One possibility for a cheap, flexible, and pain-free tone generator is an old Audigy2 (or even Soundblaster Live) card. Just as these have gone obsolete, they have become absolutely useful. We have huge amounts of RAM now, and the KX drivers have removed Creative's limitations. The problem is to get satisfying soundfonts to play in the cards.TiUser wrote:I am tempted to reply to your interesting answers more in detail
I was wondering if you had found unusual schemes, since you are always thinking of new things.
Indeed I am thinking about some "abuse" of the media players...But the players are just one piece of the cake...
Backings are just an inflexible static way for accompaniment and I do not like it very much for jamming and improvisation.
I am still after some replacement for arranger like auto accompaniment. But for one or another reason no software works satisfying. The least problem is to find accompaniment styles in the net, but... you usually don't find a software tone generator that reflects the sound they were programmed for. Especially no chance with the better sounding Yamaha XG styles or such with megavoice technology. On the arranger side the only program that works somehow like a keyboard is "livestyler"... but I don't trust this thing - it's unreliable. There are some other programs but it's a pain to use them... but anyway, the tone generator problem remains.
Now if you try thinking of alternatives there are additional problems. One problem is cord recognition. Think of the Ableton live way playing clips. These can almost triggered like sections on an arranger keyboard but you can not harmonize these in real time. Arrangers basically use patters around the Cmaj7 cord notes and transpose each note by a NTT - note transposition table - that dynamically changes transposition of each note in the pattern reflecting the cord you play left hand. That's a part of the style accompaniment technology. I haven't seen this in any modular form like midi VST or whatever.
Back to something more practical... I usually like at least to have some drums and bass to jam with. Bass needs NTT, luckily drums not. To get this from the Cantabiles media players in an arranger style way I could imagine one media player group for bass snippets and a second for drums snippets. The sections should switch both synced with the bar... so here we are basically with the media players...
I do have some MIDI keys designated to act as Start/Stop and Start/Pause toggles. Those make it easier to practice at the MIDI keyboard without turning to the computer.
That's what you even need some more buttons for to switch the media players the way I suggested above...
Not very original, I'm afraid. If my keyboard had some sliders and knobs, I could probably think of more things to do along those lines. But the Fatar SL880 was mostly a piano keyboard, with very few MIDI controls.
Well, I'm a kind of setup manic too, but... guess no surprise - isn't it?
Knobs on a keyboard can be nice and useful but I start to hate them because it makes it very difficult to stack them without a fancy stand - I am still after a more organ like setup where the keybeds are very close to each other... but there are very few boards - mostly entry level stuff without aftertouch - that come plain, without knobs... I also start thinking some of the many small midi controllers can add what one misses in control - like the Korg nano controllers - and you can put these always where you want them, for instance on top of a board stack...
Interesting that you mention the Fatar Studiologic series... I fancy with one of these too as I want to go a bit more serious with hammer action. Fatar has generally a very high reputation in terms of quality and playability. My dream is the Numa Nano, light in weight, small for an 88, stylish and without knobs and faders so I can easily put a lighter synth board on top of it.
The story ends here by now... maybe there are some interesting ideas in here... as never stop to change perspective when looking at things...
It's a job for a patient hobbyist to make soundfonts to suit, but the results are excellent. Sound quality is a decent second rate, entirely adequate for backing tracks. I don't especially suggest the use of Soundblaster as a sound card, but only as a soundfont player.
