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

SWAM engine is a new and innovative software that uses sophisticated modeling technology to replicate the sound of real instruments. In contrast, to sample playback, modeling technology uses advanced algorithms and physical modeling techniques to create a virtual instrument that responds and behaves like a real one.

So, what does this mean for you as a musician or producer? It means that you can now create music with virtual instruments that sound and behave like real ones. With SWAM instruments, you can create expressive and dynamic performances with all the nuances and articulations of a real instrument. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for music-making, from solo performances to orchestral arrangements.

The key to using SWAM instruments effectively is to understand the differences between sample playback and modeling technology. While sample playback is a static representation of a sound, modeling technology is dynamic and responsive. This means that the sound of a SWAM instrument can change in real-time based on how you play it. This includes changes in tone, volume, and articulation, as well as other nuances such as breath and vibrato.

In the SWAM introduction videos, you will learn how to get started with the software and how to create realistic and expressive performances. You will learn about the different controls and settings that allow you to fine-tune the sound of the instrument to your liking. You will also learn about the different playing techniques and articulations that are available to you, and how to use them effectively in your music.

But the SWAM introduction videos are just the beginning. To really dive into the software and take your music-making to the next level, you can visit the Knowledge Base. Here, you will find a wealth of information and resources that will help you master the software and create amazing music with SWAM instruments.

In conclusion, if you are new to SWAM, you are about to embark on a thrilling journey that will change the way you make music with virtual instruments. With its sophisticated modeling technology, SWAM opens up a whole new world of possibilities for music-making. So get fired up, and get ready to take your music to the next level!

Getting Started with SWAM Solo Brass

Getting Started with SWAM Solo Strings

Getting Started with SWAM Solo Woodwinds

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

• 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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Bobby Bigboddum keeps his plate pretty full. He plays both fretted and fretless electric bass in two wedding bands and a rock band. He also plays acoustic double bass in a jazz group and a bluegrass band. As if that weren’t enough, Bobby is a pretty good singer, too. Because he is so versatile and a solid player and singer, Bobby frequently gets booked to play bass with acts on tour, but finds it exhausting hauling around a heavy bass amp and a big pedalboard of effects to get the various sounds he needs to cover gigs.

Recently, Bobby played a gig with a guitarist who brought nothing to the gig but his guitar, a small audio and MIDI interface and an iPad. He plugged his guitar into an interface instrument input, ran a cable from the interface’s output to the sound system, and sounded great all night, with a different sound for each song, and sometimes several sounds within the same song. Impressed, Bobby asked him about his rig, which is when Bobby was introduced to Audio Modeling’s Camelot Pro.

The guitarist explained that he could host any plugin in Camelot and, since the audio inputs got added in Camelot 2.1, run his guitar through it, using a MIDI pedalboard to change sounds and control parameters like sweeping his wah wah. Bobby instantly knew he had found his new rig. He learned that Camelot ran on macOS and Windows, as well as iOS, and, since he already had a laptop, an audio/MIDI interface, and some great plugins, he decided to run Camelot on that. So Bobby downloaded a copy of Camelot Free and was off to a new adventure. In less than a week he decided to buy a license for Camelot Pro to get its greater power.

Although Bobby’s interface has a nice, clean sound on its instrument input, he wants the grit and beef of a real bass amp, so an amp simulator is the basis of his sound. As we shall see in a moment, getting Bobby’s bass into the world of Camelot is fast and easy.

Bobby uses different amp sounds for each of his bands, and the wedding bands call for a wide variety of different sounds. Camelot’s Layers make it easy for Bobby to accommodate all of these different needs.

Each Layer has its own signal path, with whatever processing and effects plugins Bobby might want, and even the ability to route his bass signal to other layers, if need be. One or more Layers can be stored as a Scene, and Scenes can be changed manually or automatically at specified times. This makes it easy for Bobby to change his bass sound at different points within a song.

But Bobby often wants the same amp sound for a whole song, or, and, in the case of the rock band, for the entire evening. Camelot has two special-purpose sections that make this easy. Layers in Camelot’s Setlist Rack stay the same through every song of the entire set, while Layers in the Song Rack change with each song, but not within a song.

So, for the rock band, Bobby makes a Layer in the Setlist Rack, puts his amp sim there, and selects the interface audio input as the audio input to the amp sim. Since the amp sim has some built-in effects, that’s often all he needs for an entire gig with that band.

Figure 1 – On the right, Bobby has stompbox effects and an amp simulator in a Setlist Rack Layer. On the left, his bass is selected as the audio input to the layer.

There are a few songs, however, with spots needing a sound that is in some way unusual (for example, one song has a section where he uses a Leslie sound). Bobby’s amp sim can call up presets from MIDI program change commands, so when those songs are in the setlist for the night, he has Scenes that send the appropriate program change command to the amp sim. Each Scene has a Layer that sends the appropriate program change command, and an item that routes the MIDI to the Layer in the Setlist Rack that has the amp sim. When he calls a Scene, it changes the amp sim program. He uses this same method to change presets on the amp sim for songs where he plays the fretless electric bass, which needs different settings than his regular bass.

To call up these different Scenes, Bobby turns to Camelot’s Timeline view. Many users (including the guitarist who first showed him Camelot) use the Timeline to play backing tracks during a performance. In that situation, Scene changes can be programmed to happen at exact times while the backing tracks are playing. Bobby places his Scene changes on the Timeline, but doesn’t have backing tracks and doesn’t play the Timeline. Instead, he uses his MIDI foot controller to manually step Camelot to the next Scene change on the Timeline.

Figure 2 – The Timeline (on the left) here holds Scene changes Bobby calls manually. On the right is shown the MIDI command used to advance to the next Scene.

Some of Bobby’s bluegrass and jazz gigs don’t require amplification at all, but the ones that do call for the same sound all night, just like his rock gigs. For these bands, he’s looking for a totally different sound than he can get from an amp sim. Instead of the amp sim, Bobby’s Layer in the Setlist Rack is built around a plugin that emulates a high-class mixing console channel strip, which gives him the sound of a nice recording preamp, plus EQ and compression.

Figure 3 – Bobby’s basic rig for his bluegrass gigs is a nice channel strip (shown on the R), followed by a graphic EQ he uses to adjust for each room. Since he uses the same sound all night, he puts everything in the Setlist Rack.

Bobby has a pickup on his double bass, but sometimes it works out better to use a microphone. So he has two copies of his jazz and bluegrass Camelot Setlists, one copy with levels, EQ, and compression settings optimized for the pickup, the other identical but with settings optimized for the microphone. (He tried just having separate Scenes, instead of separate Setlists, but he found having so many Scenes confusing.) He also has a graphic EQ plugin that follows the channel strip, which he uses to make adjustments at each gig for the sound of the particular room. There are a few rooms he works regularly, and he simply stored additional copies of his Setlist documents named for those venues. Bobby can go to a gig and use either a pickup or a microphone, with perfect correction for the room at regular gigs – all by doing nothing more than opening the right Camelot document at the beginning of the night.

The wedding band gigs are a whole different story. The band plays well-known songs and tries to come as close as possible to the original versions, so Bobby needs a different sound for each and every song. The Setlist Rack is not as much help to him on these gigs, so he relies more on putting his amp sim or channel strip (depending on the demands of the gig) in a Layer in his Song Rack, where it changes for each song. As before, when there are special needs in the middle of a song, he uses Scene changes to let him bring other sounds in and out.

Having all of his sounds for all of his bands instantly available in Camelot comes in very handy in one other way. When Bobby is on the road doing a tour, he often needs to be learning new material, sometimes for additions to the setlist, sometimes for other upcoming tours or gigs. Camelot has a Timeline view that many users (including the guitarist who first showed him Camelot) use to play backing tracks during a performance. In that situation, Scene changes can be programmed to happen at exact times while the backing tracks are playing.

Figure 4 – Bobby practices new songs by playing over a recording or a minus-bass mix of the song as a backing track. He also can program scene changes as he learns the song.

But instead of using the Timeline for programmed changes, Bobby uses it for rehearsal. He gets recordings of the songs he needs to learn and inserts them as backing tracks in yet another copy of one of his Setlist documents. He creates a new Song with a backing track for each piece he has to learn. He runs it as many times as necessary, stopping to program Scene changes where necessary, then moves to the next Song. Since he works while listening over headphones, he is able to learn while traveling, in motel rooms before or after a gig, or anywhere, really, that he can have his bass with him and play along. If he needs a sound he doesn’t already have, he creates a new Scene, adds whatever plugins he needs, and then stores the Scene as a template, which he can easily import to any of his existing Setlists.

When Bobby sings, his microphone goes directly to the sound system on larger gigs, but for some of the smaller gigs the bluegrass band often does, he plugs his mic into his interface’s second audio input and selects that as the audio input to another Layer in the Setlist Rack, in which he has put another channel strip plugin. He usually sends a mix of his bass and vocal out a single interface output, but there have been occasions when he has routed them to separate outputs. This is exactly the kind of flexibility that convinced Bobby to try Camelot Pro in the first place.

Figure 5 – When Bobby sings, as well as playing bass, his Setlist Rack has a second layer for processing vocals. Note the addition of reverb after the vocal channel strip.

Sometimes people think bass players have it easy. It seems to them that only having four strings instead of six is easier, and that nobody expects lots of crazy sounds and effects out of the bass player. But the art of playing bass lies in large part on how the part is played: the sound has to be right, the touch has to be right, and the phrasing has to be exactly what is needed at any moment. Bobby’s favorite quote is from Little Feat’s Lowell George, who noted on an album cover, “Do not underestimate, nor take lightly, this thing we call ‘bass.’” Bobby understands his role as a bassist very well, which is why he now relies on Camelot Pro to give him all of the tools he needs (beyond his fingers and instrument, of course) to be the player Lowell George was talking about. Judging from his packed gig schedule, no one is underestimating Bobby, or taking him lightly.