i need a new live setup. laptop is dieing. dont feel like buying a new one. so can someone please tell me if this is feasible...
first off, my laptop served two purposes (live) : 1) to actually play my songs, 2) to power my midi keyboard with 8 bit sounds so i can play along. rather than buy a new laptop just to power the midi keyboard, can i have midiness open and have different instruments for each song for live playing? for example, say for song A i want a 50% square song with a quick decay. halfway thru the song i need to change to a 25% with sustain.... can midiness do that? i don't actually need midiness to play my songs (for now) i would have a second nes for that... unless, can midines run my song and let me play along simultaneously? Thanks!
It depends on your midi controller. But if you have one with knobs that you can assign CCs then yes.
Hi. I use the MidiNES a lot. This is SO much easier with a laptop, but you could do it without one. The problem is, I don't know a lot of cheap controllers that are going to have the ability to save the type of CC info and recall it, so you'd have to program this on the fly. But it can be done (kind of). For instance, I have this cheap Behringer UMA25S controller. It has 8 knobs on the top. You can pre-assign them to control whatever CC you want, but you'd probably have to change them on the fly. The good thing about MidiNES is that the duty cycles are pre-assigned to your mod wheel, so is is really easy to just move to the correct duty cycle (of course if you bump it you'll have to move it back). So for your example, if you assigned ASDR to knob 1, 2, 3, and 4 on your MIDI controller, you could just turn the sustain to your liking and turn the mod wheel to whatever duty cycle you prefer.
And of course you can play along with the MidiNES simultaneously, but you will need to change the global output of your controller to the appropriate channel (1-pulse, 2-pulse, 3-tri, 4-noise, 5-wav) and you will obviously have to reserve one of these channels for your live playing if you're using only one MidiNES. Of course you have two of these, so I assume you'd use one for live playing and just run MIDI on the other one.
If you want to playback MIDI and do all of this from one controller using one MidiNES, you are going to have to have a workstation of some sort so you can save the MIDI tracks / CC data. Something like a Triton. You could import your MIDI files to any workstation and direct them to use your MIDI out, and send it to the MidiNES, and that is a complex but workable non-laptop solution. Or you could run your MIDI tracks from a standalone unit (like an Akai MPC500 from what I understand) and plug your controller IN to the Akai so you can still send MIDI data OUT of the Akai to your MidiNES from your controller.
Or get a little Asus Eee netbook. It is powerful enough to run MIDI on a basic DAW and allow you to have all of these presets and MIDI files stored and ready to fire.
Last edited by RushCoil (May 22, 2010 3:37 pm)
oh i guess this would help - i use an m-audio oxygen (pic is a slightly newer model than mine, but same dif)
http://www.m-audio.com/images/global/me … 49-top.jpg
it has all sortsa knobs and stuff i usually never use haha. would this work, nordloef? not sure how the knobs even work to be honest lol, but theyre there. it also has a channel selector that i would think could be used to go back and forth between say square 1 and 2, which i could program beforehand to sound to my liking. that combined with the fact that i can duty cycle with the mod wheel would be sufficient. . i don't ever need (so far) more than two instrument sounds per song.
@rushcoil, i am trying to avoid having to buy anything extra, like a trition or akai. esp cuz tritons are expensive. getting a cheap netbook was my fallback like you said. but id still rather not spend any extra money than i need to. plus using soley NES's - significantly cooler haha.
Last edited by HPizzle (May 22, 2010 4:41 pm)