Re: [LAU] Synths for live use

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:10 PM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@email-addr-hiddenwrote:

> Fluid Synth is VERY difficult to work with in a live situation, even as
> QSynth. I tried it many times and I don't advice it.
>

For years, I regularly used Fluidsynth+qsynth in parallel with Bristol,
live at shows running off a netbook with an Atom chipset. Dell Latitude
2100.

(Somewhat outdated, but conceptually accurate) details here:
http://lukepeterson.com/2010/02/07/arriving-midi-keyboard-live-rig/

The trick was to set Bristol up as my hammond emulator on midi channels 1
and 2, then various patches including a Rhodes, a D6, a piano, a few other
things up on channels 3+ ... I set up Bristol to listen to the knobs and
sliders on my keyboard (M-Audio Axiom 61), and then could change patches by
flipping the global channel for that keyboard up and down. It took me half
a dozen shows to work out all the bugs in performance -- for instance, I'd
run into trouble every now and then if I'd change channels while holding a
key.

The most overloaded this rig ever got was a show where I had my X-Box
keytar running through a M-Audio MidAir wireless midi unit, fixed to
channel 1 on a high-distortion D6 patch, my Axiom 61 as a multichannel
workhorse playing any patch I wanted with the knobs and sliders set to the
hammond, and my old Yamaha P80 which was a pain in the ass to change the
channel on set to channel 4 for my piano patch. So 3 controllers in total.

Our encore was Baba O'Riley, for which I created a QArp arpeggio on the D6
that mimicked Pete Townshend's Lowrey autoarpeggio intro. After our set, I
ran a shell script to kick off QArp to control channel 1, and then started
the song from the crowd in front of the stage on my wireless keytar. It
worked great until I made my way back to stage and tried to hold the
arpeggio on the keytar while also then playing the first 3 piano chords on
the P80. The five-fingered piano chord along with the arpeggiating D6
overloaded the memory on my little netbook and sent a ton of nasty
artifacts through the venue's PA, and then I had to kill a bunch of
processes and re-load the rig. But it was pretty f--ing cool right to that
point. The sound tech and the rest of the band covered as best they could
and we did a fairly exciting trainwreck of an encore, which we medleyed
into something else. God bless beer and 2am crowds!

Anyway, I guess my point is, if you are just looking to play a fixed
fewer-than-16 patches and don't need to change any of their settings
mid-show, QSynth should be a fine solution. Pre-load each onto its own
channel and just change the channel on your controller to switch from patch
to patch.

-----
Luke Peterson

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Received on Mon Nov 19 00:15:02 2012