeps the unit very svelte.) You could fit this into even the most cramped VJ setup, and take advantage of the LCD screens for previewing, or with more space, output to monitors.

With a street price expected around $2300, you’ll have to be a serious VJ to make the investment, but there’s certainly some reliability and ease to hardware — not to mention, for sampling capabilities (software’s one main weakness), this could be the perfect complement to your laptop.

Ed: My VJ Day spilleth over a bit, so just a little more VJ coverage before we return to the usual music stuff. -PK

Holly Daggers is another superstar VJ, having toured with folks like Fischerspooner and the Black Eyed Peas. (Holly’s probably reading this, so maybe I shouldn’t mention the Hillary Duff thing — bad mojo.) Don’t miss the free Creative Commons VJ clips and futuristic fetish visual inspirations on her site. Since Holly makes better eye candy than, for example, I do, she’s found ways of inserting herself into her VJ imagery, in several videos famously in a nurse’s outfit.

Of course, to insert people into videos requires chroma-keying, the “weather man” effect that has a well-earned bad rap for looking cheesy. The problem is inaccurate chroma-keying, in which the camera has trouble distinguishing foreground from background. That’s where the Reflecmedia Chromaflex comes in; it’s a special reflective surface that helps the keying process. I got to see Holly using this with body-painted and costumed dancers at a recent Crobar gig, and the effect looks terrific. The magic comes from the 3M Scotchlite material used in reflective jackets.

Software versus hardware: Holly and I have a little disagreement going. Holly is a hardware person: if the VJ tool runs on a computer, she doesn’t want to touch it. She argues that hardware is more reliable and outputs better-quality video, and of course I staunchly disagree and say that . . . uh . . . well . . . actually, usually I try to change the subject because I know she’s got a point. One thing we can agree on is the general coolness of the Korg Entrancer, an $800 piece of gear that melds a KAOSS pad with video capabilities. Rock-solid. Add an Edirol V-4 and you’ve got some great VJ hardware; even a lot of software VJs carry some of this around. See Korg’s Leslie Buttonow write-up what happens when the Entrancer first hit Holly and Eric Dunlap’s Eyewash VJ party. (In a word: think drool.)

While Edirol takes the synthesis approach with its new video box (at least from a marketing standpoint), VJ gear rival Korg is going the sampler route.

As reported here earlier,
the Kaptivator is a video sampler with a 4×4 Akai-style drum pad grid.
Now that we're not reading in Japanese, we've got some more details:

• It's a sampler for video: Here's the stunningly-cool bit:
  sample up to 800 clips, up to 10 minutes in length (though shorter will
  be more interesting) and play them back on the sixteen pads.
• It's a 2-channel mixer: Mix clips or (as expected) external video input and even DV camera connections.
• Watch the action on dual LCDs
• Create "style" routings and automation: Effects are
  bundled into routings called "styles," with 15 presets and 100 user
  settings, for everything from coloring to beat-synchronization. And of
  course, you can record and reproduce movements.
• Make it musical: Use MIDI, audio triggers, tap tempo, and even auto-detection of BPM for rhythm-synced effects.

All in a 5-lb. box with a 40 GB hard disk. What we don't know: price or
availability. A representative for Korg USA tells CDM simply that
products at Messe aren't yet announced in the US market, and even the
European models appear to be unreleased. Stay tuned; let me know if you
hear anything!

How does this differ from the Edirol CG-8? Some of those details will
become clear, but the emphasis of the Korg appears to be on longer
video clips (the CG-8 appears to be focused on short clips and stills),
and higher specs like the included LCD displays. We should know more
once we see these in person within the next few months.

What if you took an iPod, a drum pad / controller, and a
high-end VJ mixer, and put them together? You'd get something like the
new Korg Kaptivator. Here's what it does:

• 40 GB hard drive for storing video clips
• Two LCDs for watching what you're doing
• Manipulate clips with an Akai sampler-style touchpad, cross-fader, ribbon controller
• Built-in video effects
• Live video and audio input
• Video, audio, DV/FireWire, MIDI ins and outs, including separate preview video outputs

Details and pictures are on the Japanese-only site Pixdisc;
apparently this was shown at a dealer conference in Japan, so all
availability/specs/price are unknown. Stay tuned, because you can bet I
want to know when this thing comes out in the States! (via vjcentral)

Do any of our readers read Japanese? Contact me (or comment here) if so.

Updated: As a reader points out in comments, there's a lively discussion on vjcentral. (Flip straight to page two
for a fantastic lineup of Akai/Boss-style 4×4 drum pad triggers and . .
. ooh, sorry, my heart stopped beating. Ah, the MPC1000 . . .)