I’ve recently put together my rendition of a ‘Midi Cello’ (inspired a la Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell) from an old cheap ebay cello, a doepfer OEM kit and a pile of linear potentiometers. It doesn’t play notes. It’s basically a midi controller boxed in a cello.
It has 4 linear pot potentiometers in the headstock (disguised as cello tuning pegs), two more linear pot potentiometers and a mod wheel on its body, a ribbon position sensor on the neck and one last ribbon position sensor on the bow in place of the hair, which I rub over the lower neck of the cello.
Although I attempted to write a scrubbing patch in max/msp I was never happy with the results, but with the discovery of the aka.mouse object by Masayuki Akamatsu I was thrilled to be able to control the horizontal mouse movement in Melodyne (or any program for that matter). Because of this I was able to take advantage of Melodyne’s amazing scrubbing abilities.
While the position sensor on the bow was reserved strictly for horizontal mouse movement (as well as two of the tuning pegs; 1 for horizontal mouse movement, the 2nd for vertical mouse movement) I could assign any of the remaining potentiometers to put out midi CC info.
In an attempt to utilize this for live performances, I run Melodyne rewired into an audio input track in Ableton. I found this to be the best way of controlling any other vst/audio unit effects (with the other available sensors outputting cc info) dropped into the chain after the initial input of the audio coming from Melodyne (through rewire).
What I’m curious about: Is there any way to use tempo-synced effects like beat repeat without playing time code out of Ableton? Keep in mind Melodyne is rewired to Ableton, so I if I press play in Ableton - Melodyne will sync up and I will lose my scrubbing capabilities. Is there any way of manipulating an external timecode into Ableton so I can take advantage these tempo-synced effects without actually engaging Ableton’s time code?