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Old 9th November 2009   #4
synthoid
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It's worth going through each sound you want to trigger and to consider carefully what it needs at a minimum. Often you can arrange that every sound takes care of its own internal timing, free from MIDI clock and other external time references. For example, if there's a delay on a sound, you could set the delay interval in milliseconds, to make it independent of tempo. Then the only problem is to trigger the whole sound at the right moment on stage, i.e., to "play" it. Anyone on stage can do that: drummer, kbd player, etc. Someone just has to send the thing a MIDI note(s) at the right moment.

This won't work if the drummer gets too far off from the original tempo of course. But assuming that the drummer sets and holds the original tempo reasonably well, this is often more than good enough, and it makes it a lot easier to coordinate gear.

The sounds that are really tough to deal with are the ones that for some reason want to understand the actual bar/beat structure via MIDI clock. If you try to drive the MIDI clock from a drummer, you will end up with lots of glitches and bad stuff I think. In that case it's better to use a click so that the MIDI clock has a steady reference.

-synthoid
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