On 3/27/07, Thomas D. Cox, Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 3/27/07, theREALmxyzptlk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > noodling around > > with mapping midi nonsense has nothing to do with performing music.
> Eh - neither does hooking up cables, tuning strings or any number of > things which are analagous with any instrument. most of which are far more intuitive to do. really, you can switch guitars numerous times in a show with the greatest of ease. try doing that with a complex midi setup and its a whole other story.
Tom, have you ever programmed a digital keyboard from the 80's or 90's? I wasted hours and hours of my life going through menus on tiny LCD screens trying to get my sounds tweaked just right. How was that intuitive??? It was the 80's and 90's that had those complex MIDI setups from hell! Now things are much more intuitive. Now, I can: A. Instantly map any knob on my controller to any synth/effect/Ableton/whatever parameter I want, with a choice of programs to use. It can even be done with 100% non-commercial, free software. B. With a very small amount of work, build my own synthesizer, if the synth I'm using is missing some functionality I want. Again this could even be done with free software, though it might not be quite as elegant a solution. The closest thing I ever had to this in the past was playing around on the Moog modular in college. In that case you had to be in the class, and you had to sign out little blocks of time in order to use it. For every place where technology makes things less intuitive, it's not too hard to find things that are far more intuitive because of technology. Playing live is far more intuitive and spontaneous for me now. It only takes a few minutes of playing around with a particular setup to feel comfortable and be able to do tricks and use the knobs to mess with things etc. Tweaking patterns on my old drum machines, fixing sequences just right on the MMT8, it all just used to take a ridiculous amount of time, wasted time just doing little annoying technical things. The result is that I write far more music than I ever did before, because the technology doesn't get in the way anymore, I can think of an idea and it won't take long for me to have made that idea a reality. ~David
