Palms as Sequencers?

[~metaphreaq]

has anyone tried using a palm pilot as a sequencer?
I've heard that the new palms can do that....I'm very interested because that would make for quite a streamlined live set-up, I'm also wondering if anyone has any tricks for appearing to be live when using heavy sequencing...I sequence heavily in my industrial experiments and I would like to give it all a more live feel without losing the rhythm....

[~ZuN]

I was contemplating it, and i found this piece of software for the Palm http://www.mccormicksnet.com/minimusc.htm

[~NullDevice]

Minimusic is pretty nifty. There's also BeatPad for drums and one or two others. It's not Cubase or Cakewalk, but Palm seqs do the basic MIDI stuff.

The hardest part is the MIDI interface. There weren't many last time I checked, and they of course were all device-specific - one for the V, one for the III, one for the Handspring, one for the...etc.
I think the new ones have some audio capability, but IIRC the quality was kinda silly.

The PocketPC stuff has some built-in audio/MIDI functionality too, but I don't know what's available right now.

[~arronc]

Hi there :

We have just done our first gig using soft synths and reason :

We did it like this :

Reason 2 on a laptop, all sequencing imported / recreated in reason.

4 Port Midi USB connector running into a del inspiron laptop, Comming in on the four midi busses on the hardware interface from reason.

Each midi buss is mapped to a sequncers or sampler in reason for live playback.

Each Midi port get connected to whatever keyboards/controllers you want to use. I used a single controller keyboard, and a chaos pad.

Map all the controlls in readon you want alter dynamically (resonnance filters envelopes) to the controllers, and away you go.

To control muting of tracks etc, map them to the laptop keyboard to bring them in and out dynamically.

With cunning use of the laptop mouse pad and the loop points in reason, you choose sections to loop round indefinetly and drop tracks in or out, play with the kaoss pad etc : the crowd loved it.

I think the next step for us will be reason 2.0 on transmeta palmtops : Thats got to be great. And the midiman surface one will be most excellent if they ever release it !

[~ZuN]

Thats a real cool setup, I haven't had much experience with reason. I would definately like to know how the next setup works for you.

[~arronc]

Yeah : we liked the way you could control the arrangement and mix live. It did take us about two weeks of work to reprogram our backing to be tempo independant and runn efficiantly enough to be stable on a laptop.

We have got video of this and hope to be uploading it somewhere soon : Subcribe to the eight to infinity mailing list (info@8inf.com) if you are interested in getting the video once its edited.

[~ZuN]

Sounds good, Ill go subscribe ;)