Part two of our guide to how we set up the guitar demo at the recent Bett Show.
The solo guitar
The main performance is the solo electric guitar, played by using the triggers on the top edge of the Xbox controller. Even though there are two variable controllers (one under each finger), they produce a single variable signal called ‘Trigger’ in Ensemble. Pressing down on the right controller increases the output; pressing on the left controller decreases the output.
The controller is linked to a single ‘MIDI Notes’ block, which contains thirteen notes from a blues scale: E, G, A, A#, B, D, E, G, A, A, A#, B, D, E. These are played on ‘Distortion Guitar’.
The controller also triggers a series of images to the screen, moving from left to right and getting higher on the screen as the pitch increases. This provides great visual feedback for both the player and the audience.
The Video/Image block is set to ‘Variable’ so that we can use the variable output of the Xbox block to select the image to use. In this mode as you add each scene to the block it will provide a small visual display of the range used to trigger the image. Although you could add one image for each pitch, we chose instead to have five images spread out equally across the range.
Each image has it’s own custom effect, which relates to where the image appears on screen when triggered. You can adjust the image location by double-clicking on the scene in the list.
To make the images more dynamic, we set the entry time to zero; play time to a maximum of 5 seconds; and exit time to 1 second.
Rock organ with moving head
The final part of the guitar map is a rock organ sound on the squeeze sensor connected to the Hub. This could be replaced with any variable sensor.
Again the sensor is linked to a simple MIDI Notes block with blues notes, this time on a separate MIDI channel playing a Rock Organ sound. The output is also linked to a small Showtec moving head light. It’s driving both the Pan and Tilt positions of the light, meaning the beam of light will change position depending on how hard someone is squeezing the sensor. The Startup block is used to trigger the colour and gobo for the light when the map runs.