Support Polyphonic Aftertouch as a modulation source
complete
Nikolozi
At the moment MIDI Source only supports Channel Aftertouch and I consider it more important than Polyphonic Aftertouch as MPE spec uses Channel Aftertouch. And eventually Mela will support MPE.
However, some users have hardware controllers that support Polyphonic Aftertouch and it's probably a good idea to add support for it in Mela.
Nikolozi
in progress
Those with the MIDI controllers that support Poly Aftertouch please try out the Build 196 and let me know if it works as expected. No rush though, I won't be releasing Mela 4.8 at least until the second week of January.
Nikolozi
complete
Shipped with Mela 4.8 update.
Samuel Lindeman
Both regular Channel Aftertouch and Polyphonic Aftertouch are correctly registered in the midi-logger when I use my CME X-Key.
It is how ever a bit tricky to 'see' the Poly-Aftertouch value per note in the 'Midi Source' module and I've honestly not yet even tried to create a polyphonic preset that utilizes per note modulation controlled by Poly-Aftertouch.
Cheers!
Nikolozi
Samuel Lindeman: Thanks for trying it out. By "tricky to see" do you mean you weren't seeing the indicator (the small circle) move?
Some notes:
- The MIDI Source and all other visual indicators usually show the graph for the voice that was triggered last.
- If a MIDI Source is on a MIDI lane then it's really a monophonic modulator and uses the last poly aftertouch value received.
- If a MIDI Source is on an Instrument lane then it should modulate polyphonically. And visual indicator will only show the latest voice activity.
Would you be able to create a small MIDI file with your keyboard that I can use to test? I'm manually creating a poly-aftertouch signal using Logic's List Editor and may not be representative of what it's like to play with a poly-aftertouch capable keyboard.
Samuel Lindeman
Nikolozi: The midi-source module was on a midi-lane. Will try to put it on an instrument lane and check as the purpose of polyphonic after-touch is to well, apply the modulation individually to each note.
The Midi-Monitor correctly shows poly aftertouch for each of the notes on both instrument and midi-lanes so it should work properly when the modulation source is added on the instrument lane.
My guess is that CPU load would go up a bit if an additional 'poly-point' was drawn in all the modulators.
It works as expected when the midi-source module is loaded on the instrument track but as you mentioned it only shows the 'dot' for the last note that is triggered.
Cheers!
Nikolozi
Samuel Lindeman:
> Will try to put it on an instrument lane and check as the purpose of polyphonic after-touch is to well, apply the modulation individually to each note.
Even MIDI Source with the Velocity input works as a monophonic modulator when on a MIDI lane. This is because MIDI and Audio lanes have no voice management features in them.
(As a side note, I wanted to make MIDI lanes participate in polyphony directly with the rest of the synth but things get super confusing once you have a complex MIDI processor chain. Some new notes are generated and some disappear after each module, and it's hard to come up with a clear rule on how the voices are allocated and deallocated according to the notes appearing/disappearing. In an ideal world, there would be no lane types.)
>It works as expected when the midi-source module is loaded on the instrument track but as you mentioned it only shows the 'dot' for the last note that is triggered.
Good to hear.
>My guess is that CPU load would go up a bit if an additional 'poly-point' was drawn in all the modulators.
It may not be too much more CPU, but I guess a general problem needs to be solved here. Firstly the UI/UX one. How many voice indicators are visually useful? At the moment everything only displays the latest voice's activity. This includes dial modulation indicators and things like LFO's oscilloscope graph. It might be too chaotic to display 8 or even 4 morphed sinusoids for an LFO. My assumption is that the user wants the last voice's indicators to know what's going on, especially when "debugging" their presets.
Maybe displaying up to 4 indicators for a MIDI Source is not a problem but things get weird if the user is also modulating the Bias and Gain parameters and then I'll need to display 4 different curves for each voice also. It will become really hard to follow what's going on. Anyway, I think it's getting off-topic. But I'm generally also interested addressing this issues always display latest voice vs trying to show more info about other voices.
Nikolozi
in progress
Those with the MIDI controllers that support Poly Aftertouch please try out the Build 196 and let me know if it works as expected. No rush though, I won't be releasing Mela 4.8 at least until the second week of January.
Nikolozi
under review
David Parlin
Support for PolyAT would be huge for me from a performance standpoint. PolyAT is generally far easier to implement than full MPE (you don’t need to mess around with all of the MIDI channel mess). Even though I have MIDI hardware that can do both, I find that I almost never use other aspects of MPE and just stick with the independent pressure per-note for added expression.
One relatively simple way to add this to the UI would be to just make the MIDI Source module respond to PolyAT
and
ChannelAT (I haven’t seen any hardware that ever sends out both signals) when the module is set to Aftertouch and added to an instrument lane in a Poly patch. Most soft synths that I have used that support PolyAT just support both PolyAT and ChannelAT simultaneously without any special UI.Nikolozi
David Parlin: Thanks for the detailed feedback. I'll keep this in mind. As you said, it might be easier to add this sooner than MPE.