Something I miss: Discontinuous MIDI modulation

[Sendy]

One thing I remember fondly from my Akai S3000XL was it's impressive modulation abilities. There were special modulators that had an '!' before them, such as !Modwheel !Pitchbend !Pressure which would only update on note-on. This was extremely useful.

If you think about it, if you want discontinuous modulation over MIDI, you have velocity - but that is often needed for dynamics. Then you have CCs, but these can suffer from smoothing issues, causing quick ramps rather than instantaneous jumps.

Bottom line: Everything sounds like someone twiddling a knob unless you do some clever workarounds. Does anyone else miss this feature? Continuous modulation is starting to get a bit stale and too ubiquitous for me. One of the benefits of tracking is that any parameter can jump to any value in any amount of time, and it's something that's unusually hard to do in a modern DAW.

[Gone soft]

I can do it easy peasy in Vaz Modular, just put the modulation signal through a s&h module and let the s&h module be triggered by cv trig. This will work polyphonically, that is any previous held notes will retain their modulation value while only new notes are updated with a fresher value which is then held for that note etc. Which is the way velocity works so probably what you're after.

If PureData was userfriendly and easy to put into VSTs that could probably have been an option, I fought hard to make enough sense of it for my purposes (all things modular and then some and preferably running as a VST) but gave up the first time around.

It's possible Max and/or Max for Live can be useful.

And someone more capable than me could whip something up in Reaktor using whatever is the equivalent of an s&h module, I'm sure. Existing ensembles could then be modified/expanded with this sort of functionality. Though that might require a bit more work for the initial effort than you'd want.

I hope I understood you correctly and that my post made sense, I'm somewhat tipsy now so I'm not quite sure...

[PaulSC]

I agree this is a useful but all-too-rare feature. SynthSquad Fusor can sample CCs at note on, and some modulars can be set up to do likewise. (Bazille is one.)

Some synths only update LFO phase at note on, so you can set up a ramp with a rate of (or near) zero and modulate its phase with a CC, effectively sampling the CC. I've used this trick with Alchemy.

[PaulSC]

This is also why I like synths with other fixed-per-note modulators like Random and Alternating values (and u-he Mappers in Alternate mode). Not quite the same thing, of course.