Video: Sound Designer Adriano Clemente Explores Roli’s Innovative RISE Keyboard
The NYC-based artist discusses and demonstrates how the revolutionary MIDI controller changes how he creates sounds.
Adriano Clemente is a Brooklyn-based sound designer, Dubspot instructor, and DJ known for his genre-bending sets of techno, IDM, ambient, punk rock, and synth-wave music.
Upon arriving in NYC from Rome six years ago, Clemente became obsessed with the sound of the city and regularly recorded its voice with various field recorders and mics before taking the recordings home and tweaking them with his other obsession, technology. As a sound designer, Clemente is always searching for new and innovative instruments and technology to mould the sounds he creates—which is where the RoliSeaboard RISE comes in, as he explains:
“What the RISE has done is really make me focus on expression when I input notes,” he says. “When I strike a sound on the RISE, it’s like I can see a composition unfolding in slow motion. I’ll grab a chord or a single note and focus on its expression by doing slow movements up and down the key along the Y axis, which lets me open and close filters. Then I combine that with movements along the horizontal axis, which bends pitch. Even when you’re just striking one key with one finger, you’re basically controlling three things at once. You’re producing a sound, modulating it, and also bending pitch. Usually, you would need pitch-bend wheels and faders and other things to do all this at once. Here I’m doing it on one key.”
You can find out more about Clemente’s experience in NYC and how he incorporates the Seaboard RISE into his setup by watching the video above.