does this even exist

Over the last few days, I’ve realised there’s a studio toy I really want, but can’t quite find. If I can’t find it, maybe I can build it – or maybe that should be the other way ’round, eh? Regardless, maybe some of you guys can help.

One of the many cool things about midi is how you can have arbitrary controllers in variety of functionalities. You can, for example, buy banks of knobs and sliders. And all they do is send MIDI signals. This is great, because then you can assign them in whatever software you’re controlling to any function you want controlled. There are also banks of buttons, and so on. More commonly, you get mixed devices.

drool pad not included… or needed, really, but I would like this one or this one

I want that, but USB (or wireless-to-USB), and sending user-settable keyboard character combinations. I want a small remote pad that I can set up to have one button send a space, another button to send Shift-R, another button to send HOME, another to send END, and so on. Ideally, it should be able to send any button combination from a 101-key keyboard.

There are two reasons I want this.

One: If you’re surrounded by drums and mics (just for example) in my studio and you want to enable record and start the virtual transport, it’s difficult to do so in time to sync up with the pre-existing tracks you might be working against. Not that this was driving me crazy over the weekend or anything.

Two: Ardour is FULL of keyboard shortcuts. No, I mean full, like every goddamn key on the keyboard does some damn thing. If you’re reaching over something to get to some key or other (say, SHIFT-R, to enable master record), or in the wrong mode (which this mostly won’t fix), it is really easy to either hit the wrong key(s), or hit the right keys, but have them do different things, because not only are they loaded, they’re overloaded.

overconfidence not included

Basically I want a control panel that isn’t so overloaded, and I want it to go anywhere in the room.

I’ve thought about getting a minikeyboard, maybe a wireless minikeyboard, and hax0ring it. I may well do this, because I don’t want to build a USB interface and I don’t want to build a keyboard interface for that USB interface, and besides, I might want to add some more buttons later. But I worry about how easy (or difficult) it might be to send numeric keypad keys specifically, and how reliable soldering to surface pads will be, since I want to move this thing around a bit and it will get knocked about.

Now, there are some gamepads out there that might be good. The cheaper one I found doesn’t actually let you reprogramme what keys the pads send, and as annoying as I can find Ardour’s spaghetti of hotkeys, I don’t want to change them. I might want to use someone else’s workstation at some point. The ones which do let you reprogramme the pad’s keys are a bit spendier, and tend to be large and/or weird. But more importantly, they appear to require external software. This may just be for the purpose of changing key assignments, so I could run it once on a different machine and forget about it – but the data pages don’t make that entirely clear. If someone knows for sure, tell me?

Also I’d need to take a hacksaw to parts of it because of all the do-not-want.

Really, do I need to go all Arduino for this? I don’t want to. Anybody got ideas?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

oh it went up already

I mentioned in that last post being miced up – excuse me, apparently, miked^* up – and surrounded by drums, which was making it hard to use the keyboard on my studio’s digital audio workstation.

This is why. I’ve been talking about doing a bunch of engineering for Leannan Sidhe recently, but the whole “possibly doing a guest appearance on their album” thing has gone unsaid – well, until now.

I was the turkey the WHOLE TIME!

Sadly, it is not the return of Fake Drumkit. It’s two tracks of bodhran (tuned differently and effected quite differently), two kinds of bells (Chinese and African), and a ratchet noisemaker which sounds a little like kokiriko, but with more harshness. If anything, the result is a little bit kabuki; I was afraid they’d find it a little sparse and alien. But they liked the test mix I sent over last weekend so much that they said it might not even need cello! And everything they do has cello. So we’re on.

The song is called “Once More,” and it’ll be on the album Mine to Love. They have the money to complete recording and mixing, but are a little short on funds for mastering and replication, so have a campaign going for that. You want to hear it? Awesome. Help them pay me. XD

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*: Goddamn, English is stupid. Is there a K in microphone? No. Do you call it a mik? No. You call it a mic. And yet.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

manos: the soundtrack of fate

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

http://www.manosinhd.com/manos-the-soundtrack-of-fate/

ABSOLUTELY REAL. From the Manos HD restoration people. XD