RE: Ritardandi and accelerandi when live-looping.... any ideas?

["Goddard, Duncan" <goddard.duncan@mtvne.com>]

>>What's a "throttle pedal"?<<

like in a car. 

I was thinking, after writing the original mail, that for tempo
adjustments on the fly, you want something like a pitch-wheel that
springs back to a central position, & knocking it either way briefly
would adjust the tempo. a tiny bit of adjustment in a sort of dead-ish
area near the centre of the pedal's travel, with the adjustment getting
more extreme at the ends of the pedal's travel. if you've used a
pitch-wheel on a synth, you'll know what I mean.

my particular challenge is that there are three of us in my band, & it
will most likely always be three, + the occasional guest. 
as bass/drums/guitar with electronics, we use a lot of pre-fabricated
parts in looping midi sequencers (the sequentix p3, a doepfer maq)
aswell as parts in the repeater. the drummer doesn't like clicks or
flashing lights & in any case, we all think that for the music to be
able to "breathe", we don't want quartz-locked BPM. 

tap tempo is fine, but by the time you've started to hear the sequencers
& loops lagging the drums slightly, you also need to slip them aswell as
make the tempo correction. the solution is to accelerate briefly to a
higher-than-required tempo so that the midi clocked parts catch up to
the drummer, then relax back to the new higher tempo.

same goes for slowing things down. & you need to do this with a single,
intuitive control that works by being kicked while you're not looking at
it or concentrating on it especially hard.

I would therefore most likely design a centred foot pedal that looks
like a half-open wah/volume pedal & is sprung to settle in that
position. either side of this, it uses midi CC to raise or lower the
tempo around a relatively insensitive zone (like our synth pitch-wheel)
but which at both ends of it's travel would also have a PC switch to
make a permanent change to the tempo. obviously, the various values for
CC & PC would be determined empirically.....

ah, projects..... :-)

d.