First of all, what an incredible band!!! I just listened to your “Close to the Edge”, my all time favorite piece of music and you nail it beautifully. Congratulations.
By “on the fly”, I was not referring to any kind of improv situation, in fact such things are intended for use with very precision oriented music.
Suppose for example you are playing a (transposed) acoustic piano with your left hand (on two octaves, say) and an electric piano with your right hand. Further, the acoustic piano has a string layer as well.
However, when you hit a chorus, you might want those same strings to also be layered with your electric piano for a more orchestral sound in the chorus. There are several ways to do this….one is to have another MIDI in block for that range, connected to the same string synth and just unbypass it for the chorus (via a variation). But another way to do it is to just change the split range of the existing block when you switch to the appropriate variation.
Or you might want a synth solo to range over most of the keyboard until you play a chord low down at which point the synth range might be automatically restricted to a small area at the top.
The point is that the GP design gets you a lot of flexibility that might not be available in other systems (which of course is one of the reasons we decided to roll our own in the first place)
@dhj
Well, first and foremost thank you for your compliments! It’s always nice to be appreciated by other musicians, and your comments are most welcomed
As I alluded to in a few posts above, I am not by any means comparing the flexibility factor between the two systems…or overall performance level. Clearly GP has taken considerable strides over its competitors, and I am looking at my conversion with more enthusiasm each day! Of course, there are some features I will likely NEVER use. I am sure that most users out there don’t use EVERY feature. But, I am looking forward to taking advantage of some things that were either impossible to do with Forte, or were extremely cumbersome (like muting all CCs coming into a synth, yet remapping the hardware knobs afterwards through widgets…that will be awesome).
For the examples you describe above (in Forte), for the electric piano / string scenario (which I do currently do) I would simply disable the elec. piano expression pedal and enable it on the strings to bring them in when I needed them. Forte will allow up to 4 Key Ranges per route…so that is easy to get the octave I would need. Losing the expression pedal might be a concession for some, but not for our band…we premix everything so there is a constant from venue to venue, but that scenario is a whole other topic!
Your 2nd example (the synth solo one) is intriguing and would likely be advantageous to some…but I don’t see it for this music. And, no…no way in Hell Forte could do that!
I am enjoying myself thus far. I have a long (and I mean…a loooonnnnggg) way to go in rebuilding almost 4 hours of Yes music patches. But, baby steps. I look forward to the new opportunities.
