The means of live performance

[The Pezman]

I know this isn't exactly a remixing question, but I thought this would be a good place to get some answers.

I just purchased a Roland Ax-7 Keytar. Not everyone's cup of tea, I know (though I don't see why) but that's all besides the point. It's a MIDI controller, so it has no sounds of its own. Descriptions on web sites all say to plug it into a MIDI generating box or a laptop. What they (and the Ax-7 manual, from 2002) fail to do is elaborate.

I don't have (room for) a MIDI Box and I don't want to purchase one, not when my laptop is infinitely more versatile and customizable in terms of the different sounds I can generate. But the question is: how do I do that? Should I just use Reason samples (playing them as if I were writing a Reason tune) and play that way? Will it respond to the patching buttons on the Ax-7? Or should I use something else?

By the way, I don't think one would necessarily need to be familiar with the Ax-7 specifically to answer this question. If you've ever interfaced a controller through your laptop for the purposes of live sound, you can probably help me.

[Mustin]

Your Laptop will be a fine "MIDI box." Just plug the Ax-7 into your laptop as a MIDI controller and use whatever sounds you want. If I were to do that, I would have a SONAR project open with the individual instruments already loaded and whenever I wanted to change instruments, I could just click the appropriate track.

Sounds good.

[The Pezman]

I don't want to have to click tracks. Ideally, my laptop will be nowhere in sight. The keytar has buttons that you can press to change your MIDI mapping on the fly so long as you've preprogrammed it (more details about the buttons available if you need them). I want the laptop to be my versatile sound box, but I want to be able to control everything right from my MIDI keyboard and have the button press be equivalent to clicking a track (again, provided I preprogrammed it).

Another question that comes to mind is the sound quality you get by going from a eighth inch connection (the only sound output a laptop ever has) to something a bit more robust (ie quarter inch). Does it sound okay? Can I just run an eighth inch to quarter inch converter from my headphone jack to an amp and be good?

[Mustin]

Did it not come with software for that sort of thing?

You might have to write some code for the program that you use to allow you to cycle through your sounds.

Personally, I don't see clicking the tracks as such a big deal. But you should read through the manual, check out the software, and get online to Ax-7 users to find if there's someone with the same rig as you and find out how they control it. Someone's doing what you want to do before and you'll figure it out.

Don't worry about the sound - that's find. Ideally, you'll want to get a cable that goes from 1/8th on the laptop and Y's out to two 1/4" plugs that'll go into DI boxes.

[sgx]

I think you can set different Reason instruments to listen to different midi channels. That way, you can just change the channel on your keytar and it will change the instrument.

[Mustin]

Oh yeah, that's the same thing as clicking in the program. I didn't think that the keytar would actually have a MIDI channel switch, but that makes the most sense.

[The Pezman]

Ideally, you'll want to get a cable that goes from 1/8th on the laptop and Y's out to two 1/4" plugs that'll go into DI boxes.

What are these DI boxes you speak of?

I will be looking at forums for certain. And I'll come back here if I find something in the manual that looks useful. I still need to get all the connectors together so I can interface the two.

[Kanthos]

A DI box is a small unit that converts a 1/4" input into a mic input. Your laptop probably has no more than a 1/8" stereo output (i.e. the headphone or speaker output), which you'll want to connect to the mixer if you're playing live. Converting 1/8" to 1/4" is easy (you can get a tiny adapter that screws onto the 1/8" head; shouldn't cost more than $10), but you need to also convert the 1/4" input into a mic input so you can connect it to the mixer and use the main signal flow for the mixer (as opposed to doing something like running the 1/4" into the tape or CD player input on your mixer).

[suzumebachi]

You intend to be doing this live, I'm assuming? If that's the case, you're going to need more than your basic onboard laptop sound card. The onboard cards generally do not support ASIO, and as a result have some nasty latency that will quickly put the kaibosh on your gigging. For a laptop, you'll need a PCMCIA audio card with ASIO drivers at the very minimum. An EMU 1616M may do the trick, but they are pretty pricey. An Echo Indigo IO might also work, however I've heard that they have some PCI latency issues, so that may not work so well either. There are some USB audio interfaces as well, however those often have even higher latency than onboard sound cards. You may be better off using a desktop computer in the long run, and picking up something like an EMU 0404.

[The Pezman]

Kanthos - The mixer that I'll be using (it's not mine) has a quarter inch input, so that's what I'd like to use. But even if I didn't have a hardware mixer available, I'd prefer to bypass it anyways and preset my eqs through the computer.

suzumebachi - As I do with all things I don't know, I wikipedia'd ASIO and discovered what it was. The article gave me a link to this:

http://www.asio4all.com/

Wikipedia says it "brings ASIO support to users of virtually all consumer-grade soundcards and integrated audio chipsets." Would this solve the latency issues you're referring to?

[The Pezman]

Sorry, I know it's not proper forum etiquette for me to do this, but the (possible) gig is coming up and I need assistance. I downloaded Asio4all and started futzing around with it... I have not been able to get it to work quite right. Anyone ever used this before?