i used to play live with ableton and an akai. that afternoon i started wondering what my own program in the browser could give me. i already had a pile of machines that make the sounds. maybe they could also save me the time i spend preparing samples.
decided in the first hour: laptop only. no midi to begin with, just keys. the tools on the shelf don’t fit as they are, they’re the base for live versions. hard industrial techno, 150 bpm.
what it turned into: scenes you fill with sounds. a kick channel with fills under your fingers, where holding a key plays only the body, or reverses the hit, or throws the pitch up. a key that kills everything except the channel you’re on. a key that pours noise over the whole mix for as long as you hold it. and key hints drawn into the interface the way vimium does it, because i kept forgetting my own shortcuts.
i kept asking the same question. where does this beat ableton? at one point i wrote that i didn’t see the wow. one thought from that night: a neo-bochka live might be built on effects on the kick itself, switched on and off while it runs.
the next day i took an akai mpk mini to a windows machine and watched the browser print its knob moves in the console. it saw it. pad one was going to be a strike on metal, the harder you hit the bigger it gets. pad two, a data mosh on the audio.
49 commits on one page in two days. a red design that i pulled back to black. and me asking when this counts as finished, so i can go and play it somewhere.