making beats

Out of context: Reply #1641

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  • mg332

    https://roli.com/products/blocks…

    Bought the ROLI Seaboard Bock this weekend. I had never heard of this until a coworker told me about it Friday and I was immediately intrigued.

    Two words: blown away. Being used to playing a standard MIDI controller that doesn't even have Aftertouch, there are obviously limits to the expressiveness of a regular controller.

    This thing is amazing in how much variable pressure, direction, etc. you can play with. What really sums it up in terms of what instantly amazed me was that it can be set to adjust all sorts of parameters per note - ex: cutoff - if you're playing multiple notes at once and you only slide your finger up on one of them, it only impacts the cutoff for that note. It was pretty mind blowing. I'm sure there are ways you can adjust cutoff per note if you want to control all of that in software and painstakingly adjust that stuff, but to do it all right there with your hands was really cool.

    I'm really looking forward to getting it set up to work better with strings in Logic. It apparently requires some tweaking of the MIDI controls and such, but some of the videos I've seen, you can control vibrato by moving your fingers up or down, or kind of vibrating them side to side.

    Anyone have one of these? I've not been this excited to sit down and just come up with ideas, especially for more of the ambient stuff I'm doing these days where I'll love the variability and expressiveness of it as you use it.

    mg33 2Permalink
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    • where you been? Facebook seems to bombard me with their adverts for the past 3+ years...shapesalad
    • This somehow missed me completely. I'd not seen anything from them until Friday.mg33
    • Friend has one, I like it a lot, very expressive! He recently got a Touche too which is just as epic. https://www.expressi…microkorg
    • It really reminds me why I like the Animoog app - because of that big customizable X/Y pad and the variations of sound with it.mg33
    • Nice.. played before but was super wary of the foam.. longevity these keyboards won’t have..autoflavour
    • yeah i'm quite tempted by the roli, tho i wonder how the surface stands up to wear...hans_glib
    • and the touchee is almost brilliant, if only it was more programmable and more joystick like.hans_glib
    • I played with one of these in our local music store, hungover, for about 2 hours. Great bit of kit. And the modules are great add ons tooIanbolton
    • Cool purchase tho.. not to throw shade..autoflavour
    • Love the look. Like a Death Star engineer was into musicfuturefood
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