So, on the recommendation of some respectable texts about MIDI orchestration, I picked up a Breath Controller - the Yamaha BC3. So far, after fooling around with it for about an hour, I can see that it will take a bit of practice to become “good” at it. Since the BC3 cannot determine pitch, you need to do an interesting little dance between the keyboard and your breathing through the device which is not always the easiest thing to do! However, I’ve found that it can be extremely expressive when it comes to subtle changes for patches that use a cross-fade between different velocities (such as the excellent Symphobia sustained strings, for example). For this, I assign the BC3 to CC#1 as opposed to the standard Breath Controller CC#2 and the results are impressive!
I’ll check back in again when I have experimented some more with hopefully some “best practice” tips!
Blog Post
I’m a definite believer in cleaning house in order to be more creative. For a composer, this means lots and lots of computer work. Perhaps its setting up backups, cleaning out files, installing a new PCIe card or hard drive, updating (all!) your software programs and sample libraries. Maybe calibrating your monitors. Whatever it is, eliminating the clutter is a great move towards improving focus during some downtime. Read more…
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
A few moments ago I added “johnseguin.com” as a forwarding site to seguinsound.com. Hopefully, this will help folks easily find this site whether they remember the “seguinsound” name or not!
Give it a try!
Blog Post
I’ve had some major cosmetic updates to my studio, so I thought I’d redo most of the pictures for my site. The one that I didn’t include, but is just fun anyways, is a newly installed track light as seen here in this blogpost. It produced a more focussed and intense light on the areas that need it while casting very nice shadows on things that don’t!
Blog Post, News
As many folks know, in the MIDI protocol, there is actually a particular control number for volume which is CC#11. However, in MIDI-speak this is called expression so as not to confuse anyone with the volume of a fader in a sequence. However, in order to add life to your arrangements, it is often very practical to embed this expression information within the recording in real-time and then use the volume faders of your sequence to “balance” things later on in mix-down.
For a lot of folks, this is a mind-numbing process of drawing various shapes in some sort of editor. For the luckier among us, our controller keyboard may have a port to plug in a continuous pedal of some kind. Or, our keyboard may have some moveable faders that are hard-coded to transmit certain MIDI signals. The question is: are any of these CC#11? And if not, how can you “re-purpose” one to do this?
Read more…
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks