Thanks to all for sharing advice. The set went really well. The owner of the bar came up to me after the set to ask how i did the “cash register sounds” and mentioned the Hammond organ and Rhodes wah sounded like the album.
I settled on a table type keyboard stand with a mic attachment bar to hold the laptop platform. The advantage (as opposed to scissors stands) is that two people can quickly carry it all assembled on stage and just plug power and audio in.
On-Stage KS-7150 table style folding keyboard stand
On-Stage KSA7575+ with Gator mic quick connect
I then assembled two identical rigs that pop onto the Gator connector:
On-Stage MSA5000 laptop stand with a Gator quick connect
Behringer UMC202
D-Link powered USB Hub
Lenovo X230.
Everything is zip tied in place so nothing can come loose. I can swap out to the backup in less than a minute.
During testing one laptops applied Windows 10 updates on restart I set it to only do that between 4-7am. You can’t trust those settings. From now on I will be perform multiple restarts before I head out to the venue.
I’ve decided to simply build out the MSA5000 laptop stand into a 1U enclosure under it with an interconnected back panel so the cables aren’t exposed and the inputs are all in the back.
Hi, I have been loyally screwed by Windoze updares having a mind of its own during sound check. In the end I purchase some Win 10 pro OEM licenses from Software Geeks (quite cheap) and got control of my update schedule back.
Glad it went well, it is atisfying when people come up to you wanted to know where your Hammond and Moog sounds are coming from (for me a combination of Kronos and Cantabile right now (mostly Kronos, but as we start doing more new songs I am looking at moving more into VSTs on Cantabile
Hi Derek - one of my biggest fears is the damn windoze updare screwing things up for me. Can you elaborate on what you did to regain control of the schedule?? Cheers!
Hi - I’m using a simple sample player called Grace. It’s free, and REALLY simple to drop samples in, assign to keys… plus it has the other features such as LFO, Modulation etc… worth a look
If you don’t want to upgrade to pro, the same article shows you how to disable the Windows update service, which will work on the Home edition. I went the pro route as the the control is then more WIN7/XP like when I had those set not to do automatic updates, but I could check when going to Windows Update in the control panel without faffing about with manually starting disabled services.
I used keep the computer disconnected from the Internet before the gig, but that didn’t save me in the example I gave above when I was on WIN10 home. It had been disconnected for a week, and it still decided to go into update mode when I didn’t want it to. I was also pretty certain I had set the active hours. I was lucky in that I had a spare laptop.
I currently use a tool to do this (click here) on all my live machines (Cantabile laptop and LivePrompter tablets)
This blocks Windows updates (so far pretty reliably) using various registry changes and other modifications - without the need for Windows 10 Professional. So far no negative effects that I have experienced.
I just make sure to deactivate it once a month and let all the current updates run their course - I’m all for Win updates per se - just don’t want them to happen in the middle of a gig or rehearsal…
I went the pro route as I always had pro versions of Windows until I was daft enough to accept the “free” WIN10 home update, so I decided I wanted to get back on Pro after that “experience” I had that I relate to above. When that laptop went into reboot just before sound check on its own accord (it was the creator’s update), it was well over two hours before it came back to life, and I decided I could not face that again, especially as at the time we were doing theatre gigs, where the Show had to go on (fortunately it did, via the backup laptop). With WIN10 pro, so far, so good…
Just downloaded it. I read the online manual (about 10 pages) and then watched Bedroom Producer’s YouTube tutorial. It’s looks much easier to program than Sforzando.
I had Grace in my live rig before switching to Sforzando. Basically a good bread-and-butter sampler; unfortunately didn’t always play nice in my setup (threw some nasty exceptions on trying to open it for editing), so I abandoned it for sforzando.
Actually, Sforzando is not so complicated: this is what a typical melodic single-sample-patch looks like:
So it’s the same things you would set in Grace:
the sample used
what its fundamental pitch is
the attack and release times
velocity sensitivity
how it tracks with the keyboard
Just in text form - once you get used to it, it’s actually faster…
For simple sound effect samples, it’s similar:
I’ve just set the key tracking and velocity tracking to 0, so it doesn’t matter how hard you hit the trigger pad and what note triggers the effect.
So no need to be afraid of Sforzando’s complexity - works nicely for simple stuff!
I agree that once you get text based editing down it’s much faster. Thank you for posting the examples, it seemed more complicated before I saw those. I’ll try Sforzando first.
