Re: Mixer with MIDI scene recall

[mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 2:01 AM +0000 10/31/06, Greg Mills wrote:
>Hey mech, thanks for your input. I was kind of hoping there would be
>something a little more recent than 1987!

Yeah, I wish there were more things out there as well.  There are 
still a lot of really cool things to be done with MIDI, but with a 
few exceptions (Numerology, for example), it seems as if most of the 
development dollars were spent during the late-80's or early-90's 
when there was more of a "gee-whiz" factor to MIDI.  Heck, two of the 
hands-down best MIDI foot controllers -- the Digitech PMC-10 & Lake 
Butler Midi Mitigator -- both came and went by the middle of the 
90's.  That's not to mention all your cool little widgets like merge 
boxes, breath control, arpeggiators, data filers, etc.  MIDI scene 
control is something that was popular for a millisecond, then got 
passed by when people started flashing onto realtime control via 
computer.  What happens when you don't want to take your computer 
onstage, however?

To be fair, there are also a couple of other full-blown digital 
mixers that allow scene selection and control (Yamaha made a couple, 
IIRC), but I can't think of any others that are a 1U rackmount.

>Fidelity is an important factor
>for me, although some of my gear is not that recent I would prefer the 
>final
>output to be as clear as possible.

Oh, I understand completely.  I've currently got four of the SPM 
8:2's (we used to use them as submixers in the studio, before passing 
a feed along to the main board).  Yet I'm not really using any of 
them actively right now, simply because of that bandwidth issue. 
Most of the instruments I'm dealing with now as well require a fuller 
frequency response than you could get away with a decade ago.

I'm still hopeful that the problems are predominantly in the older 
op-amps.  I'd also like to see what it would take to convert them to 
balanced outputs as well.  I'll post if I can ever find anyone to do 
a modification to update those issues.  Given the current selling 
price, these are a fantastic bargain if you can get around the loss 
at the top end.  And their enhanced functionality would more than 
justify the cost of having them modified.

>The filtering sounds interesting though, love the analogue filter sound.

Oh yeah, the filtering is very cool.  You can have the LFO 
free-running sweeping the low-pass filter up and down, or else you 
can use the envelope follower to track the incoming volume on a track 
(sort of like an auto-wah).  Likewise, you can alternatively do the 
same with the panning.  You can auto-pan a track from side to side, 
or you can have the relative loudness of a source control where in 
the stereo field it's placed (beware: this can cause motion sickness 
;)

The effect settings, BTW, are individual from track to track, so you 
can auto-pan one track while envelope tracking the filter on another, 
for instance.  As well, you can likewise get some very interesting 
effects by fading between two MIDI scenes.  Change only a single 
parameter (like EQ, or effects) between two scenes, for example, and 
you can get a morph effect as the parameters change.

Overall, extremely cool feature-wise.  Just wish I could get over the 
fidelity hump.  :P

        --m.
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