This is not just for emulating a guitar, the Roli Seaboard is midi keyboard style controller but WOW...I decided to post this one just to mess with your minds a little.

Marco Parisi playing Little Wing at NAMM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh-hzbG5FzI

Here's Jordan Rudess doing some playing but here he's also verbally explaining just what this thing is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P14JcRyJCEI

I wasn't sure just where to post this because this controller is a great example of how to produce realistic sax or other horn parts, guitar parts, strings, whatever for our Biab or Real Band songs when the RT's aren't cutting it.

This question comes up all the time, how to I make my midi melody lines or solo's sound more realistic? What I love about these Roli's is while they're not cheap they're not over the top expensive either. The 25 key version has a street price of $799. These things are not as obvious as they look because they're really not keyboards. The playing surface doesn't have actual keys, they have little ridges where the keys should be so a player can feel them but that's it as far as any resemblance to a traditional keyboard goes.

For you guitar guys I'm sure most of you have messed around at a piano or keyboard, every guitarist I know can play a little piano even if it's just one or two finger melody lines and some can do a lot more than that. You can learn to control one of these to create some cool stuff for your songs.

Bob

Pretty impressive, and for more than just guitar of course.

I've seen that before, if he's not careful he'll get callus's on his dainty finger tips

Larry

Bob, thanx for posting as this is very impressive.

very cool!

Rudess and Sherinian both always made me ask "Just how many fingers do those guys actually have?"

I have posted this joke before, but it's still a good one! They play SO MANY NOTES!!!!


Dream Theater sheet music

Dream Theater. Yeah, that joke has some truth to it for sure. If some here don't know about DT you've got to check them out. There's a vid on YT with Rudess and Sherinian going off on a dueling keyboard thing. Awesome.

Bob

I hope I come in at Bar 21 .

Nice little "toy".

Wow...just wow! Don't know what's more impressive, Marco, Jordan or the Roli!

Jeff

that instrument is an awful lot like an iPad app that Jordan Rudess was involved with. It's called GEO-SYNTH. Very similar concept, but obviously scaled down to the size of an iPad screen

I think it's a free app.

I'm still waiting for the inevitable adaptation of the idea to a smooth guitar neck. There are already midi guitars that trigger the note by tapping the neck, but a smooth neck like that keyboard would allow a much wider range of nuanced CC in real time.

I love the Seaboards. Not sure if I could ever use it to it's full potential but would like to play around with one if they weren't so expensive.

the block is their smallest module about 2 octaves span for $300 which can mate to another block for greater range. cool stuff

And here it is!!

Dueling keyboard monsters

Sound engine technology is going to have to catch up. Back in the day I had an ensoniq VFX SD that had key aftertouch. Each key had individual aftertouch and the VFX sound engine could take advantage of it. You could do really cool individual note vibrato, filter opening, etc with it. But the rest of the industry did not follow suit and key aftertouch kind of died out. This thing has even more controls and I wonder if the VSTi world will be able to react or if they will ignore it like the industry did with key aftertouch?