Triggering...

sheridanrock · Post by **sheridanrock** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 8:45 am

So I'm working on a new music project that I have tons on ideas for...I want to pull these off live, but I have very little midi, or triggering exp. What I'd like to do is set up a unit to launch longer sequenced keyboard parts or distorted drum intros ect... I know bands like Elliott, Radiohead, ect. use this live...any ideas what I can use to cheaply pull this off...?

Captain Steve
Sheridan
Stranger InThe Alps

lsn110 · Post by **lsn110** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 9:50 am

I use Ableton Live for this and a midi footswitch. There may be a freeware solution out there, but Live's been super flexible for me. I basically load in samples, set how I want it to trigger and then assign that to a specific patch on my footswitch. All that takes is putting the program in midi map mode and then hitting the switch (or key on a keyboard) I want to use. You can also trigger using the computer keyboard.

The price thing might be a problem...it's around $500.

sheridanrock · Post by **sheridanrock** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 10:08 am

Yeah it's a bit pricey, but then again if it works it works...My other Guitar player in a bit more of a computer wiz I'll ask him about that program...Thanks man!

lsn110 · Post by **lsn110** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 11:07 am

Do a search, there might be some free/shareware that someone here's using...

or if'n anyone here has an on-the-cheap solution, I'd love to hear it myself.

apropos of nothing · Post by **apropos of nothing** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 3:45 pm

There're two parts to the problem.

1) something that turns a drum-hit into a MIDI note-on message. There are many drum brains that will do adequately for this purpose. Once you have a drum-brain, its just a matter of hooking piezo-triggers from the drum to the drum-brain. I have a Roland TD-7 that I got for around $100. There are many more out there.. Yamaha, Alesis (D4, D5), etc.

2) something to play the loops you want to trigger. This could be hardware (i.e. hardware sampler) or software (soft-sampler: Ableton, etc). If you go software, you'll also need a sound-card with low-latency drivers.

justinf · Post by **justinf** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 1:05 pm

I use an older Roland Octapad 2 and a newish Roland SP-606 for this very purpose. For maximum creativity I would go with a song-based sampler/sequencer so you can layout automation of the samples as well as for individual trigger instances. In other words, you can trigger an entire song made up of samples or the individual samples. Ableton, Reason, Fruity Loops, Acid, etc accomplish this in software and the Roland and Akai MPCs do well as hardware. None of this is very cheap--my rig was about $500 as well. good luck, j

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