[sdiy] One Octave Foot Pedal Project

[Paul Higgins]

On Saturday, July 10, 2004, at 08:15 PM, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:

> So we have an example of a non-MIDI instrument (and therefore a REAL
> instrument) that presents real latency that drives the musician to - 
> Oh my God -
> deal with the latency by LEARNING how to play it.  (CRAP! how 
> unperfect!)

Right.  Many moons ago (high school), I used to captain a percussion 
section in a marching band.  It's amazing the delays you have in those 
situations.  In something like ten feet delay starts to become an 
issue, IIRC.  In real-world marching situations, the delays can become 
appreciable and definitely past audibility threshold.  You just learn 
to deal with it and compensate for physics.  Hey, what a concept!  ; )

BTW, the percussionists in marching bands always get yelled at because 
we're about the only musicians playing instantaneous-attack 
instruments.  If the tuba is 100 ms late, no one notices.  If a snare 
drum is even 50 ms late, all hell breaks loose.

> I have not personally noticed MIDI latency myself with keyboards, but 
> then I don't
> try to play through an ocean of messages, however, I have noticed a 
> small
> latency with my GR-50 before I switched to modified Nashville tuning.  
> I did get
> used to it and it's now a great source of fun.

I play an old Roland GM-70 GR-MIDI converter, and the delays on the 
bass strings (especially the sixth) are appreciable.  Nashville tuning 
is certainly one good strategy if you're not using the electric guitar 
sound in parallel with the synth; however, I found that just like 
marching band, I dealt with it and compensated for physics.  Drums were 
my first instrument, so it's very natural for me to simply anticipate 
the beat when I'm playing the GM-70.  The latency is not the end of the 
world.  Especially with all the neat things you can do with synths 
using a guitar controller.

The other thing is that those Roland boxes really have to be tweaked 
for each individual.  I spent several nights messing with the trimpots 
on my controller before I got the thing working perfectly.

-PRH

Paul Higgins
email: higg0008 at tc.umn.edu