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malletKAT Quick Start Guide
ARTICULATIONS
When you first started studying how to play the mallets, you had to learn the layout of the
“land”. The malletKAT is much the same, only it has an enormous “land”. For example,
you can learn how to bend notes like a guitar or flute player, or add vibrato to your sound.
You can dampen notes like a vibe player. You can control how long a tone lasts or change
the octave on the fly. You can have several instrument sounds layered on top of each
other and you can control these sounds by how hard or soft you are playing. Each of these
articulations require a gesture movement on your part, and incorporating these new moves
into your playing style with allow you to express how you feel in ways that will “move” you!
This is the heart and soul of malletKAT playing.
KITs
The malletKAT has built in KITs called Factory and User KITS. A KIT is a collection of
parameters that are stored for each kit. These parameters control the octave range,
the length of a notes sound, the name of the kit, program changes, etc. Factory Kits
are permanently built in, so you can not erase them. User kits are your own parameter
configurations. There are 128 Factory Kits and 128 User Kits.
If you have the malletKAT KS, then you will be using USER Kits. If you are using a General
MIDI External synthesizer, then the Factory Kits are where you want to begin. Everything is
ready to go. You can of course, create your own kits as you go.
MIDI CONTROL
MIDI is the digital language that allows us to communicate our playing into sounds. A
“controller” like the malletKAT allows us to manipulate the instrument in specific ways.
We can train the pads to respond to dynamics the way we like. We can tell the malletKAT
to remember what sound we want on what pad and how loud it is going to play. We can
send our real time playing information to a computer using a sequencer software program
so that our performance can be played back or even scored automatically. The possibilities
are endless. I promised to leave out most of the technical stuff, but I must tell you that
the malletKAT is a powerful MIDI controller. You will be able to do things you haven’t even
imagined yet!
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