[LAU] looking for a midi recording softsynth

[andy baxter]

On 10/12/10 10:02, andy baxter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was talking to a friend this morning about a project I thought we 
> could do together. He plays free improv piano/keyboard music - dense 
> patterns and textures improvised in live time. I was saying that in 
> principle it would be possible to record a piece of his music on a 
> keyboard as a midi stream, then feed it through a softsynth in a 
> studio and tweak the synth parameters as it's playing to produce the 
> final piece.
>
> He liked the idea, but I'm not sure if there's a linux softsynth that 
> would work like this. What it needs to do is:
>
> - produce sounds from a midi stream in real time, with the sound 
> altered by tweaking various parameters (knobs and buttons).
> - the tweaks should be recordable so that you can play them back and 
> re-tweak them until you get the result you want.
> - the feature I really want is to be able to set presets for the 
> parameters and then fade between presets in real time. E.g. if there 
> are two presets which both use a resonant low pass filter, I want to 
> be able to move a single slider that moves the filter value from one 
> to the other continuously to create a filter sweep. This is different 
> from a fade at the audio stream level.

Thanks for all the replies so far.

Has anyone seen a program which does anything like what I've described 
in the last item above? If not, I might have a go at writing my own in 
supercollider or python. The idea would be that you could play with all 
the parameters of a synth to get a sound you liked, tell the program to 
record those settings as midi CC values, do the same again to get a 
different sound, record those settings, and then be able to morph 
between the two with a crossfade slider. Then for live performance you 
would have a DJ like interface where you could load different patch 
settings into either end of the crossfade, start with one and morph to 
the other whilst playing, with the controllers all varying smoothly at 
the same time to take you from one sound to the other.

thanks,

andy