Despite owning and running the hotbed of DJ pr0n that is , I’m still somewhat of a Luddite when it comes to playing music. I likes me vinyl I do and no mistake guvner, and largely leave the computer only style of spinning choons to the hotter younger things. But when I saw one of these new fangled softwares actually using a turntable, my interest was piqued enough to wonder if I should really take my head out of my arse and learn Ableton.

Nathan Ramella is somewhat of an Ableton guru, walking among mortals but eating at the table of the Ableton Gods. What he has done (and forgive my simplistic description as it’s the only way I understand what’s going on) is written a plugin called Ammobox to allow all manner of timecoded vinyl to grab samples in Ableton and scratch with them.

You’ll see in the above video that Nathan is sequencing samples on the fly and cutting them up as he wishes. This all seems to be working within Ableton’s environment and sticks to a 4 beat grid, picking up the sample and scratching with it and returning back to the beginning of the 4 beat grid loop style. If you watch the video, you’ll understand what I mean.

This isn’t the only way to use vinyl inside Ableton – Imageline’s Deckdance can be used as a VST plugin within Ableton, although I’ve yet to check it out. But anything that can get the more human hands element of vinyl manipulation into Ableton is all good in my book.

Nathan’s site remix.net will no doubt be breaking under the groan of info hungry net nerd DJ traffic. Oh wait… it already has broken. In the meantime, check the creatdigitalmusic post or the thread on the Ableton forum.