RE: Bob's amazing Lex Enhancement

["Sellon, Bob" <bsellon@lexicon.com>]

Michael wrote:

>Bob, you mentioned that you were considering using a PC program to run   
the
>JM enhancement.  Will it be possible to run it without a PC, purely by
>MIDI?  I don't have a PC and wouldn't really want to gig with one.  Of
>course, this is jus one voice in the marketplace, so feel free to ignore
>it.  I was just wondering; since most of the best JM features are   
already
>only accessible to MIDI, there's no real change in design philosophy.   
 (Of
>course, if I could run it from a 386 I would probably end up buying   
one...)

Michael, I do bring a PC with me to some gigs (a laptop) but this really   
wasn't my only intention for the glass interface. Other uses I have been   
thinking about are:

1. Configuration of the system for live gigs. On of the things I have   
been getting frustrated about with all of these rack mount systems is the  
 
limited user interface. With the lousy interface on the JamMan, its hard   
to set up certain features that the system is otherwise capable of doing   
(noise gate, compression, etc...). One of the things I was considering   
was making the footswitches and "Mode" encoder (the right hand one)   
programmable so you could select what you want them to do. Another this   
is setting up mixes with the parallel loops (pan, level).

2. Another use for a glass interface is "On-line help". The basic idea is  
 
to have a soft version of the users manual that pulls up the appropriate   
page of the manual as you use the system. Or, an interactive manual that   
sends commands to the JamMan and perhaps contains audio samples that play  
 
back through a sound card to demonstrate the system. The possibilities   
are frightening.

Though some of the configuration stuff could be done with something other  
 
than a glass interface, I suspect that it would be extremely time   
consuming (not impossible, just a pain in the ass). I'll definitely keep   
your situation in mind, however.

By the way thanks for feedback on the glass interface folks. I sort of   
suspected that the Mac may have been the most common system in use. One   
of the options I am exploring is the use of Java to perhaps make the   
tool(s) platform independent. I'll keep you posted.

Bob Sellon
Lexicon/Stec