I’m Fred Schendel and I play in the American prog band Glass Hammer. We started in '93 and just released our 16th (or something) studio album Valkyrie. Like most, I graduated from the big dedicated hardware rig around 2012 or something to a laptop rig because we were doing a lot more shows where I couldn’t take my own gear and it’s just so hard to get a rig the way you want it even if thy rent you the gear you want (which is never a given). Plus, I wanted to have access to the better sounds I could get in the studio using VSTs. Up until now I’ve been running my rig with Sonar, which as you can imagine is fraught with difficulty- it’s just not meant to function as a live setup. I had looked around it stuff like Forte and it just didn’t seem like the way to go. We’re getting ready to start rehearsing for shows in support of the new album and I just thought, I have to get this rig more pro and more robust, so I started looking around again and downloaded C3 as a demo and the rest is history! We’ll be going to Europe next year for the first time (Italy, the 2 Nights of Prog +1 festival) and I really wanted to be able to say “just get me any four 61 key controllers with MIDI outputs”, show up with a laptop and be bulletproof and I think I’m there. I’m programmed for anything; I don’t rely on a single keyboard based knob or slider. Not even the mod wheel lol. I’m just blown away by being able to preload the entire show in C3 and be ready to go. I have all control assigned to key switches or the laptop touchscreen. I initially planned to use something like a Behringer FCB1010 foot controller but honestly I don’t think I need it,
Apart from that I run a local recording studio here in Tennessee where we’re based with GH co-founder Steve Babb and I’m a dad and that’s pretty much it!
If you want to check out the band feel free to go to www.glasshammer.com, or visit us on Facebook. And I very quietly put a solo album on Bandcamp that you can find here…
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-just an instrumental thing I tinkered away on all by myself in the mid 2000s.
Glad to be a part of the community!
PS- good to see a fellow progger, Neil! We played NEARFest in 2003 but I saw IQ when we came back in 2005 and we had a booth in the dealer room. Of course, that was with Martin. Maybe our paths will cross sometime!
Also good to see you here too, as a fellow progger! You’ll enjoy 2 Nights of Prog +1, it’s a really nice festival, and the organisers will look after you really well. Will you be doing any UK dates while you’re over here in Europe? Either way, perhaps as your say, our paths will cross sometime and we can compare notes.
Being able to show up anywhere on the planet with your laptop and a few other small bits of kit and be able to do a gig is a wonderful thing! But I wonder, after using Cantabile for a while, whether you’ll need four 61-key controllers, or whether you’ll cut that down too (Cantabile is amazing for splits and song states). Either way, great choice of Cantabile - I’m certain it’s going to be way better than Sonar or your original hardware synth setup!!
lol I know, right… I’ve evolved into more of a Tony Banks style lead playing and less Roger Powell… actually, I expect most controllers that should show up would have wheels and I’d use them, but I can get by without them with little tricks.
I actually am using a ton of splits and patch changes as it is with the 4 controllers, but I’ve had the same though; it’s very possible as I get more evolved with Cantabile I’ll get it down to 2. Especially two 88-keys could work. My setup here at home is hilarious; I’m using all kinds of ancient keyboards I have left lying around. There’s a Mirage, a DX-7 and a D-50…
I’ve been taking some pedalling for things like portamento time out the equation by mapping notes to send the parameters instead. For example some leads start off with a loooong slide and then have only a short slide afterwards. Obviously it depends on the riffs how it’ll work out, but surprising often it’s a winner.
Ultimately you only have two hands that can span a bit over an octave each. If you have an effective enough way to do scene/state changes, and do your programming, there’s no real reason why it can’t all be done on one keyboard…
The benefit then is that you don’t need to spend time physically moving between keyboards, with that resulting 1/8th note rest as you dive for the other keyboard
Yup, this is where I’ve arrived at with Cantabile: just one 88 key master keyboard.
But there is a price to pay for this simplicity: there is a natural limit to what you can achieve with splitting. “oh, which octave were the brass stabs in this song again?”. Plus, jumping to a high octave just for a few notes can be a bit distracting - just moving up to the upper manual of a two-keyboard setup in the central key range is often more intuitive.
I find that I’ve changed the way I approach sound selection and design, now that I’ve moved to one keyboard, using less splits and more state changes as well as expression pedal blends. This is something that never occurred to me before, but now I use it all the time: just fade between two sounds with the expression pedal - or sometimes it’s actually easier to just layer some sounds like brass stabs onto your main sound and fade it in via EXP - the unisono effect is often actually more organic. In a lot of songs, I now layer a hammond on top of my piano and fade it in via EXP or modwheel, whenever I feel like filling things out a bit.
And my secret weapon is: the big red button! It sits right in the middle of my keyboard above middle C, is big (2,5 cm / 1 inch diameter) and friendly, and allows me to advance to next state with either hand (whichever is less busy at the moment). Some (actually pretty short) songs have around 20 state changes: intro - intro2 - verse 1 - verse 2 - pre-chorus - chorus - verse 3a - verse 3b - … The only thing you need is a big Show Notes display with the current (and next) state; otherwise you might get lost…
Yeah, I’m old school- I like knowing a keyboard is just there, ready to go when I need it; I like physically moving to it. If it was up to me my rig would look like Geoff Downes on the first Asia tour LOL And hey, huge keyboard rigs rule. But I also dig that Jordan Rudess vibe where it’s clean and sleek and he just bangs through a complex set on one board. I think right now it’s a good compromise but I’m going to ply with getting down to 2 just for the sake of less stuff to deal with.
BTW thanks Other Neil, glad you like Trurl! It was the early days of computer music for me and I wanted to make an album of music that sounded like it was played by a band of cats that were better than I was…
Torsten, wasn’t there an earlier thread about how to accomplish expression pedal blends with C3? Could you point me toward that? And one other question- which 88 keyboard do you use ( I think that was discussed in an earlier thread too).
make sure that each of the racks (I’ll call them rack1 and rack2 for now) involved reacts to CC7 (volume) by fading its volume from -oo to 0 dB (use whatever volume/fader plugin you like before the output of the rack and automate its gain/volume parameter)
Now create a binding MainKeyboard-CC11 to rack1-MIDI in;CC7;0,127–>0,127
Create a second binding MainKeyboard-CC11 to rack2-MIDI in;CC7;0,127–>127,0
if you want to be sure of the initial levels of your two racks at the beginning of a song or song state, create additional bindings “Song States;OnLoad–>rack1-MIDI in;CC7,(value)” for both racks.
That’s it: now when you move your EXP pedal, it will fade between rack1 and rack2. And you can still set the relative levels with the rack gains.
Re your other question: I use a Kurzweil PC3-K8 as my main gig board; but I have an Akai MPK88 sitting around as a backup.
After a while of playing with Cantabile, you will discover that it is really hard to make things go wrong. You can pretty much not even look at your lap top and know that everything will always happen the way you set it up (well, maybe not in some of your songs).
Yeah, but there is that thing of finding notes in a comfortable place on the keyboards - and not having to remember that you have a bass note mapped to C7.
Plus… if you position your high velocity floor fan in the right place, you can get a reasonable Thunder God in full flight as you dive for the most distant of your keyboards with your circa 1976 Rick Wakeman locks blowing in the wind.
Neil [quote=“Ade, post:35, topic:1143”]
Yeah, but there is that thing of finding notes in a comfortable place on the keyboards - and not having to remember that you have a bass note mapped to C7.
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Well you still have to remember which octave on your other keyboards. Four 61 key keyboards is 20 octaves! If you use song states for each section, you only need splits for what you’re actually playing at any time, so can usually place your zones in “obvious” places.
I didn’t twig the connection with IQ! Fantastic band. Dark Matter (the first I heard) and Road of Bones are my favourites, followed by Frequency and The Seventh House and Subterrania then make up my overall top five IQ albums!
I was interested to read how you are using Cantabile. At the moment I am using it for backing tracks and controlling a DMX light show for Welsh Floyd. I currently have a Yamaha EX5 (mainly used as a controller these days whilst playing live) and Korg Kronos, on stage. But for future projects I am seriously thinking of making use of the array of soft synths I have in Cantabile. So my live rig will probably be controller keyboard, Kronos and then PC, Cantabile and VSTs.
I also have a Nord G2 Engine. An amazing modular synth in a 1U rack!
Sounds like it’s just a matter of time before you go the whole way and use Cantabile for running VSTs. Once you get a taste for it, there’s no going back
Yes, I really need to sort out my VST synths onto my Cantabile setup. I have Omnisphere, Arturia V collection, MTRON PRO, VSM, Oddity, Imposcar etc, and I probably don’t use them as much as I should/could. Talking about the U-HE synths, I also purchased Zebra as the first one to try for Christmas, and that is gorgeous sounding. So, yes I need to get around to it.
Between all of that and the Kronos, that should be a powerful setup, and less to carry out!
