That's actually me playing the solo. On the original record, it was played by Jens Johansson (keyboard player of Stratovarius). And yes, he uses sustain pedal when doing monophonic leads like this.sebber wrote:Sorry, but I disagree. First for the solo: if you have a synth that has "lowest note priority" you could simply play it in the tapping style you describe by holding the lowest note in the described places. You can, trained pianist that he is, also simply play it with your fingers, that is totally doable. I wonder if he really uses the sustain pedal here at all, it sounds like mono legato mode with a little glide to me.
Everyone in the metal genre who plays fast synth leads like this are using sustain pedal - it's a fact. Anyone who doesn't, just sounds sloppy as f**k because... things get very disjointed when sustain pedal is not used! Rudess has Juillard schooling yet he still uses sustain pedal for his ultra fast monophonic leads. And his trills don't get eaten like they do in u-he synths... because on Korgs and Kurzweils (and Rolands, too, IIRC) it works as it's supposed to! 
Also, there's no glide in the sound, and the keyboard only has last note priority, not low note priority. Other things would be screwed up on a low key priority board with sustain pedal pressed...
Yes it's easier as it's physically less stressful and it makes you play such things faster than you could by individually pressing any keys. AND you can play things holding a sustain pedal that you cannot physically play out in a very legato way on a piano (stretching outside hand's range). It's why sustain pedal is used with last note priority in order to legato everything much more easily and to be able to do it FAST.sebber wrote:Playing it in the tapping style is _not_ any easier, because you can't just play staccato and hope it's fast enough but you have to lift your fingers exactly in time and that's actually more difficult than just concentrating to play the thing with your fingers as you would normally.
Disagreed there. If you're doing note retriggering to previously held keys when releasing the currently played key in monophonic mode (if there ARE still pressed keys, of course), then sustain pedal should NOT affect it. Regardless of which mono mode we're talking about (legato or regular mono where notes are resetting envelopes on each played). It is only logical, and plenty of software and hardware instruments support this logic. Howard understands it very well, so I'm hopeful that this is going to happen across all u-he synths eventually (although I'd love it to be done yesterday, but I know the pitfalls of development far too well).sebber wrote:I'm sure there are even more ways to go, however, there's no single logic way to go about it. The sustain pedal on a piano is too much a different technology to the voice allocation in a monophonic synth, whether legato mode or not.
The 4th-to-1st finger same key repetition in bar 13 would also be murdered. There are also short trills in bars 2, 4, 8 and 9.
