On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Leigh Dyer
<lsd@wootangent.net> wrote:
On 11/02/11 06:00, Luke Peterson wrote:
At my last show I decided to experiment a bit and use a Rock Band 3
keytar via a MidAir wireless midi adapter. The RB3 controller is
midi-compliant but completely undocumented, and while I have figured out
how to do most useful things on it such as octaves, pitch bend, and
modulation, I cannot figure out how to use any channel except channel 1
(and splitting to channel 10 on the lower half of the keyboard by
pressing one of the buttons -- I forget which). So I ended up playing
the B3 with my keytar, but had to sit back down at my controller to play
anything else, which is a bummer.
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/10/hands-on-rock-band-3s-keytar-a-surprisingly-serious-80-midi-keyboard/
Unfortunately it looks like it's stuck on channel 1 with the exception of that drum split mode you mentioned.
How has the keytar been for you otherwise? I have one myself, but I haven't done anything serious with it yet.
RB3 keytar has been good. I've used it at one show and three practices thus far. It is really nice to have something small and portable that I can use without having to deal with a stand, etc. It's taken my rig from something that requires a large (at least) four-wheeled vehicle to get around to something I can toss into a backpack and transport on a bicycle. The most significant decrease in the amount of regular exercise I get since I went from an 88-key weighted board to my Axiom 61. I've been drooling over Roland's AX-n for a while now, but ultimately the Rock Band game controller is far more portable than any of the "pro" keytars I've run across. From specs it looks like the RB3 controller is 11" shorter than the Lucina AX-09 and has about half the heft.
The hardest thing to get used to is switch-handed accompaniment: clicking the down-octave button a couple times before playing a left-handed part with my right hand while our guitarist or horns are playing, then clicking up-octave twice to pick up a lead is a bit awkward.
This article you cite is interesting; I figured out all the same features through tooling around with the keyboard for 30 mins in kmidimon. I'm not sure I agree with the complaints about the pitch bend (I have other complaints about the touch strip). If you've played the game at all, you get quite accustomed to holding the button down while hitting the touch strip and playing at the same time (you get bonus points for doing this). If anything, I find that I will accidentally hit the pitch bend and not notice that I've de-tuned myself against the rest of my band, then upon hearing the de-tune through a monitor spook myself into thinking I forgot how to play a song. The upside of this is it may train my band to think it is more likely my instrument's fault than my own when I'm playing wrong notes :P
The article didn't note that the controller has active sensing -- quite important for a battery-powered device.
I find the simple powering-on-and-off of the device to be a bit of a pain. If I haven't manually powered down the controller by holding down the Xbox button for a couple seconds before I disconnect the midi cable or power-down my laptop, it will sit there and blink til infinity, looking for an Xbox connection. If I want the green flashing light to cease and I'm not in vicinity of my Xbox, I have to plug a hot midi cable back into the controller (this doesn't work if I just plug a disconnected midi cable in), hold the Xbox button, then shut everything else down afterwards.
I'm familiar with the importance of connection order already with my rig: I learned to plug my Fast Track Pro in to USB before any other USB midi device or else I have to change around my JACK config to point to a device other than hw:1. But now I have to remember to manually power down my keytar before unplugging and disassembling my rig, too.
Otherwise, everything else is great. The only change I'd make is to have the 25 keys go from F to F instead of C to C, but I suppose that's something I'd have to take up with the entire industry.
Luke