Sounds Like Now
A blog by saxophonist Brian Sacawa
December 11, 2009 at 2:17 pm
· Filed under Ableton, Blog: Fall 09
Towards the end of last night’s Zodiacrobatic rehearsal, Erik and I sat down to discuss MIDI mapping for our—well, my—Zodiac Live set. I’d already mapped out my Pisces cadenza with the FCB1010, but Erik said he had a better way. As he explained his method to me, I admit that I was extremely confused, until it dawned on me that his method and my method were different solutions for the same problem.
My method maps all the things I need to do for a specific melody in a single bank. So for example, in the Pisces melody I need to launch clips, scenes, add effects, and use the expression pedals. My solution was to assign all these tasks to switches 1-10 in Bank 01. And when it came time for the next melody, I’d simply scroll to the next bank of switches.
Erik’s method is to create banks that are each assigned to do specific tasks. So Bank 01 might be clip launching/stopping and scene advancing, Bank 02 might be for adding a certain kind of audio effect, Bank 03 might be to arm and deploy the looper, and so on.
Once I got my head around it, Erik’s way seemed extremely logical and made perfect sense. His reasoning for setting up his FCB1010 in this manner is that he’s creating an instrument that can be used across multiple projects. In contrast, my mapping choices were very project-specific. My issues with mapping things as Erik suggested is that it could potentially create some situations in live performance that would require some unnecessarily fancy footwork. Say I’ve got to toggle between Banks 01 and 05 quickly to activate something-or-other while playing some intricate line on the saxophone and then go back down to bank 00?
Obviously, there’s more than one way to skin this cat. I’m interested in what other performers—especially instrumentalists—have found to be the best solution here. Thoughts?
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You’re absolutely right, both methods are useful in just the way you’ve described. I tend toward Eric’s model, because I improvise a lot and create pieces in realtime and perform lots of similar actions. On the other hand, when the fancy footwork comes up, it PISSES ME OFF! I have two banks (00 and 01) set up with note-ons and expression pedals which I can use with Ableton or 3rd party loopers, but which also are correctly mapped to an Oberheim Echoplex, whenever I decide I want to use it. Beginning on Bank 2, however, I use a simple convention. controller 70-79 with cc 7 and 13, Bank 3 = 80-89 with 8 and 14, and so on. This allows me to always map away with ease.
However, if I were working on a particular problem or piece, I’d definitely do it as you are doing it, Brian, no Dancing with the Stars experience required. When I’m performing something which needs to be ‘executed’, with plenty of rehearsal, I prefer things to be simple and straightforward. That said, I really don’t have many times when I can’t fuse the two approaches, which really means using Eric’s scheme in reality.
iFCB, by wabbitwanch, really makes all of this moving between pieces or methods very simple, as you can straightforwardly and simply download pre-existing FCB1010 setups into your machine at will. However, I rarely use it that way and leave my machine the way it is most of the time. If you’re a Max programmer, then Max4Live will make that all even easier. I’m sure I will eventually write one of those patches where I can quickly change the whole pedal functionality like a scene, instantly. One of the things I do miss in Eric’s and my approach is the ability to have the expression pedals do something different on every pedal depression. I tend to leave the exp. pedals doing one thing over the entire bank, so I’m always controlling volume or feedback while I’m using the other pedals to loop, reverse, overdub, etc.
So, once again, as I so often do, I’ve succeeded in coming down straight in the middle on this issue finding the positives and difficulties of both paths to cancel themselves out. I’ll be interested in knowing your eventual solution and the steps down the path, and look forward to your next post.
Now that I’ve written my way into the middle way, I have to say, Brian, the way you’re doing it seems the most efficient way to do it for this situation, keeping in mind that all these midi bindings aren’t permanent, but are set-contained, so you have a lifetime to use the other method as well. I realized after writing my comment that I veered off toward the ‘programming the FCB discussion, when you’re actually having the ‘how to organize my midi-bindings’ conversation, which is definitely a task-oriented discussion. Rather than build a tool-kit which works across application, perhaps for this series of pieces it is more efficient to focus on micro tasks at hand.
brian wrote @ December 11th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Thanks for the feedback, Todd. Yeah, I think because this project is very specific, I’m going to go with how I’ve been assigning things. It helps keep my brain from melting to just have to remember an easy sequence like, “okay, 1, then 2, then 3, and so on,” while playing at the same time than having to go up however many numbers of banks and then remember what switch does what. I imagine that as I begin to experiment more and more, I’ll develop a kind of vocabulary using the software that will make the other method more useful.
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