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Cut Glove is a live sampling and performance instrument built using Max. It was programmed around the Xbox 360 controller and contains mappings based on video game mechanisms and metaphors. Additionally, the patch has MIDI learn functionality built in, so every parameter can be mapped to any MIDI controller.

Click here to read a blog post going into detail about the background, development, and technical implementation of Cut Glove.

Cut Glove shares much of the core feature set of The Party Van but massively updated/improved and based around a completely different control and performance paradigm (a game controller). The Xbox 360 controller is extremely common and cheap and can be used with a computer using this driver (both wired and wireless). A big part of the interest for me writing a patch around a gamepad is my background in playing video games. Most video games have quite deep, complex, and rich mapping schemes that become internalized quickly. That approach is taken in the mapping scheme here. Subsequent updates will expand on these complex mapping metaphors, but the initial feature set and mappings are quite deep as they stand.

Here are a few videos showing what Cut Glove can do:

Cut Glove is based on a custom external, karma~, which handles all the complex recording/playback in the patch.

You can download the patch (for 32bit Mac/Win) along with all the required externals here (v01).

You can follow the github repo here : https://github.com/rconstanzo/cut-glove

7 Comments

  • […] of software based on a gaming controller which has gained some attention. It’s called the Cut Glove and it’s a live-sampling and processing patch that contains mappings based on video game […]

  • This is wonderful! Thank you so much for all the work and experimenting you do!

    I sold all my monome gear largely because I couldn’t run The Party Van reliably. This looks even better. Now I just need to get a controller (i’m not a game guy).

    best,

    sonny

    • Thanks!
      For what it’s worth, been working on The Party Van 2 for a while now.

      With Cut Glove you can just do MIDI mapping and use it without, although it is easy to use with a gamepad (and gamepads are cheap).

  • Hi,
    Is there any easy way to route this into Ableton? This is literally the first time I’ve used Max, so a step by step would be great.
    Thank you so much for making this! :D

    • Kyrre,

      The easiest way, by far, would be to use something like Rewire, Jack Audio, or Soundflower, to send audio to/from Ableton and Cut Glove. It takes a bit of initial setup, but once that’s done, you can treat Cut Glove like a ‘plugin’ from within Ableton. Short of that, refactoring bits of Cut Glove (and The Party Van) as M4L devices is on my radar, it’s just something I haven’t gotten around to yet.

      It wouldn’t, easily or immediately, be possible to open up Cut Glove in Ableton’s Max for Live without a lot of work.

  • Is cut glove 32-bit only?

    • For the time being, I think it is. A couple of the externals being used in it were 32-bit only. The rest of the code is 64bit though (including karma~). It’s been a while since I look at it, but I want to say the only externals I’m using in it are sigmund~ and AHarker externals, and there are 64bit versions of those available. If you get those and swap them out, it should work.

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ABOUT

Rodrigo Constanzo
-makes music and art
-lives in Porto/Manchester
-is a crazy person

Read my PhD Thesis!

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Composition, Performance,
and Making Things,
sitting in a tree :
Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me-Me

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