When you’re performing on your instrument with virtual instruments and effects, you don’t want to have to stop playing to change your settings. So you program Scenes for everything you need in Camelot, the incredibly potent live performance environment. Now you can change everything at once by calling another Scene, or maybe start and stop some backing tracks.

But you don’t want to stop performing to make any of those changes, either. What to do? And now you think about streaming from the comfort of your sofa at home and it hits you: what you need is remote control!

Yeah, we already thought of that. That’s why Camelot has Remote Controls built in that let you do all kinds of stuff from your MIDI controller, or, if you prefer, from a computer keyboard. That starts with changing Scenes and starting or stopping backing tracks, but it goes WAY beyond that. Camelot’s set of Remote Controls is – how should we put this? – quite robust. For example, you can:

• Step to the next or previous Scene
• Step to the next or previous Song
• Select any Scene with a MIDI Program Change message
• Step to the next or previous Event on the timeline
• Go to any of 15 Events on the Timeline
• Start and stop MIDI clock
• Tap tempo
• Set the level of up to 16 different Layers in a Scene
• Mute any of those 16 Layers, too.
• Set the level and mute up to the first 16 Items in a Layer
• And levels and mute for Song Racks
• And the same for Setlist Racks
• And Backing Tracks
• And streaming services. Oh, wait, no, not that. Sorry.

You get the idea, we don’t have to list ALL of the Remote Controls here (and there are quite a few more). But we DO list them all in the faboo tutorial we wrote about Camelot Remote Controls. Do not make the mistake of underestimating just how phenomenally powerful Remote Controls are in harnessing the extraordinary power of Camelot and all of your plugins and hardware devices into an integrated system of unparalleled power, the command of which is quite literally at your fingertips.

Please, please, PLEASE go to this humble web page and learn how to use The Power of Your Pinky to control every little thing in your performance rig:

Camelot Tutorial 10: Remote Control

Sure, Camelot lets you route and process audio from all of your instruments, hardware and software, but it also gives you a potent set of tools for shaping MIDI data from your controllers to make your instruments as responsive and expressive as they can be.

From simple filtering of MIDI messages to complex curves that reshape continuous controllers to smart scale mapping to humanizing, Camelot lets you optimize the match between how you play your controllers and the sounds your instruments produce.

Of course, it wouldn’t be magic without incantations and spells, so we have created a book of spells for you, to enable you to draw on Camelot’s amazing MIDI powers.

OK, we said “book of spells,” and it’s really an article in our Knowledge Base, but, you know, we kind of think of the KB as a book of spells, because the technology we work with often feels to us like magic, as we’re sure it does to you.

So, everybody raise your wands and read along here: Camelot Supercharges MIDI Processing

Somehow, it often seems harder to do that with software. You know how to set up an effects loop in your guitar rig, but trying to do the same thing in a DAW seems challenging.

But sometimes it’s not as hard as you think it will be; you just need someone to give you the first clue and then the rest becomes easy. Which brings us to using Camelot for audio effects. (See how cleverly we got there?)

If you’ve ever worked in a DAW, or even in an old-school analog studio, you probably already encountered concepts like send effects versus insert effects, corrective versus creative processing, parallel processing, and lots of other ways to have audio fun with effects. All of those techniques can be implemented in Camelot, and even more, once you get the hang of things.

Wondering where to find that first clue? We’ll give you a hint: you don’t have to look at any Facebook ads to find it. No, indeed, you’ll find all the clues you want in our handy-dandy tutorial on Adding Audio FX. And now that we’re into the next paragraph, we can reveal that this tutorial includes all of the techniques mentioned in the previous paragraph, then goes on to talk about setting up separate house and monitor mix sends, each with their own effects, incorporating external hardware effects, submixing Layers with effects on the submixes – oh, such fun!

It’s all right here, so read up and party on:

Camelot Tutorial 7: Adding Audio Effects

We’re sure some of you are great at languages, too. Show of hands: who knows how to say “Party on!” in Italian? (Audio Modeling employees are excluded from replying, because, well, we’re an Italian company.)

Well, it’s just as important to know how to get your audio where it needs to go, and Camelot offers many different routes, depending on what your needs are. Did you know that each Layer has an audio input, but you can bring external audio into hardware device Items in the Layer, as well? How about the fact you can get a traditional mixer channel strip display for all of the Items in a Layer? Or how to create submixes? Or the existence of “VCA-style” masters in Camelot?

Camelot’s audio mixing and routing capabilities turn out to be really quite extensive, enabling you to create a sophisticated mixing scheme in each Scene, and then, of course, switch Scenes manually or with automation. You can even control many mixing functions through MIDI.

Don’t be the person that just passes right on through town without checking out the local attractions! You may discover inspiration seeing the writing cabin of a famous composer or the childhood home of a great author. And you may discover musical inspiration in our Audio Routing and Mixing tutorial for Camelot. You don’t even have to get in your car for the tutorial, so there’s that. All you have to do is follow this link and you’ll get your mind stretched when you learn how much you can do:

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Camelot has the answer: let the technology run itself, a solution better known as “automation.” There are so many things Camelot can automate for you: starting and stopping playback of prerecorded backing tracks; total reconfiguration of all your software instruments and MIDI controllers with Scene changes; displaying a music score, or lyrics, or performance notes. With Camelot’s Timeline, all these services can be scheduled to happen at exactly the points in each song where they are supposed to occur. Or they can be lined up in order and triggered in order or at will with a MIDI controller, or even a key shortcut.

Camelot is your willing servant, able to act when your eyes and ears and hands and feet and even your mouth are all occupied with other tasks.

And there are bells and whistles, too! You can add fades in and out on your backing tracks control the volume of all the Layers or Scenes in a Song from a single fader, convert backing tracks that are MP3 files into WAV files, and color code components so that one glance tells you what is playing or happening.

You can read all about Camelot’s Timeline and all of its juicy features in this informative and nutritious tutorial:

Camelot Tutorial: The Timeline

Now if we can only figure out how to add an “equipment hauling” automation feature to the Timeline….

One way to think of Camelot is like this long hall of doors – but without all of the comedy. If you know what’s behind each door and how to get from one to the other, you can create for yourself a performance setup that is immensely powerful and sophisticated, yet easy to understand and use.

To help you with this, we have created a new tutorial called, “A Guide to Camelot’s Long Hall Full of Doors With People Dashing In and Out of Them All  of the Time.”

No, we haven’t done that. Well, we have created a tutorial, but that’s not what it’s called. It’s actually called “Camelot Tutorial: Audio Input and Output,” and you can find it here:

Camelot Tutorial: Audio Input and Output

it doesn’t actually deal with all of Camelot’s doors, because it doesn’t really cover MIDI input and output, but we think people don’t realize just how powerful Camelot’s audio input and output structures are, so we have focused on those in this particular tutorial.

And we do present the full picture, from the role of your audio interface and its drivers to Camelot’s audio inputs and outputs and how they are abstracted from your interface. (ab-what? Well, we explain that, too.) Where you set the sample rate and buffer size, where audio I/O shows up in Camelot, plus, of course, a few tips about Very Clever Uses for audio inputs and outputs for those special situations that call for just a little bit more than normal.

What makes Camelot such a useful application is that you can always use it in the simplest, most basic fashion; you can construct complicated, monster setups that do incredible things; or you can mix the two approaches. The resources are there to work in any way that works for you…if you understand what is behind those doors!

Let’s just cut right to the heart of the matter. Which, of course, will lead us to the circulatory system. The beating heart of Camelot is its Layers, which must mean that its Items are the circulatory system, because Items are contained and connected in Layers.

Each Layer is a complete signal path made of Items that deal with MIDI, audio, or even both! You can have Layers that change completely for every different part of a song, you can have other Layers that DON’T change for the duration of the song, you can even have Layers that don’t change for the duration of an entire setlist. And you can have all of these at once. Now doesn’t that make your heart beat just a little bit faster?

To be clear, Items aren’t spleens or kidneys, but they can be software instruments, or reverb and delay effects, or MIDI processors, or any of a number of other functions. You can combine all of these and, rather than ending up with Frankenstein’s monster, you can end up with a monster performance rig.

You can see now how much more important it is to understand biology with Camelot than it ever was in school. And you’ll be pleased to know there’s no thick textbook that starts to look like a blur after only a few minutes. Instead, there’s a nice, clear article that lays out the particulars of Layers and Items in a thorough but digestible form. (Please tell me we’re not on to the digestive system now, because enough is enough with the biology metaphor.)

Trust us, when you start understanding what you can do with Layers and Items, it’ll generate some body heat!

Camelot Tutorial: Layers and Items

Omri’s setup provides a great deal of flexibility from a relatively simple configuration. He gave us all of the juicy details, which we pass on to you with a thorough explanation and high-quality graphics, in this video:

Find out how a top musician puts SWAM and Camelot to work in performance!

Now come back to the 21st century. In this time, YOU are the king (or queen, as you please), Excalibur is Audio Modeling’s powerful Camelot live performance environment, and the knights are all of your instruments, be they hardware-based, software instruments, or even acoustic instruments played into microphones. Using Camelot, you are able to command all of your instruments, in unified fashion, to adventures in performance, and the greater glory of music (ok, yeah, and maybe a little glory for yourself, too, sure, why not?).

Camelot allows you to press a single button (or step on a footswitch) and, in an instant, change presets on all of your instruments at once, for a complete transition to a new section of a song. Or maybe, instead of changing a sound, it might entirely swap out which instruments are being used for that section.

Camelot can cast spells that let you play and make real-time gestures on your MIDI controller and have each instrument be controlled differently, with the gestures scaled or mapped to curves that optimize their effect for each instrument. Camelot even gives you the sorcery to mix and process the audio from all of your instruments; the hardware devices and microphones being connected to audio interface inputs, the software instruments being routed directly.

Camelot’s magic is so awesome that it has Smart Maps which let you recall presets from your hardware devices without any kind of MIDI programming, just choosing your sound from a preset list. It casts such powerful enchantment that, far from being limited to controlling hardware synthesizers, Camelot serves guitarists just as well as synthesists, easily controlling a Line 6 Helix, Kemper Profiler, or Fractal Audio Axe.

Be the king. Be the wizard, too. This is the 21st century, and the magic of Camelot will let you be whoever you want to be. You can start right now with the many incredible magic spells in this tutorial on how to make your hardware and software instruments serve you as knights at your round table:

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• playing with backing tracks
• recalling the right sound preset for each part of a song
• using a single lead voice (your horn or wind controller) to generate harmony parts on different instruments
• setting up MIDI controllers to remotely control software instruments and FX
• displaying music scores

In the past, accomplishing these tasks could be difficult, and you might have given up on some of them because you couldn’t find the right tool with which to do them. You probably bashed your head against a wall once or twice in frustrating attempts to cobble together several devices or software programs only to get some compromised version of what you wanted.

Yeah, we’ve been there, done that. At the end of the day, we only want to play and have fun, and be able to focus on music-making without being distracted by infuriating technicalities. So we created Camelot to let us–and now, you–have more fun and less head bashing.

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