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Microphonic Soundbox by LeafAudio

Ableton Live Set

The Story

The story of our Microphonic Soundbox is a personal story, going back to the year 1997, when
LeafAudio‘s Manuel Richter started his musical project Xabec, which should last for about 15
years. After meeting people from Hamburg‘s experimental music scene and learning about
composers such as Asmus Tietchens and being inspired by Y-Ton-G and many others, plus
listening to Geräuschmusik and Drone, he got inspired to start own experiments and leave
traditional musical structures behind.

One of the first devices he was building himself was the Microphonic Soundbox, which he simply
called „the woodblock“. Manuel developed his own style of experimental composition, collaging
sounds and ambient structures. Over the years it happened, that „the woodblock“ became his
trademark instrument, being responsible for many of his trademark sounds. His musical output
included many albums, remixes and live gigs and was so unique, that he was asked to do some
sound design and production work, such as Anne Clark‘s „The Smallest Acts Of Kindness“
including composition of her very successful song Full Moon.

But back to the Microphonic Soundbox – twenty years after creating it, the original woodblock was
still in use, still an exiting tool to create unique atmospheres, meanwhile for Manuel‘s Ambient &
Drone project Silent Walls. In the early years it was connected to a mixing desk and was used with
some effects. But the usage changed very much after the mid 2000‘s when processing power of
computers made it possible to process audio in realtime. Specially Ableton Live made it now easy
to control realtime processing by Midi controllers, as Live has made controller mapping intuitive
and easy.

What had changed, was the integration of realtime audio events into modern software: The
Microphonic Soundbox, Midi controllers and Ableton became one instrument and the perfect tool
for intuitive live improvisaton of atmospheric, other-worldly and unique layers of sounds. It‘s a
brilliant sound design tool!

As LeafAudio is doing Synth DIY workshops since 2010 and we opened a distribution for DIY kits
in 2016 called Exploding Shed, finally the time had come to provide that instrument to you by
offering it as a DIY kit. You can order it via Exploding Shed and we also want to provide some
ideas, how to integrate the Microphonic Soundbox into an Ableton based computer system for
sound design and live improvisation.

On the following pages we give you a little tour about setting up your system for live-sampling and
improvising with the Microphonic Soundbox, using our basic Ableton Live-Set.

Please download and open the Live-Set. You will need at leat the standard version of Live 9,
including Looper, Reverb, EQ Eight and Filter Delay.

www.leaf-audio.com/en/downloads/microphonic-soundbox

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The Signal Routing

In our Live-Set, all audio from the Microphonic Soundbox is coming in via the channel called „MIC
SOUNDBOX Input“. Various effects on this channel can be applied by your Midi controller. Then
the audio is going to the Master Bus and that‘s where you hear it from.

But as we also have set Send C to 100% on that channel, all audio is also being sent to Return C.
You see all audio channels on the left and all Returns and the Master Bus on the right.

The next two channels are Looper 1 and Looper 2. They get their input signal from Return C.

Summed up: Your input signal comes in via your audio interface, passes channel 1 and is being
processed by effects there, then it travels via Return C into Looper 1 and Looper 2.

The Loopers can record your audio in realtime and the recordings can be processed further by
effects in this two channels. Their audio is being sent straight to the Master Bus.

Our routing is kept relatively simple, as we just want to give you some ideas here. But what
ingredients you add and how you control them, is up to you and that‘s what creates your personal
instrument then.

As the whole Microphonic Soundbox is ment for experimentation, also the Live-Set is ment to
change, try and find out new possibilities.

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Setting Up Your System

The first thing you have to do is to connect the Microphonic Soundbox to your audio interface and
select the audio interface in the preferences of Ableton. Please check what works best, your
interface might have different inputs, such as line inputs or instrument inputs. Also your Midi
controller should be installed and selected in Ableton‘s preferences. If you need help, please read
Ableton‘s manual.

Once that is done, you can select the corresponding input channel of your audio interface in the
first audio channel called „MIC SOUNDBOX Input“.

This is your global input channel, including some effects. Some of the effect parameters are
mapped to the Macros of the effect rack. You now have to map two buttons of your Midi controller
to that Macro controls (you guessed it: read the manual if needed) (Cmd+M). The Midi controller
buttons should be set in „toggle“ mode, what means if you push them once, the effect if turned on
and with the next push it is turned off again.

The next thing is to map a fader/knob to the channel volume, represented by the small triangle and
set it to a range of min. -inf dB and max. 0dB in the mapping dialogue.

The last thing you have to do on this channel is to map 2 faders/knobs of your controller to the A
and B sends on that channel. Return A and B contain different reverbs which you can apply to your
live-audio, coming from the Microphonic Soundbox. Also possible: The reverberated signals are
going straight to the Master Bus (your output), but are not going to be recorded by the Loopers. If
you want to do so, use Send C on Return A and B to achieve that. This could also be mapped to
faders/knobs of your controller.

Then you are ready to control the input channel of Microphonic Soundbox.

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The next step is to map all necessary functions of the two Looper cnannels to your Midi controller.

The Macros called Speed, Dry/Wet and Decay should be mapped to a slider/knob of your Midi
controller and for Freeze you want to use a button (set it to „toggle“). Sadly, some functions of the
Looper cannot be mapped inside racks to a Macro. So you have to map two buttons (this time
„momentary“ behavior and not „toggle“) of your Midi controller to the „Rec/Overdub“ and „clear“
functions.

Do that with a different set of sliders/knobs and buttons for each of the Looper channels and save
the Live-Set under your own name.

Very helpful additional idea: Clicking on the Track Title Bar of each channel makes all plugins
visible which are used on that channel. Try it out manually! It can be very useful when working with
input channels and Loopers. Luckily you can map buttons of your Midi controller (use „momentary
behavior“) to the Track Title Bars.

Now you are ready to jam with our Microphonic Soundbox. Explore and if you like change it,
remove stuff, add found materials!

Spread the word about it and share the results, we‘d be happy, to get tagged on Twitter or
Facebook.

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Order Microphonic Soundbox

www.exploding-shed.com

LeafAudio

www.leaf-audio.com
www.facebook.com/leafaudio
www.twitter.com/leaf_audio

Ableton Live

www.ableton.com

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