Playing “Over The Rainbow” with breath, bite, and tilts with TEControl BBC2

Описание: I set aside my EWI to try something new: the TEControl BBC2 Breath & Bite Controller. In addition to sensing breath and bite, it reacts to head nod and tilt. After playing with this controller for a day, I attempted a little musical performance of "Over the Rainbow" -- and rather than playing a piano keyboard, just for fun, I used my Mac keyboard with “musical typing” in Logic Pro...

So far, I’m really impressed with this device -- it's a lot of fun and it's quite a powerful little device. The configuration utility for mapping parameters to MIDI controls is straightforward. The biggest challenge for me so far is figuring out how to map parameters to a patch in a way that allows some extra expressiveness from something like a head movement, but without requiring a lot of precision.

For the patch I made for this video, I used Native Instruments Monark (mini-Moog emulation) with the somewhat unconventional choice of a band-pass filter to give me sort of a breath-controlled “wah”. Here's how I mapped the BBC2 controls. Breath controls the band-pass filter cutoff and a bit of the volume for the first oscillator (a sawtooth). Head nod controls volume for the second oscillator (a pulse wave). Head tilt controls filter resonance. And bite controls the mod-wheel LFO for vibrato (when I’m not using breath vibrato).

TEControl channel:    / @tecontrol