The Silver Machine Bundle

Ever wanted to play music with a video game controller?

Want to play riffs like moves in Street Fighter? Then come take a ride on the Silver Machine...

The Silver Machine Bundle is two Max For Live patches: The MIDI device and the Sound Engine. You can get both together here.

The MIDI device turns your Playstation 3 controller into a MIDI controller that can play any synth in Ableton Live.

• The 8 buttons become the notes in your chosen scale.
• Up/Down on the D-pad change octaves.
• Left/Right on the D-pad controls velocity. For a quiet note, press and hold left, then press a button. For a loud note, press and hold right, then press a button. The harder you press right, the louder the note. The harder you press left, the quieter the note.
• The X and Y directions on each joystick can be mapped to any knob or slider on your synth.
• L3 turns on latch mode for your notes so you can focus on modulating timbre with your joysticks. R3 turns it back off.
• The select button is a panic button - just in case you quickly want to turn all notes off.

Using this MIDI device you can quickly set a scale and a key to jam in, such as D Major, or you can individually assign the buttons to whichever notes you like with the click of a button.

The Sound Engine is built for psychedelic rock. Inspired by the EMS Synthi with it's joystick control, as played by Pink Floyd and Hawkwind, but driven to be fun and simple for anyone to use. Simply set your envelope and gain controls, use the left XY control for filter and LFO expression and the right XY control to morph into different timbres.

When the Silver Machine MIDI device is connected, your joysticks will automatically navigate the two XY controls. But you can also map each one to any MIDI controller if and just feed it notes like you would any synth in Ableton if you don't have a PS3 controller.

What exactly do the two XY controls do? Come on... do you really have to ruin the mystery? Try it and see for yourself ;)

Requirements:

• Ableton Suite or Max MSP add-on for Live standard
• MIDI device only currently supported on mac. Contact The Radical D if you'd like a free copy to try on PC.