MIDIfile Player

[Andrew W]

Hi all,

This is my first post, and I have a feeling I might be in the wrong place. If so, sorry....

I have been a user of midi since it first came out in the 80's, using sequencers and all the latest gadgets at the time.

I am currently playing in a 3 piece band that uses a Galileo midifile player. I use the internal sounds for bass and keys, with live drums and guitar. The midifiles are also programmed to change guitar, drum and lighting patches, as well as providing a click track for the drummer.

Anyway, the Galileo is about 8 years old and I don't have a backup. It was never the best sounding unit. but it is OK.

What do most people do nowadays? Just use a laptop and an external sound module? I need to stay midi rather than record the backing on order to do patch changes etc.

What do you recommend?

Andrew

[Hawkeye]

Welcome :-)

As you are on the MIDIbox site, the choice would be to build a portable MBSEQ Sequencer, which stores your drum/bass patterns (and can also be nicely tweaked for live playing). (-> http://ucapps.de/midibox_seq.html ). It is a tremendously powerful sequencer! To save money, there are also choices to build a stripped-down unit, if you just use cardboard carton and a few leftover switches and cheap LCDs, I´d say you could build it for less than 150USD in material cost (although it will then not look as nice as the unit depicted on the ucapps.de website).

Using this sequencer as a base, you can then use specialized MIDI synthesizers for the sound generation itself, e.g. a MIDI-connected drummachine or a MIDI-connected bass synthesizer. There are lots of very nice sounding units available :-), my choices for great analog sound would be the vermona drm drum synth and a moog little phatty for (monophonic) bass sounds.

Or you could use a laptop and use VSTs to create the sounds.

Greets,

Peter