With a nod and a tilt to …
Finally getting around to giving my Christmas present a workout! I got a TEC Breath and Bite controller 2. Here I try it out for atmospherics on this almost ambient piece.
This is really fun. I can already control two things from my guitar by where I pick and by the MIDI volume knob. The
My partner stopped in to hear the concert in my little home studio and said I looked funny when doing it, but hey, you gotta give a little, right? Next time, I’ll do a split screen of that for your amusement,
Rich
The instant feedback of controlling through the breath is strikingly intuitive, so I could bring things to the edge but back off before they spilled over into mayhem.
Setup
GEEK alert The setup is my Godin xTSA Midi Guitar through an Axon AX50 midi processor (just sends midi data to the computer, no onboard synths). This feeds an audio and MIDI guitar signal to Plogue Bidule running three plugins. The MIDI is processed through Dmitri
The song
The first 45 seconds are just setting up the loops. At 45 seconds, Thorn CM fades in, played by the midi channel of the guitar and the Bite and Breath Controller. Instead of using the synth alone, or trying to sound like some other instrument or emulation, I use the Thorn to work with and add expressive power to the guitar sounds. The synth is running one of its built in presets, “PAD Duster,” that I have tweaked. I wanted to use Thorn’s built in matrix to connect the Breath Controller to the synth, but it turns out to be not possible yet, probably coming in a future update. Bidule has a great paramater-mapping facility though, so it works out fine, but I can’t pack the breath controller into a Thorn preset just yet.
A side note
MIDI learn on most DAWs is difficult with the breath controller because you have to isolate your movements to only trigger one CC at a time, so for example, you can’t nod at all while tilting your head. In practice this is nearly impossible, a problem also with the Source Audio HotHand and anything else that maps CCs to an accelerometer.
Setting up the breath controller
The breath controller comes with an app to program its response (see the video). I set it up for my lung capacity and bite, and calibrated it to my head tilt and nod. You can set the output for each of the four functions to any CC, pitch bend, or aftertouch. I adjusted the curves quite a bit to get a good response for me, and it worked great once I did. The curves and the attack and decay settings are particularly helpful in smoothing out the CC response. For the guitar MIDI CC1 signal, I have to smooth it out separately in Bidule, so the curves and other adjustments in the breath controller are nice; so is the visual feedback, which you can see in the video.
Controlling Thorn
I controlled Thorn’s synth parameters by first removing the one modulation wheel control from the mod matrix, since I would be using my guitar controller to send the CC1 signal. Then I set the following two CCs from my guitar and the four from the Breath controller as follows:
Guitar:
- CC1 (mod Wheel) controlled by pick position between neck [0] and bridge [127] of the guitar and smoothed out in bidule ==> cutoff frequency on Thorn CM’s clean low pass filter
- CC7 on guitar ==> synth volume
Breath Controller:
(I put the color code from the app in so you can follow the video easier)
- CC2 Breath ==> noise oscillator pitch. RED
- CC3 Bite ==> filter resonance. GREEN
- CC12 Nod ==> delay feedback. BLUE
- CC13 Tilt ==> distortion drive: AQUA
Results:
The instant feedback of controlling through the breath is really responsive and intuitive, so I could bring things to the edge but back off before they spilled over into mayhem. I had a blast tilting my head up to create endless feedback echoes and tilting to the side to grunge out. Breath seemed a natural choice to