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Makai

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Makai
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  • What are some great companions to the Deluge?

    Ok, bear with me, but I literally created an account for the express reason of sharing a very dope, very portable and very flexible combination of cheap gear that is, in my opinion opening up some stuff in some of the few weak areas of the deluge. Only able to vouche for iOS combination, though I'm sure an android facsimile could be assembled.

    iRig Duo (2 chan. audio+midi I/O) - roughly $160 USD online
    Roli Lightpad Block M - $150-200 USD online
    MIDIflow IOS app - $7 USD
    TouchOSC IOS app - $5? USD

    Rationale:

    In my opinion, one of the biggest setbacks for the deluge, which has otherwise replaced my convoluted and dozens-of-hours-in-the-making ableton setup, is that the controller itself doesn't do velocity or expression in any tactile way. The synth engine is really not bad when you're able to have expressive control over it, and even just playable velocity makes a huge difference in expression. After realizing that the deluge was becoming my new workhorse, I started looking for a portable, battery-fed and expressive controller, mostly for leads and dynamic drums.

    This led me to the roli lightpad. very expressive drum pad, portable, cheap, internal battery...only setback: proprietary software makes for convoluted interfacing with any hardware.

    That said, I spent a while researching a workaround and toying around with my pre-owned Irig Duo, which has midi functionality and Audio I/O to/from iphone.

    Results: after tinkering with a combination of the IOS app "MIDIflow", the iRig Duo midi output and lightpad (connected to iphone via bluetooth, and customized via the proprietary dashboard app) I was quickly able to configure the lightpad to not only trigger deluge's synths/drums for sequencing with very low-latency, but also to reign in the MPE powers of the roli to modulate dedicated parameters (so far glide/pitchbend on x, filter sweep on y, and aftertouch on whatever) on the deluge, meaning I can use the x/y pad as a trigger with (I think max of 2) dynamic effects I can control after thumping one of 25 notes/pads on the lightpad.

    The best part: Entire setup is self powered, totally mobile, potentially very flexible (IOS audio processing, I/O for instruments/mic via iRig, expressive midi ctrl, etc.) and cheap!

    This is starting to sound like a convoluted, acronym-laden infomercial, so I will stop, but after picking up a roli lightpad and (after some trial and error) making it control the deluge as well as it's own MPE soundbanks, all the while on battery power, I'm pretty amped about mobile sound fuckery. This is coming from a guy who has a custom programmed 5-controller-deep ableton workstation that he's all but abandoned for songwriting.

    Posting in main too. The Deluge has got me more excited about setup fluidity and possibilities than I've felt since Live 6.

  • Slicer by transients?

    This may have been introduced already, or maybe there's a limitation I'm not aware of, but it would be really helpful for some sampling workflow if this beast had a transient based loop slicer. Even something that just worked comfortably on bare drum tracks would be great for chopping and flipping kits quickly.

  • External Audio Looper

    +1, live looping and being able to record quantized snippets right into the kit would be great. Something like the resample function which allows you record directly into a kit starting on the 1 and end recording after a preset number of bars. Maybe some sort of count in feature would be appreciated too, when recording a longer loop, it's kind of obnoxious waiting for the whole loop time to come around again just to have a count in before recording at the top.

    This combined with some more sample based workflow tweaks would probably mean I never at another mpc in my life. real talk.

  • sequencer editing: nudge individual notes left/right

    +1

    fast intuitive nudging for individual notes would be highly appreciated. I love that you can record midi into this thing without the required quant that some machines force upon you, but being able to tweak and correct patterns with a nudge option would be great.

  • copy/paste a row in a kit-track including the sample and all settings

    +1 definitely.