DAW and MIDI

[Leonardo Cavallo <LEO@DINONET.IT>]

Hi all

>
>Hey Leo...your set-up sounds cool.  I   In my current project, I am using
>drum loops samples from the internet, and my drum machine..and throwing a
>whole bunch of moog junk on top..with some other instruments, and various
>noise......and some goofy lyric sort of stuff too.  You are right about
>flexibility..the DAW kicks ass.  It's not even the same ballpark as
>real-time recording.  I noticed that you said that you do work with drum
>and bass loops.  Are these drum loops you create yourself or do you 
>sample?
> Are you familiar with some of the drum and bass, or breakbeat sites on 
>the
>internet?  
>  

I hope this is not off topic. After all my Daw setup is built around my
looping rig. And the music that comes out is strictly loop based.

I avoid to use sample from sites and CDs. I make my own sounds 90% of the
times. If I use a sample from a CD I tend to edit and modify the sound to
make it unrecognizable.

On the Net there are a lot of programs that can help you to work. And a lot
of these softwares are freeware. The first that come to mind is, strictly
for PC, Hammerhead 1.0 (I know the author signed for Steinberg for further
development and next versions of HH). Try it for creating your drum loops.
It's simply brillant.

For breakbeat and d&b I use my AWE 64 Gold as a sampler. I load my waves
(mostly drum kit sounds) in the internal memory and I use those like MIDI
datas on a sequencer. 

My purpose is to create a dense rhytmhic background for my Jamman loops. I
sample the best work from my Jamdude on the PC, edit it and put the loops
tracks along my rhythm tracks. The results are quite interesting. This
approach works well with vocals on, too. You have to be careful in building
your loops, key speaking, cause too spacey sequences can be really 
difficult
to sing on. Try to stay a little simpler and have some pitch dominate over
the other.

Back to MIDI jamman, yesterday I realized one simple but incredible thing
(sorry if I'm late....): you can let all the operating functions, normally
performed on a MIDI pedalboard, to a software sequencer. Actually (sorry
again, I'm really slow.... ;>) you can record via MIDI the program changes
you need to loop along a song, connecting your pedalboard to the computer.
You hit record on the seq and program all the functions you need (start
loop, stop loop, fade 1, replace, etc.) in the right sequence on the
pedalboard. Then connect the midi out of the computer to the jamman, and 
the
PC (or mac) will say to the looper what to do while you are free to play
without all that dancing on the pedals. 
The only drawback is that the jamman will follow the MIDI tempo of the seq,
but on the Sellon pages, Bob say that you can avoid MIDI tempo 
transmitting,
letting only the program change datas. This could be revolutionary. Imagine
that you could only tap the tempo of a song and let all the other pedals
stuff to a little laptop. Anyone tryied this kind of approach?


ciao
leo