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Looper's Delight
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Hi! We put an interesting rig out on the road last week with a touring MTV show, "Campus Invasion", which is intended to promo the upcoming MTV television season. There were several interactive electronic music exhibits planned and we were called in at the last minute to supply some electronic guitars. Twelve days before the show was to ship out. Their initial request was for a MIDI guitar to input to some Hotz-style re-mapping software that removes all of the wrong notes from a controller when playing along with a pre-programmed song. An entertainment device for non-musicians. This worked ok but the note-choices in their re-mapping software were fairly random, and it was difficult to see the rhyme or reason as you played, even though the notes were within the proper key-center. They didn't know how to re-write the lookup table to fix this, so the idea was dumped in about a week into it, without telling me of course. Then the idea was to put out just an elecronic guitar forthousands of visitng MTV guests to jam on. Thinking that anyone who has access to a big metal guitar sound will be instantly shredding. So we put together a Kurzweil K200RVP with a disk drive and extra RAM and installed some 10Meg and 20Meg guitar samples that killed. Connect the Ztar, our new Z6-S After the first demo of the system it was clear after passing around the instrument that not everyone can do it. Funny thing. I thought Ed VanHalen was shipped inside these things. Also, the users for this were not to be allowed to touch any of the controls either on any of the equipment, including ProgramChange. The reason being that people would tend to disable or damage the setup through mindless button-pushing. We covered all the buttons with Lexan cover plates. So to bring back the instant gratification, and hide the controls, we installed a Kurzweil EventStation in the rack and set it up with four footswitches.. The footswitches were programmed in the EventStation to: #1- Step through varoius guitar samples #2- Step through a bank of sampled grooves. Every time you hit the pedal you get a new groove in the chain. #3- MuteAll in case it goes crazy. #4- Bank alternate swapped banks of sounds and samples. We kept this to a minimum because a) we didn't have much time to load and setup the samples and b) we could easily overkill the app with complexity that neither the users nor the road crew could understand. We also put in some chains of fixed CC settings to alter just one guitar sound which was cool. Another way to skin cats. We could've put in hundreds of samples and loops with CC settings continuous from a CC pedal rather than a footswitch, but no time. In all it was an entertaining rig and I was happy that it went together for the very first time without any hangups in just a couple of days. The toughest part was setting up the K2000 with samples and programs and keymaps assigned to the correct places. However, now that it's done, I can see that the setups in the K2000 and the EventStation were pretty generic and one could completely change the character of this new instrument combination just by changing the sample sets and the maybe the CC assignments. Interesting. We could also have setup the Ztar to fire loops, arpeggios and such directly from the Fingerboard or Triggers but there was no time to sort out a sensible arrangement for this application. Next time. There was no time to set up realtime sampling/playback from the Kurzweil so we never included that in the spec. Likewise, if we had KDFX installed in the Kurzweil we could've included even fatter, more expressive samples with realtime control over distortion, for instance. Maybe next time. There was also no time to set up MIDI-sequence recording/playback from the Ztar which has some interesting possibilities. Too omplex for this venue I suppose. There was one setup we tried and didn't keep that had SteveStevens guitar-hit samples assigned to the fingerboard... little licks and guitar noises, dive bombs and stuff. Not notes in the ordinary sense. People were astonished to play this! Not really music as it's just a big sound effects map but when they played a chord or a line, well... it's funny. cheers, harveyS http://www.starrlabs.com