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I come from a (genuine) acoustic piano background and I am discovering the mod wheel on an 88-key DP with guitar and many other lead sounds.
I find it impossible to emulate with any degree of precision the twingy twangy sound of Hank Marvin's Apache. I find the mod wheel too far away from the right hand side of the keyboard compass or my arms are too short. It is equally difficult for other lead sounds.
Just practice, practice, practice or any other advice?
I am 'doremi' because I play scales My teacher is 'domisol' because he plays chords
Are you thinking of an expression pedal assigned to do modulation? My foot is even less suited for fine control than my hand. I am not alone on this, I think, although there would not be any reach problems.
I am 'doremi' because I play scales My teacher is 'domisol' because he plays chords
Are you thinking of an expression pedal assigned to do modulation? My foot is even less suited for fine control than my hand. I am not alone on this, I think, although there would not be any reach problems.
Did you ever watch the foot (feet?) of somebody playing a pedal steel guitar? I think that's where the (physical) pitch-bend control is.
To put it another way:
. . . Sometimes, to get professional results, you need . . . to develop professional skills.
. Charles (who never uses his pitch-bend wheel)
PS -- worse than I thought -- _several_ pitch-bend pedals:
I'm inspired by that guy on the CP4 video I posted earlier who's doing all kinds of stuff with two expression pedals and he has the sustain pedal sitting between them.
In many of the things I've seen where someone is doing a lot of stuff with the mod wheel, they're playing on a keyboard that has less than 88 keys. (I just looked up the Scott Tibbs Integra-7 demo and it looks like he's using a 49-key board.) Is adding a mod wheel to an 88-key board a problem in itself, particularly if the wheel goes in the same relative position that it would be on say, a 49-key board? I would think designers would take this kind of thing into account, but you never know.
Another solution would be a stand-alone MIDI controller with a wheel that you could move around, but out of curiosity I did a little searching and that kind of thing is surprisingly hard to find. Most of the answers I found point to do-it-yourself projects like this:
I watched a video lately of someone demoing an 88 key DP and it involved a fair amount of pitch bending. The pitch and mod wheels were waaaaay off to the left in the keybed area and he really had to stretch to get over there - it didn't look all that natural nor comfortable.
IMO, pitch & mod wheels in the keybed area are lose-lose. They are awkward to use and needlessly lengthen the form factor of an already too long instrument, making transport that much more problematic. Positioning them there is a boneheaded, ergonomically blind move.
I watched a video lately of someone demoing an 88 key DP and it involved a fair amount of pitch bending. The pitch and mod wheels were waaaaay off to the left in the keybed area and he really had to stretch to get over there - it didn't look all that natural nor comfortable.
IMO, pitch & mod wheels in the keybed area are lose-lose. They are awkward to use and needlessly lengthen the form factor of an already too long instrument, making transport that much more problematic. Positioning them there is a boneheaded, ergonomically blind move.
I can't totally agree. I can transpose the whole key-bed +/- 3 full octaves. This way one can move the whole body further to the left for pitch-bend euphoria, if necessary.
Will do some R&B for a while. Give the classical a break. You can spend the rest of your life looking for music on a sheet of paper. You'll never find it, because it just ain't there. - Me Myself
The only example I can think of, of a keyboard player using the pitch-bend / modulation a lot, would be Chick Corea, and the Elektric Band album.
It does bear note that the early days I was listening to this (in the late 80s) it was on a video, and (from memory) I'm thinking of Cool Weasel Boogie and India Town, but there's probably other tracks on that album where he does.