Controllers
Oct 29, 2008 Gear
The night before last, I delivered my venerable and trusty Roland A-33 controller to a friend who wants to learn piano. He has a keyboard that has a passable-enough-for-his-purposes piano sound, but its keyboard is unweighted and not velocity sensitive. The A-33 has a semi-weighted, velocity-sensitive keyboard and I believe it even has after-touch. I also loaned him the X stand and some cables, although apparently I mistakenly gave him a MIDI extension cable instead of an actual MIDI cable.
Why mention any of this? Well, I’ve never had a very close relationship with the A-33. I’ve used other keyboards in the past. I started with samplers, beginning with a Korg DSS-1, then moving through an E-Mu Systems EMAX and sticking with an EMAX II for many years. When I switched over to a rackmount E-My Systems E4X sampler and Planet Earth world music module, I had a Roland Super-JX synth to control them, which was really reminiscent of a friend’s JX8P that I’d borrowed briefly in University.
The A-33, however, was my first pure controller keyboard. It has a reasonable feel and I do think it’s a decent unit. I didn’t hand-select it, but I got it for free from a friend and it’s a really nice piece of hardware for what it does. The problem is that when I had all those synths in the past, I was mostly composing on them. With the DSS-1 and the EMAX, I wasn’t even really using sequencers, and for the later units, I would do a lot of my compositional noodling at the keyboard and then just notate what I’d worked out on the computer. I think that part of this was that the sound engine was tied to the keyboard — I could tweak sounds and fiddle with their parameters right where I was.
Nowadays, I do most of my composing (what little I do these days) at the computer. I also do my sound design at the computer, and the synths are running on the computer. In theory I could change patches from the keyboard, but I never even really got around to setting that up. And while I have an Evolution UC-33, which I could theoretically have perched atop the keyboard to provide knobs and sliders to edit sound parameters, I haven’t ever really integrated the UC-33 into my workflow, and it has no displays for the parameters, so I would probably keep wanting to glance at the screen anyway.
All of this led to a situation where if I wanted to work with the keyboard, I would have to set up my sounds on the computer, then get up and walk over and sit down at the keyboard, play a little, try to finally remember the notes that I’d played and go back to the computer, and note it down. (I could also I suppose have recorded the MIDI, but I never found that that worked well for me — possibly because I’m not an awesome player.) Truth be told, the process was really disruptive, and over time I found myself more and more using on-screen keyboards or just fiddling with drawing patterns with the mouse and then fixing them after. I think by now I’ve played using the computer keyboard or mouse more than with the piano keys.
As a side issue, but not totally irrelevant, moving the A-33 away gives me a lot of extra space in my little den. There’s been talk of putting a chair there, maybe with a reading lamp and/or an ottoman.
I find myself thinking that this might be a positive development. One part of me thinks that I could get some sort of smarter, smaller controller that has a couple of octaves at most, a bunch of knobs and sliders, and maybe some nice displays. Another part of me thinks that I could stick with the UC-33 or move to something like the Kore 2 hardware for the sound editing and just start using the EWI, which I have really neglected thus far.
The real solution will probably evolve over time. I can’t help but feel somewhat liberated by this turn of events, though. I’m curious to see where the new path will take me.