Robot Control Workshop in Berlin, Day 5
[Coffee]
This morning Frank Blum has gone shopping for the electronic components he would need to build an magnetic coil driver circuit, with the coil's current & polarity can be controlled by an Arduino-board. Last night we had a brief rummage-round, and Bastiaan kindly provides us with various relays, solenoids, heat-sinks and other Elektroschrott from his eclectic personal collection.
Learning How to Play a New Song
The drummer can now play "Bad", by NoMeansNo, and doing well on getting to grips with Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love"
Frank Barnes & Kolja continue work on getting their respective machines to play the song "Bad". Synchronization over MIDI is working like a dream. Their computers, both running Logic, can start playing and stay in sync from any point in the song. And they can of course disengage the synchronisation and work on their own distinct parts of the song.
Last wednesday night's first experiments with MIDI-sync showed that it was also easy to get Lice & Logic to run in Sync, with either one being the master or slave. When Markus arrives, he suggests to start working on the new song ("Bad") in Live, by way of experiment, instead of Logic which he has used so far.
After importing the MIDI-file, I sit down with him and first show him how to make a 'Mapped Instrument', so that he can name ranges of MIDI note-messages that control different aspects of his robot, Fingers, the guitar-player. Better yet, he can remap & slide these ranges around on the MIDI note-range in order to have a slightly more sensible arrangement of Fingers' various subsystems in the piano-roll editing window.
Next we create a new MIDI-track for Fingers, and drag some tracks around in the Arrange view so that we can easily see the original guitar-part and Finger's part side-by-side.
Writing Finger's guitar track starts of with checking which notes are played in the original song, and figuring out the fingering for Fingers' left hand. Because of the speed of the little finger pistons, fingering a note always happens like a 'hammer on', and after editing-in the first four bars of the guitar-riff, we can already hear Fingers' play along.
But his guitar is still in 'Drop-D' tuning, from playing the Pantera song earlier. Oops. We'll have to look into motorized tuning-heads, s that we can make the musicians capable of tuning their own instruments.
After a quick tune-up, editing goes quickly, as we figure out how to use a 4-bar loop to create a 16-bar region, and some other useful tricks.
