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Some looping features setup for MTV



Hi!

We put an interesting rig out on the road last week with a touring MTV
show,  "Campus Invasion", which is intended to promo the upcoming MTV
television season. There were several interactive electronic music exhibits
planned and we were called in at the last minute to supply some electronic
guitars. Twelve days before the show was to ship out.

Their initial request was for a MIDI guitar to input to some Hotz-style
re-mapping software that removes all of the wrong notes from a controller
when playing along with a pre-programmed song. An entertainment  device for
non-musicians. This worked ok but the note-choices in their re-mapping
software were fairly random, and it was difficult to see the rhyme or
reason as you played, even though the notes were within the proper
key-center.  They didn't know how to re-write the lookup table to fix this,
so the idea was dumped in about a week into it, without telling me of 
course.


Then the idea was to put out just an elecronic guitar forthousands of
visitng MTV guests to jam on. Thinking that anyone who has access to a big
metal guitar sound will be instantly shredding. So we put together a
Kurzweil K200RVP with a disk drive and extra RAM and installed some 10Meg
and 20Meg guitar samples that killed. Connect the Ztar, our new Z6-S After
the first demo of the system it was clear after passing around the
instrument that not everyone can do it. Funny thing. I thought Ed VanHalen
was shipped inside these things.

Also, the users for this were not to be allowed to touch any of the
controls either on any of the equipment, including ProgramChange. The
reason being that people would tend to disable or damage the setup through
mindless button-pushing. We covered all the buttons with Lexan cover 
plates.

So to bring back the instant gratification, and hide the controls,  we
installed a Kurzweil EventStation in the rack and set it up with four
footswitches.. The footswitches were programmed in the EventStation to:
#1- Step through varoius guitar samples
#2- Step through a bank of sampled grooves. Every time you hit the pedal
you get a new groove in the chain.
#3- MuteAll in case it goes crazy.
#4- Bank alternate swapped banks of sounds and samples. We kept this to a
minimum because a) we didn't have much time to load and setup the samples
and b) we could easily overkill the app with complexity that neither the
users nor the road crew could understand. We also put in some chains of
fixed CC settings to alter just one guitar sound which was cool. Another
way to skin cats.

We could've put in hundreds of samples and loops with CC settings
continuous from a CC pedal rather than a footswitch, but no time.

In all it was an entertaining rig and I was happy that it went together
for the very first time without any hangups in just a couple of days. The
toughest part  was setting up the K2000 with samples and programs and
keymaps assigned to the correct places. However, now that it's done, I can
see that the setups in the K2000 and the EventStation were pretty generic
and one could completely change the character of this new instrument
combination just by changing the sample sets and the maybe the CC
assignments. Interesting. We could also have setup the Ztar to fire loops,
arpeggios and such directly from the Fingerboard or Triggers but there was
no time to sort out a sensible arrangement for this application. Next time.
There was no time to set up realtime sampling/playback from the Kurzweil so
we never included that in the spec. Likewise, if we had KDFX installed in
the Kurzweil we could've included even fatter, more expressive samples with
realtime control over distortion, for instance. Maybe next time. There was
also no time to set up MIDI-sequence recording/playback from the Ztar which
has some interesting possibilities. Too omplex for this venue I suppose.
There was one setup we tried and didn't keep that had SteveStevens
guitar-hit samples assigned to the fingerboard... little licks and guitar
noises, dive bombs and stuff. Not notes in the ordinary sense. People were
astonished to play this! Not really music as it's just a big sound effects
map but when they played a chord or a line, well... it's funny. 

cheers,
harveyS
http://www.starrlabs.com