A night flight with Linnstrument
Ever since I got my Linnstrument, a new kind of midi controller from Roger Linn, I've been totally in love with it and have used it on almost all my tracks. It consists of touch sensitive pads which transmit not only the usual velocity, pitch bend and aftertouch but the finger movement in x, y, and, z -directions can be quite freely mapped to control any parameter of the software or hardware synth of your choice. And this is all MPE (Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression), or midi channel per note, if your synth supports it. Practically, it means that the midi messages for each played note are independent, allowing you to, for example, bend them in different directions simultaneously. To see how this can be used to produce realistic sounding steel guitar licks, check out Roger Linn's tutorial on playing expressive gestures at his website (http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/ls-videos.html). Of course, these features also make the Linnstrument a perfect controller e.g. for your MAX patchers, which now in version 7 supports MPE .
Even if MPE is one of the selling points of the Linnstrument, I think it shines already in monophonic expressive playing. I've used it for example a lot for wild bass arpeggios in electronic music. However, this time I wanted to try playing something similar to an acoustic instrument. I do play several stringed instruments, and wouldn't yet use Linnstrument to replace all of them (especially violin, although you need to again check out Roger Linn's tutorials for some impressive emulations). Yet winds and brass are completely outside of my field of expertise. Therefore, I really enjoyed playing this little tune (link below) with a U-he Zebra 2 patch that mimics the sound of a Chinese reed flute. The flute tracks are basically first takes, and they give an impression of a slightly insecure player (which I certainly was). In this custom patch, y and z axes of the Linnstrument pads are controlling the amount of vibrato, high-pass filter cutoff, and the noise amount for breathing sounds.
The writing process of the track actually started from the guitar parts, and sound-wise, I tried to achieve something similar to Dominick Miller's sounds on some classic Sting albums like 'The Soul Cages'. Therefore, I used a Roland amp with a true stereo chorus. After that, the flute melody soon emerged, and I added the drums and additional synths later on. I hope you like the music. For me, making it was certainly a lot of fun!