Manybass keyswitching

[Winston]

Afraid I'm having difficulty understanding how to do keyswitching in Manybass as well as how to access the articulations described on pages 18 - 22 in the manual.

For instance, how does one do slides?

I have a 61 key keyboard.

Thanks.

[Gregjazz]

Does your keyboard have octave switching buttons? The slides are at the bottom of the MIDI key range (D-2 to B-2).

Check out the presets that use keyswitching (they have the letters "KS" at the end of the preset name, and are towards the end of the list) to see how it works.

To load a soundset into a keyswitch slot, simply select an empty keyswitch slot, then load the desired soundset from the soundset browser, and then by holding down the left mouse button on the entry next to the keyswitch slot (it reads "OFF" by default) and dragging, you can scroll through the MIDI notes to get to the desired MIDI note for the keyswitch.

Please let me know if you have any more questions.

[reflekshun]

How do the slides work? from D-2 to B-2? Does this mean there are only 11 slide intervals to choose from? That bit scared me a bit hehe so I thought I'd ask before go ahead with this awesome sounding bass

[Gregjazz]

Oh, those are slides as in "swoop slides" I guess you could call them, which are fast slides across the entire (or large portion of) fretboard. There actually used to be more of them, but I had to pick out only the best to make room for the keyswitch spaces.

There's a slide towards the beginning of this demo: http://www.manytone.com/music/manybassdemo3.mp3

And one when the drums come in on this demo: http://www.manytone.com/music/manybassdemo5.mp3

P.S. a cool little trick I use sometimes: if I need a slide in a specific tempo, I'll play the first quarter note of a slide up, and then a quarter note of a slide down. That way you get a full swooping slide that's in tempo, and it actually works suprisingly seamless.

[Winston]

Thanks for the quick reply, Greg.

My keyboard does have octave switching, but it only pertains to its internal sounds. It does not transmit octave switching to external sounds via midi. Which means that I cannot access any of the sounds that are mapped to keys below c1. It would have been nice if they were assignable since I'm sure many folks only have 61 keys.

I was able to drag and assign a keyswitch within my range to the soundsets as you describe. If that technique was described in the manual, I must have missed it.

[Gregjazz]

Yeah, as you have found out, you can adjust the MIDI notes that the keyswitches respond to, making them within the range of your keyboard. Or I believe you can also assign your mod wheel or other controller to a keyswitch by using the MIDI learn function.

So the octave switch only applies to internal sounds, but it doesn't affect the MIDI output--that's unfortunate. However, you can use the coarse tuning adjustment in ManyBass (top left corner of the controls) to put it down an octave or two. You could even use the MIDI learn to assign the coarse tuning to your mod wheel or other controller. (my keyboard has a bunch of assignable knobs on it--I can never remember what controller number they're set to, which makes MIDI learn capabilities a huge time saver)

[Winston]

Unfortunately, coarse tuning only seems to go down one octave max, which still doesn't let me access the slides which are located in the -2 octave.

[kronsilds]

Winston, I think you can put a midi filter just before the manybass vsti in the midi chain of your sequencer to automatically transpose down the midi notes.

Gregjazz, if we put the keyswitch on a note on which there's a sample, what happens to that sample?

[Gregjazz]

Gregjazz, if we put the keyswitch on a note on which there's a sample, what happens to that sample?

The sample won't play, but rather trigger the keyswitch. You can also use the MIDI learn function with the keyswitches to set a controller number to them. (useful if you have buttons/knobs/sliders on your controller you would rather have control keyswitches)