Last night I played keyboard in an open-air venue with a Dire Straits cover band. The concert was great, and star of the night was...Carla!
For the first time I was able to load and play pre-built patches, also complex, not a single failure, and great sound!
Here are some tricks I had, and some suggestions for improvement:
- With Calf Organ, I controlled the vibrato frequency with the sustain pedal, like a Leslie (since the sustain with organ is not so useful). To do that, I sent the CC #64 to a MIDI CC range limiter, which then sent the signal to the frequency control of the organ. This was great, almost like a real Leslie, with the only problem that since the frequency knob is logarithmic, I couldn't get exactly my desired frequencies for "slow" and "fast"...but yeah, close enough. "Walk of Life" came out great
- I could split the keyboard in many slices using the midi range filters. This way, and using a great deal of sustain, I could do lots of sounds, for example the synths in the intro of "Money For Nothing" (Dire Straits fans will know)!
- I had 100% control of everything that was going on, from phaser rates to EQ knobs. Live, with an expression pedal
- I set up a mididings crappy script to change the instruments during the song, which I had to launch separately. It would be nice to have Carla directly load mididings scripts, or come up anyway with some analogous internal MIDI routing and rescaling...for now it worked anyway.
- One thing I could use, is a fast way to load and unload configurations, maybe with keyboard shortcuts. Sometimes we had less than 10 seconds between one songs and the next, I had to click on "remove all plugins", and double click on the new file. I had no mouse on the stage, with the touchpad it was kind of slow, and moreover I couldn't save edits, because they would be saved on the *previously* opened file. But for now, again, it was fine.
- For the synths, I simply added the zyn presets folder to Carla's default folders. Some presets in "Collection", and in "the mysterious banks" are very, very good, I started from there, and then did minor edits on attack, release, filter, post-effects, etc., to get the sound I exactly wanted...in less than half an hour!
People were impressed!
I'm very happy overall, and *three* other musicians asked me to help them install KXStudio!
Donation incoming
)