Dear Rainer,
Bravo!
Your understanding of blind musicians problem is so
wonderful that for a moment I wondered if you were blind yourself. If you're
not, then I guess you must be playing with your eyes closed or maybe do you
have another blind musician friend. Anyway,
your description of context
nonsensitive commands is exactly right.
But I'm afraid it would only be one part of the
problem. I can imagine having a large series of switches to trigger a loop
machine, but for more complex tools like Ableton Live which I would dream to be
able to use on stage, I wonder if a solution could exist. We live in a strange
world where today's musical instruments designers spend more and more money and
energy trying to make their products look nice and, well, I don't know if I can
blame them because may be a totally haptic interface would be much too large to
be usable. My goal would be to have a minimum of pre-programmed stuff because I
am and have always been an improviser, and if I could find a way to create
musical environments on-the-fly, I think I would be the happiest man in the
world.
Apart from this, I'm playing with African musicians quite often, and
if I was going to use loops with them, I would have to find a way to match my
loops or sequences tempi to what they are playing, and certainly not trying to
make them slave to my loops. Enough slavery.
I don't know about this new
device thatAkai released to manipulate Live, but sadly I think I heard
that the track buttons had three status bar indicated by their collar. Bad news
for me.
I'm not sure about motorised faders because I think they might be
fragile even though I could be wrong, but I've always found knobs more pleasant
to manipulate. I'm currently using a GermanIBK10 controller which felt nice but
might be limited for newer machines.
I'm really willing to discuss some more with you
about possible solutions.
Thank you for the discussion that your joke
started.
All the best,
JPR
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 10:19
PM
Subject: hardware vs software - this time
from a blind man's view (was "Re: two little guitar loops")
Dear JPR,
yes, I know what you mean by "hardware".
Actually, my second point
(the "computer without hardware") was targeted at
that fact that, as
you continue to point out, the majority of hardware
effects (at least
those most people here are interested in) are in fact
embedded
computer systems, featuring some sort of software inside of
it.
Now regarding your quest for an easy-to-use solution:
I will
in fact stick a little bit with the computer-based approach,
simply because
it's easier to customize a man machine interface here.
The most
important thing for you seems to me (and I'm of course open
for any
corrections to this statement) for you to have a man machine
interface
which doesn't require visual feedback of any sort. This
means:
1.
any commands you issue must not be context-sensitive.
2. any
controllers you use must have good haptic feedback for you to
identify
which controller command you're about to issue.
3. any sort of
information feedback from the computer (other than
what you hear in your
music) must be haptic.
ad 1:
This affects both the structure of the
software solution and of the
interface you're using. I'll try to give one
example to see if that
makes sense to you:
in an earlier implementation
of my computer-based looping setup (using
Mobius), I would select tracks by
linking the "previous track" and
"next track" commands to a footswitch
each. When I changed my approach
insofar as to look at the screen less,
this did no longer work:
earlier, if I wanted to switch to, say, track 1, I
had a look at the
screen, and if track 3 was selected, I would simply press
"previous
track" twice. The changed approach:
I added a BCR2000 faderbox
which has a row of buttons with eight
buttons. Now I simply hit the
leftmost button in that row to go to
track 1. This is no longer
context-sensitive: pressing that button
will always bring me to track
1.
ad 2:
this of course kicks out beautiful solutions like the
lemur
jazzmutant, and may also make options like the Akai APC40 with
its
huge number of buttons somewhat cumbersome. Also, foot
controllers
might be a problem (are they?). Now my question: how about
something
with motorized faders? Or something like an Akai MPD24 (4x4
Pad
matrix, six faders above it, and two rows of four endless rotary
knobs
each beneath it). Would that work for you?
Another controller
which comes to mind (even though it looks very
Eighties cheap SciFi) is the
P5 dataglove: You have a total of eleven
control channels (x/y/z position
of your hand, x/y/z axis rotation of
your hand, bending of each finger).
And there's a software that maps
this data to MIDI messages. Might
something like this work for you?
ad 3:
again: would motorized
faders work?
Again, this is just meant as a collection of thoughts
tossed out - not
a solution which works for
you.
Best,
Rainer
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