Week 10b - Guitar Rig Factor
After this week's session - we set some small yet achievable goals that would hopefully start next week's session off with ideas from the beginning. We started touching upon the concept of using the violin electronically rather than acoustically and in our session I had a realisation that I could use some software that I found out myself in the Studio Techniques module - Guitar Rig.
In essence, it's not supposed to be used for violin (as the name may suggest) however some research led me to this video of using the guitar-rig presets to create some exciting new fusions on the violin.
There was only one issue with using this software - there was a rediculous number of different setups we could choose from and to go through each one would take an eternity (similar to the issue of masses of equipment earlier on in the project)! The challenge was to find an efficent yet precise method of reducing down the thousands of different presets to a selection we could use for the two movements.
Guitar Rig has a useful colour coding scheme to help arrange presets into groups, which I hope to take advantage of in the future. We also set a filter for all the experimental sounds as they produced the most interesting results according to the video (This might have meant we missed off some other sounds but constraint was necessary at this point for the efficency of the project).
In order to give everyone in the group an equal say in what sounds they would imagine could fit well within the movements - I created a google form that asked whether a sound would be suitable for the project and be worth discussing in the next session. I then proceeded to create a video where I recorded all 64 experimental sounds with the same violin phrase. This reduced what could have been a few hours discussion into a 16 minute video where my peers would use their gut to say Yes or No to a preset. In just 25 minutes, we got our results.
We made the process simple - if both of my peers said Yes to the preset then we would explore it further in our next session. If at least 1 peer said No, then we rejected it. This was a tough decision to make but one that I think will be time and energy saving in the long-run. It also meant that everyone in the group thought that a certain preset had some potential and removed any chance of peers loosing interest throughout my demonstrating - it was a collaborative group decision.
From 64 experimental presets down to 24 presets that we all agreed on - this was a efficent and no-nonsense way of constraining the thousands of presets down to a more managable number. A win in my eyes and hopefully a win in the whole groups eyes when it comes to the next session!
