More Crazy Musical Cybernetics

[errantember]

So I have Ableton Live, a fairly insane musical package designed for live performance. My eventual goal is to be able to control an entire show, made up of anything from live, real-time performance to pre-recorded anything, and all combinations in between, while singing and doing firedancing, all by myself.

Preferably wirelessly.

Using MIDI, a networking standard for electronic instruments, it's possible to control each end every thing that Live can do. For instance, you can have it trigger a pre-recorded sound effect, start or stop any part of a song, jump to another place inside the same song, change the volume of track 3, or whatever. You can even record parts of your current performance live for looping, distorting, harmonizing, etc, like Kid Beyond does.

It's nuts.



I've been using my MIDI musical keyboard to control Live so far. However, it's big and bulky, and would would be awkward to have strapped to my ass while firedancing. However, I also have a Yamaha WX-5, which is basically an electronic saxophone. It's small, light, and, in addition to generating notes that can be translated into almost any instrument imaginable, it can *also* be used as a controller for Live. It has a 7 octave range, which means I can use the sane, normal octaves for actually playing music on it, and use the *really* *ridiculous* octaves to do other things, like launch songs, play sound effects, etc. I'm currently experimenting with how all this craziness fits together to produce a performance rig. I've managed to get the following working:

1) I can play the WX-5 like and instrument and hear it play.
2) I can record the MIDI data when I do this, then play it back, edit it, etc.
3) I can use the lower octaves to control Live. Right now it has a sample of Kurt from Information Society saying "Hot!"

Kurt is clearly at a Cajun eatery.

I'm running into a few problems mainly having to do with all the extra crap that the WX-5 and it's tone generator (that translates all that MIDI data into actual *sound*) are sending into Live. If you use the MIDI keyboard as a remote control, you just touch the control in Live you want to change remotely, hit the key on the keyboard, and you're done. But when I try to do the same with the WX-5, the copious digital diarrhea of pitch bends, velocity changes, expression info, etc, etc, etc, tends to blow out the original "This Note Is Turning On Now" message that's so easy to generate with the keyboard.

There's a couple different approaches to solving this problem, most of which involve reducing the amount of data coming through to Live. I still want all that craziness to get to the tone generator, because it needs it to make the WX-5 sound convincingly like a real saxophone. Or oboe. Or tuba. Or whatever. I'm *hoping* there's a way inside the tone generator itself to say "once you're done with all this extra data, please ditch it before it gets to the MIDI-OUT port. Thank you." If not, I may have to either simply the sound of the instrument, which would suck, or use some kind of software in between the WX-5 and Live that will strip it out for me, which will cost me processor power. A few weeks ago when a new computer was probably right around the corner, this wasn't such a bad prospect, but now that I'm unemployed, I have to deal with what I've got.

Comments

[errantember.livejournal.com]

Something like that is the goal. I will probably eventually make my own MIDI controller, but I'm going to buy the wireless rig. There's a local group called Tapestry that has used impact-based MIDI in their tap shoes. It would be interesting to find out what they used. There's also a local theater called the Vortex that seems to have an excellent wireless miking system they use for performances that are both acoustic and amplified simultaneously.