Bravo!

[Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

Dear JPR,

thanks for your reply (on- and offlist). And no, I'm not blind myself
nor have I worked with or for people who are impaired in their
eyesight, but some other things I've been working on (and that
includes the user interface for my own music stuff) feature
applications where you cannot or don't want to look at some status
display of sorts.
For example, I've been working on some projects in the automotive
field, and it's mostly obvious that e.g. a brake pedal which works as
an accelerator in case you're programming your navigation system would
be unacceptable, even though car drivers are usually not blind and
could very well look at the screen ;).

> 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 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.

One way really is to radically trim down your user interface. I have
been thinking about this just recently, bringing down my control set
for playing live to some two to three buttons and perhaps an
x/y-controller (e.g. a bluetooth-enabled trackball). This would be a
big advance for me - although my current control set has already been
trimmed down from the last one (of my loop4life programme which I
played e.g. at y2k6loopfest), there are still way over 1000 (!)
assignments to rotary encoders, buttons, footswitches and expression
pedals - way too much.

So why would I want to do this? One reason is that I don't want to
burden myself by having to learn user interfaces. The second thing
(and this is something not obvious to you) is that a musician staring
at a computer screen looks utterly stupid.

> 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 haven't used those very much myself, but it seems they are
relatively sturdy, unless you do "stupid things" with them (generally,
things which would also break a non-motorized fader).

The motorized fader idea would have two big advantages for you over
the knobs. a) you would be able to just feel how your system is set up
at any given moment by simply moving your fingers over the faders. b)
if you plan to use some computer-controlled parameter changes (e.g. a
random level change), then you'd be able to feeld that as well.
Motorized faders have the downside that they do make some noise, so if
you're doing some very soft passages in your performances, this might
not be for you.

> 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,

Now that is a simple one. A lot of loopers offer some kind of tapping
feature which you either can use to retrigger your loops or (with some
more advanced devices) to timestretch them to fit into a new tempo.
When playing with my improvised group, I had good success using a
Line6 DL4 and just retriggering it when the loop came around again.
This, of course, will not work (or rather will work in a polyrhytmic
fashion) if your musicians tend to change tempo a lot.

I'd like to ask back: what are your requirements regarding the
hardware/software solution you want to use? (e.g. looping or other
functionalities etc.) And secondly, how do you want to interact with
your gear, and what does work for you? E.g. would a user interface
like that of a Line6 DL4 generally work (based on the fact that the
few things that are actually displayed by LEDs on this can be either
heard from the output or remembered)?

Best,

           Rainer