On 31-Jan-2005 21:49, Chris Wicklas wrote:
Thanks for the reply. Yes, the Roland is a sampler. I can assign midi notes to each pad. That's how I can control what instruments get played in GarageBand. I'm not sure if it can send MMC. Is the start/stop command something that can be sent as a note? IE... Kick drum is note 35 on channel 10, can the start/stop be note x? Perhaps I need to dig deeper into my understanding of MIDI, which at this point is very shallow.
Hmm, well, my own understanding of MIDI is also highly rudimentary! But I think that controlling what note is played is a slightly different thing than sending start/stop/etc. messages. The former is done through the likes of note-on and note-off messages, so that when you tap the bit of your sample trigger that is configured to say "play note 35 (kick drum) now", GarageBand knows to do just that. Then there is also "MIDI Machine Control" which uses MIDI "System Exclusive messages" to send recording deck commands like "play", "stop", "punch in", "punch out", etc. This is how DB talks to my recording deck at present; that is, the recording deck is slaved to DB: when I hook my iBook to my deck via MIDI cables, press record+play on my deck to set it to record, and click the "play" button on DB, then DB sends an MMC "play" command, I think, to my deck -- which then acts as if I had pressed the "play" button and starts recording at the same time DB sends audio out through the audio port on my iBook, which is hooked into my deck via regular audio cables. Whew! :) One might want to be able to configure the reverse possibility by which DB could be slaved to a deck (so that when you press play on the deck, DB starts playing), though that too would theoretically require a using a MIDI device that could do MMC. From your description, you have used your SPD-5 as a MIDI controller to play parts that GarageBand can record, which is a slightly different thing than sending MMC start/stop commands -- though I suppose DB could be given an option by which playing some user-specified MIDI note was interpreted as a "play" command? Being able to plug a simple footswitch into one's Mac and use it to control DB would be cool ... I'm not sure what kinds of devices are available for that sort of thing though. Anyone? DB -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/