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Sounds: Is it possible to support per key pressure/yaw/roll in Alchemy?

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written by: NothanUmber

Thanks for the tips!

A search for "aftertouch" only brought up a thread where such a belcanto feature was promised for a future release. That was some months ago, so perhaps it's already available now and just undocumented...

After going through my virtual instruments I finally found one that is able to cope with polyphonic per key (midi channel) pitch bends, filter cutoff modulations etc.: Poly-Ana. It offers a "midi guitar mode" that is exactly what is needed for the Eigenharps. Fortunately this is still one of the best sounding analog style VSTs so it presumably will move up to position one of my Eigenharp synthesizer goto list for the mean time. (I think they also released a MacOS X version of this plugin)

So all I can do now is to patiently wait until the polyphonic midi channel bug of the Windows version of EigenD is fixed and we can enable the MIDI aftertouch output for Picos.
Will play with velocity based mono patches and the native EigenD instruments in the mean time.

written by: NothanUmber

Fri, 4 Jun 2010 20:00:40 +0100 BST

As the Alchemy Player is the officially bundled "goto synth" for the Eigenharps it was my first intuition to use (the full version of) Alchemy in order to try to build patches that make use of the possibilities of the Pico.
One of the best features of the Eigenharps is the per key roll/yaw/pressure feature so naturally I wanted to use this in my patches.
Pressure: The wiki states that pressure is mapped to note on/note off for the Pico, so pressure changes after the initial keypress are ignored. Is there a chance to additionally map the pressure to another midi parameter (e.g. polyphonic aftertouch or a continuous controller)? (I looked at the description of the AudioUnit agent but couldn't find such an option on first sight).
Roll/yaw: Those are currently mapped to pitch bending and the secondary modwheel CC. I hoped that I could send per key infos via multiple channels. But on first sight Alchemy seems to ignore which channel is used for which CC, they seem to be applied globally instead of being limited to the voices that belong to the note(s) on this particular channel. (So presumably per key roll/yaw wouldn't work even if the polyphonic channel mode bug in the Windows version of EigenD will be fixed one day?).
I also experimented with the parameter mapping but this also seems only to work on a global level and not per key.

Is there a possibility to get per key roll/yaw/pressure to work with Alchemy (or any other existing VST synthesizer)?


written by: barnone

Fri, 4 Jun 2010 23:54:10 +0100 BST

I know on the Alpha that both channel pressure and poly aftertouch are sent via midi but ironically not directly to a hosted AU (yet)

There was some discussion about this that the pico was NOT sending it via midi. Obviously a configuration change. I forgot if there was a belcanto command solution to enable it. I think there was, search for 'aftertouch" in the forum.

Many AUs don't support per key events. I was hard pressed to find an AU synth that does. One I found was MOTU MX4 and was able to hook up Alpha and get poly aftertouch and channel pressure. However because it needed the midi connection and not directly hosted as AU, I needed to host it somewhere else.

Ableton Live did not work because ironically, Live strips all poly touch events. So I ended up hosting the AU MOTO MX4 in Bidule and that worked.

Sorry if this is confusing but such is the landscape of poly-aftertouch.


written by: NothanUmber

Sat, 5 Jun 2010 16:03:17 +0100 BST

Thanks for the tips!

A search for "aftertouch" only brought up a thread where such a belcanto feature was promised for a future release. That was some months ago, so perhaps it's already available now and just undocumented...

After going through my virtual instruments I finally found one that is able to cope with polyphonic per key (midi channel) pitch bends, filter cutoff modulations etc.: Poly-Ana. It offers a "midi guitar mode" that is exactly what is needed for the Eigenharps. Fortunately this is still one of the best sounding analog style VSTs so it presumably will move up to position one of my Eigenharp synthesizer goto list for the mean time. (I think they also released a MacOS X version of this plugin)

So all I can do now is to patiently wait until the polyphonic midi channel bug of the Windows version of EigenD is fixed and we can enable the MIDI aftertouch output for Picos.
Will play with velocity based mono patches and the native EigenD instruments in the mean time.



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