The recent “Driver for Ableton Push 1 - First Steps” thread made me aware of the amazing Mididings, which I never found although I searched for such an environment. IMHO this has the potential to be a game changer for people like me, who would love to be able to use Zynthian to assist live performances along with the simplest possible gig gear.
Now that I’m rehearsing and performing with a band now and then, I dream I’d be able to prepare beforehand a setlist, script ZS3 sequences within each song, dynamically activate simple midi effects like chords and octave doublers for certain parts of the song, or automate the generation of some Midi notes and cc data, and even combining chains/midi channels simultaneously, from Zynthian itself and for other external midi modules/synths. Livedings and send_midi in the mididings docs seem to go in that direction too. Ditto for GitHub - stefets/stagedings: An UI and API for mididings community version which could be my choice for the view during live performances, instead of the mixer which I usually use.
From day one of my Zynthian adventure I have been keen on the puredata support, exactly to allow this “assistance tool” approach, but it definitely is not the solution for the scenario I mention above…
So, I come to you, asking for your kind advice and wisdom. Does it make sense?
I wish I could help, if I would be comfortable developing in Linux environment, but I’m afraid I am rusty and not savvy enough… Maybe I’ll be able to invest some time to “repurpose” what I used to know from the Cakewalk/Sonar/PC/C++/Pascal worlds, and get involved with close guidance, but for now I’m pretty useless…
In another thread @riban warns about Python inadequacy for real time processing, so the Midi processing features might be a bit too much, yet I still feel the stagedings scene concept as something really neat that could add value, helping setting up songs effectively.
I wonder, what you guys use to manage your Zynthian gig workflow, just ZS3 or some specific additional Zynthian feature or external tool that I may be overlooking?
Here’s a rather more detailed discription but it’s in my normal whimsical style, for which I should apologise, but wont.
with the different setups selected by a 6 pedal foot switch box and a footpedal input with different chains on the zynth for different effects echo, reverb, compression and a android tablet over vnc to show what was actually being done.
In truth I haven’t used it in over a year, the pedal has a BluePill in it but I would probably use a Pi Pico nowadays. I also have a encoder box that generated Qwerty Keyboard commands again via a blue pill and I used this for control but the move to version 5 made this incompatible ( race conditions on the select encoder, confirmed but not considered canonical) so that has also been pushed onto the heap of projects to re-examine at some point.
I simply don’t do drumming circles at this time but perhaps the opportunity might arise again, and the focus will then return along with rebuilds using Pi Picos, and a strong emphasis on ctrldev implementation.
I also use a zynthian as a piano during rehearsals ( another activity not being indulged at the moment) with a Roland A88 Master keyboard. This has been attempted with other sounds (strings mostly) but the person who plays it only really wants piano and uses one of the CC controls to adjust volume. Once again observed using the Android Tablet and VNC.
i would Focus on improving ZS3s to do all you need. Having chain mididings scripts could help or not. What is important is to know the requirements for the different use-cases.
@wyleu, thank you for your comprehensive and interesting description and recap.
When I’m exploring sound and music at my home studio, I also make use of multiple devices, screens and gadgets, e.g. my Roland SH201 synth. But when it comes to perform with a band, I need to be predictable and fast, to quickly reconfigure and recall settings to whatever rig I’m using, being the simple M-Audio keyboard and the V2 Zynthian, or more complex setups including e.g. Zynthian V5, Korg Piano and external Proteus module. It can mostly be done with ZS3, as @jofemodo suggests, but sometimes it gets really busy and confusing: I can assign snapshots e.g. to M-Vave SMC pads, but then I must use hand written side notes to know which pad is the setup for that song. This is where I imagine some sort of stagedings-like feature helping, with a structured/hierarchical setlist organization. I believe some chords/lyrics apps have that kind of embedding, to send out strings of MIDI commands when a song is selected, which makes me think that having the option to use Zynthian screen to display song chords and/or performance notes might be interesting as well - definitely nothing about synth technology as most people enjoy here, but interesting on “using Zynthian” in the real world
Sometimes I also would love to be able to have song-specific custom Midi processing, but that’s another story and we can leave it out of this workflow discussion.
On a side note, it’s amazing to notice how far Scratch visual programming evolved and spread (to Microbit et al) since the early days when I worked directly with Mitch Resnick MIT team on version 1.x. Custom commands would require direct Smalltalk programming
To anyone chasing such a workflow, I found a low cost setup - Android tablet and Songbook Pro - that (partially) addresses this functionality: setlists support, pdf song notes or usual chords, and Midi commands sent out when loading each song.
