The setup is the instrument

I’ve been toying with various methods of MIDI control lately as you guys know, and conceptually I’m pushing the idea that the software configuration is part of the instrument. That is, something like a key split or CC controller mapping is essentially part of your instrument as much as the whammy bar and tone control knob is part of your guitar.

One of the challenging things here is coming up with configurations that are expressive without being too complicated. The power of a guitar or bass is that you can get a huge range of sounds from a relatively small number of degrees of control of the instrument, several of which are very high resolution. For example, slight finger pressure and picking variations can produce subtle tonal differences which can be quite expressive.

We want to emulate this with our synthetic instruments as much as possible.

I came across this Ableton Live patch (Glitch Factory) for live control using the Akai APC40. I don’t think this is quite what I’m thinking, but it hits on some points such as having standard setups for different song elements (drums, bass, etc) that are always there and relatively consistent and predictable.