First gig: 1010Music tangerine - Sand, software and sound

Thought I would pass along a few quick comments about gigging with the 1010Music tangerine. I got the urge to use tangerine at my church gig last Sunday. Gotta start sometime, somewhere.

First step on Saturday, I played through Sunday’s music and chose the most appropriate voice for each tune. I wasn’t entirely happy with the woodwind voices, unfortunately. So, I quickly sampled three of my favorite woodwind patches from Yamaha MODX. Thanks to all of my recent experience with tangerine and sampling, I had three new voices ready to go in half-an-hour. It pays to know one’s tools thoroughly!

The next step was pulling together all of the pieces and parts: an Arturia Keylab Essential 49 MIDI controller, the tangerine, a Boss FV30L volume pedal, cables and power adapters. With some spares and charts thrown in, I wondered, “Am I really saving any weight?” 🙂 Keylab Essential plus tangerine in less weight than MODX6, but all those accessories add up fast.

Load-in and set-up went well. No issues. I perched tangerine in the upper right corner of the Keylab. The cables thread through the knobs and sliders to the back — not the most tidy arrangement, but it works. The Keylab Essential is a Mk2 and does not have an expression pedal input. Thus, I routed audio into the Boss FV-30L pedal before hitting my amplifier in MONO. Signal strength was very good.

Sound-wise, the gig was successful. I’m glad that I took the half-hour needed to capture three of my go-to voices. The pipe organ sounds seemed a little wimpy and need boosting. Thank goodness tangerine offers gain individually for each preset.

Performance-wise, the main drawback is tangerine’s small screen. I cannot change voices on the fly as easily as the MODX6 touch screen. tangerine requires careful aim. So much care, that you must avoid hitting one of the eight on-screen trigger pads, each of which play a sample. I learned this lesson the hard way, accidentally triggering a note while selecting a preset voice. Ooops, all eyes on the clumsy keyboardist making noise at an inappropriate time during the service. After that, I minimized the volume pedal after every tune and before selecting a different preset.

Overall, I would rate this first gig experience as a success. I spent Monday sampling a half-dozen classic patches from Roland XV-5050. As I said before, once you’ve been working with tangerine, you can really fly with it.

I renamed and reorganized my presets into “categories.” Woodwind preset names begin with “0”, then “2” for strings, “3” for horns/brass, “4” for pads, “5” for organs, and so on. Once the organization settles down and is final, I will try tangerine’s MIDI program change feature. I will then be able to select a preset from the Keylab Essential over MIDI.