A few nice new things at Ruin and Wesen

A few nice new things at Ruin and Wesen19.11.2009 03:31:05

Quite a lot has has happened lately at Ruin and Wesen, although we were pretty quiet about it. The first 100 minicommands have been shipped, another 100 is ready to go here in the lab (actually they just need to have the encoders soldered in), and the first monojoystick prototypes are ready. But most importantly, a lot of work has been done on the software framework that runs on the minicommand. This allows for some very relaxed controller programming, because despite the "easy" looks, at lot of things take place inside. The following list is just a short overview of the work that has been done:

• new MIDI sync (way tighter and allows for "transparent" clock merging: no latency, I use it with 3 minicommands queued one after the other)
• merging of MIDI on the second input (select which messages you want to merge: notes, ccs, sysex, clock, etc...)
• automatic recognition of machinedrum global settings and kit changes
• automatic recognition of monomachine settings and kit changes
• new monomachine firmwares
• generation and parsing of machinedrum and monomachine patterns
• a bunch of new machinedrum firmwares
• (preliminary) looper for machinedrum
• the whole framework can be used on MacOSX or Windows to write software interacting with MIDI and the Machinedrum
• and much more...

If you're a programmer and/or interested in the inner workings of the Minicommand, you can get the full sourcecode that we write at Ruin & Wesen, as well as the schematics for the minicommand, over at our google code website or even better at our new github repository.

Also, I'm very proud of the PatchManager that chresan has built for us, and despite a few beta kinks that will soon be ironed out, it is working great. The PatchManager is a bit like an Application Store that you may know from current smartphones: you can browse available firmwares for the minicommand, and download them to your device at the click of a button. And best of all, they are all free.

You can download the beta version of the PatchManager at:

A new firmware that directly generates melodic and rhythmic patterns (especially "polyrhythmic" patterns) is the MDPatternEuclid firmware, which stores the generated melodies directly as param locks inside the Machinedrum. No need to do weird recording of incoming notes on the Machinedrum, just press a button and it's all there. This has become my favourite firmware in just a few hours, it's incredibly fun and addictive, and takes you to place you've never been before on the MD. Also, this is just the first firmware generating param locks directly, the door has just been opened. Here is an example track where every bassline, chord line and melodic line has been generated by the Minicommand:

Also, we've been working on some secret project that will be of value to a lot of you musicians and tinkerers out there, the first prototype boards have been ordered, and the software is already well under way. Some other funny project involving the minicommand and the whole framework we developed is a liveset I'm building with my VJ neighbour haye. The MIDI output of my machinedrum is run through a custom program that controls his monome, allowing him to route individual hits of the MD into his vj software, as well as do some step sequencing. This custom software is built with pretty much exactly the same code that runs on the minicommand, and can also be found in our github repository. Here is some sneak peek into our first tests:

That's all for today, stay tuned for a lot of updates in the next time!