Live Pattern/Riff Playing...HELP. Please.

[Gromit137]

Hello... sorry I had to intrude within your email services but I'm at the end of my rope trying to find a solution. O.K. I co-direct a rock music summer school (www.bachtorock.com). The kids want to do 80s tunes... Flock of Seagulls, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper), The Promise (When in Rome), etc. Terms that I've heard...arpeggiator, phrase sequencer, step sequencer, sampler. Is there something... an external unit that will do this 'live'... you create a little music riff... you store it... you trigger it at different pitch levels using a midi keyboard.... either by single note (for single note patterns) or chords (for chord patterns)? You know, those 'throughout- the-whole-song' riffs that would be difficult/impossible for a musician to play consistently....and the drummer has to follow a click track or the pattern with headphones. Also, is it possible to 'flex' the tempo (live) depending on when the keyboardist strikes the keys at the start of each measure? I work with a Korg X-3 synth but that sequences songs/sections and can't trigger riffs. Does the Alesis Micron do this? Is there a relatively inexpensive box that does this?
Hope all this makes sense. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Mike

[mosc]

Mike...

I don't do the kind of music you are talking about, so I'm not going to send you off in the wrong direction with a wild guess. I know a lot of people use loopers of one sort or another. When I was a young musician in a rock band called The Main Street Bridge of Cow Ford, the guys in the band had to play all these kinds of parts in real time. My guess is the easiest thing to do would be to make a backing track of the song without the parts you want to play live.

There is a lot of MIDI gear and groove boxes that can follow a flex tempo from a tap input. It should be straightforward to use a MIDI keyboard for the tap input. It might be difficult if you want to get a tempo following a regular polyphonic keyboard part though.

[deknow]

mike, feel free to email me privately if you would like professional help in this area...there are lots of options depending on exactly what you are trying to do. seems to me, if this is an important part of your curriculum, and if your students are paying $500/week for the program, then they deserve a working solution.

deknow@deknow.com

[paul e.]

i think all that could be covered using the 'matrix' sequencer in Reason

a Reason user could confirm this