Brendan Nelson wrote:
What I reckon would sort me out is one of those tablet PCs with
the touch screens - particularly the ones that are made with
heavy rubber padding around them to make them robust and resilient.
That way you could just lay the "screen" part of the laptop flat
out in front of you, and control it by touching the screen. In
Ableton that would work really well, I reckon; just put your finger
on one of the faders, move it up & down, then grab the crossfader
and wiggle it about. Because it doesn't use right mouse buttons I
don't think there'd be any real problems with using it through a
touch-screen interface.
From the point of view of the audience, it wouldn't be a hell of
a lot different from watching someone work a turntable; one of the
big problems with laptop performances is that the screen is
positioned like a barrier between the artist and the crowd. Lay the
screen out flat in front of the artist and it might as well be a
1200 for all the audience care.
The drawback is that you couldn't do more than one thing at once -
if that got sorted, though, and you had the equivalent of four
mouse pointers running at once, that'd be a pretty good way of
controlling Ableton. Chuck away the mouse and all your MIDI
peripherals and just use the screen itself as the "virtual mixer"...
Brendan
i brought xingu hill and szkieve to halifax recently and both
of them used unique setups: xingu hill used a tablet
PC as you describe above: sat right in front of the
audience so that you could see him with the tablet
in his lap moving the sound files around and tweaking;
szkieve used 3 PDAs and that's it! andrew
--
Andrew Duke
scoring/sound design/source
http://andrew-duke.com
Cognition Audioworks label
[Andrew Duke, Foal, Clinker, Granny'Ark]
http://cognitionaudioworks.com
