KVR Audio

present · Post by **present** » Thu Nov 17, 2011 10:28 pm

Hi can anyone recommend a synth with per-channel pitch bend? I'm looking to use iPad Geosynth as a fretless controller, so gotta find a VST with pitch-bend independent per-note... must be something out there?

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:38 am

What you're describing is common for MIDI guitar-controllers. They will usually have two modes, POLY where the guitar performance gets turned into a single channel polyphonic performance. Pitch bend is the same for every note/voice playing in this case. And the better mode, MONO where each string gets its own separate MIDI channel, and therefore have independent pitch bends.

Poly-Ana does this. ImpOSCAR does too I believe. Just set them to a Unison patch and send in multiple channels of MIDI and they'll create a separately controlled mono-synth for each channel.

There's no doubt lots of others.

You can also do this in your host, by using separate instances of a softsynth. Just send one voice to each track/synth. (And a guitar controller takes care of the voice assignment. I'm not sure how that would translate to multitouch, if at all. Can your app output MIDI on separate channels per finger? If so, the guitar controller method should work.)

present · Post by **present** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 11:21 am

Thanks Admiral I will check out your synth! So in MONO mode I can still play polyphony?

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 4:51 pm

present wrote:Thanks Admiral I will check out your synth! So in MONO mode I can still play polyphony?

Yes, but only if it receives a MIDI performance on multiple channels at the same time. Guitar controllers do this -- they send 6 mono channels, one for each string. Maybe your iPad app can do too this on 4 channels, I'm not sure.

This is automatically enabled on any Poly-Ana program that's set to Unison (monophonic) mode. Also make sure Polyphony is set to no more than 2 voices (so that there's at least 6 available voices. Actually in your case 3 voice unison should work as well to give you 4 available voices.)

But the big question is still, does your controller send each note as one channel, or all on the same channel? If you'd like feel free to email me a zipped .mid file of a multitouch performance and I'd be happy to take a look at it and tell you if it'll work. If you do, be sure to include lots of note-independent pitch bends in your performance. You can email me at "aq AT admiralquality.com"

present · Post by **present** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 4:54 pm

Hi thanks again for the info, Geo definitely DOES do the MIDI on different channels thing so I should be able to get it to work fine, fingers X'd! Will have a go this weekend

NothanUmber · Post by **NothanUmber** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 6:52 pm

Yes, Poly-Ana and impOSCar (I, II unfortunately does not support the mode yet) and I think also Synthix are some of the few synths that support polyphonic pitch bends.
Those have mainly the "midi guitar" concept in mind though so there are a few restrictions when playing with one of the recently emerging "3d-key" controllers: Polyphony is limited to 6 channels and at least Poly-Ana does currently "only" support pitch bend, polyphonic aftertouch and of course velocity as per voice realtime modulation parameter.
The developer is extremely dedicated and helpful regarding customer support though, so if a necessary feature is not supported out of the box it might be worth speaking to him...

U-he is also considering to add support for "multi mono mode" to their synths at some point (currently it was not important enough though, so Poly-Ana, ImpOSCar and Synthix are more suitable for the purpose atm.)

At some point EigenD, the software that comes with the Eigenharps might become interesting for users of other controllers that allow several modulation dimentions per key.
It's an open source ( https://github.com/Eigenlabs/EigenD ) host for plugins, so called "agents" that are not limited by the constraints of MIDI, VST or AU - they invented their own concept that allows a higher resolution, much higher amounts of data and more flexibility regarding data types that can be transferred between agents, it offers some yet to be explored features like several people controlling the same synth setup with multiple instruments over the network etc. (It still supports MIDI, VSTs and AU plugins as fallback as those won't go away for the time being)
Here a (not remotely complete) list of some of the agents currently available:
http://www.eigenlabs.com/wiki/1.3/The_EigenD_Reference/

The open source release does not contain all parts though - e.g. the commercial binary-only edition contains a graphical controller application that controls the system via OSC, additional sample content etc. This can currently only be obtained together with an Eigenharp atm. - but perhaps that changes at some point. (The modular synth modules and some physical modelling components like cello, clarinette etc. are contained in the open source release though)
Binaries are currently also only supplied for the commercial package - you have to compile the open source release yourself for your PC/Mac.

Currently it's still "a little bit" difficult to configure (you need a textual configuration language for that), a graphical configuration environment that allows to build new setups up from scratch and modify existing ones is about to come out soon though (will also only be in the commercial package...).
So for non-Eigenharpists it's perhaps not the immediately most accessible package on the planet (as all existing pre configured setups are meant to be used with Eigenharps and building new ones without the graphical editor is not really trivial) but conceptionally it's definitely not limited to Eigenharps and definitely worth to keep an eye on as it might be the long term answer to the question how you can get the most out of controllers with multi-dimensional expression capabilities!

Greetings,
NothanUmber

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 7:05 pm

And again, most any synth can be made to do this simply by loading however many instances of the synth you need for your voices. (6 for guitars, 4 I believe is the maximum you get from multi-touch interfaces.)

Load the same patch into all 6 (or 4 ) instances. (Or you could use different patches too! Might be interesting.)

Send the MIDI from your controller to each track/instrument, and use your host's MIDI filtering feature (if it has one) to filter one channel to each track. Presto, any synth can be guitar-controlled!

Pitch bend range is important to set right between the guitar controller and instrument. Most guitar controllers I'm aware of default to +/- 1 octave range. With the pad controller this won't matter as much, but again you'll want each mono-synth set to the same PB range.

NothanUmber · Post by **NothanUmber** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 7:18 pm

Yes, definitely can be done, will require (in some cases much) more (CPU and RAM) resources and preset tweaking is less convenient as you have to keep up to 16 instances synchronized... (The latter can be automated to some extend with hosts like Bidule but it's still not a "turn knobs while playing and listing" experience, it's more "turn knob, click synchronize instances, wait, play, turn knob, click synchronize etc."
Just chaining automation parameters is not sufficient for more complex synths as not all tuning options are exposed via automation parameters, so the sound of your instances will differ more and more over time, so at some point you need a complete resync (=save preset on master instance, reload it in slave instances).
So out of the box support for multi mono mode is imho much more convenient.

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 7:21 pm

NothanUmber wrote:Yes, definitely can be done, will require (in some cases much) more (CPU and RAM) resources and preset tweaking is less convenient as you have to keep up to 16 instances synchronized... (The latter can be automated to some extend with hosts like Bidule but it's still not a "turn knobs while playing and listing" experience, it's more "turn knob, click synchronize instances, wait, play, turn knob, click synchronize etc." So out of the box support for multi mono mode is imho much more convenient.

Yep, it's a work-around and definitely a bit unwieldy to manage. You'd want to do your patch editing in advance.

present · Post by **present** » Sat May 19, 2012 10:07 pm

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I recently got a new MIDI interface for the iPad so I'm trying again... can't get any of these synths to do it!

Been playing with Poly-Ana just now but in Unison mode, with 2 voices selected I can't get more than 1 voice to play at a time

I've uploaded a bit of test MIDI from Cubase here.. had the same problem in Ableton too. Looking at the Cubase event list it looks fine ie. the notes are coming in on different channels so I don't know wtf is going on!

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?bbn3cj3u32jlbq8

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Sat May 19, 2012 11:03 pm

present wrote:Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I recently got a new MIDI interface for the iPad so I'm trying again... can't get any of these synths to do it!

Been playing with Poly-Ana just now but in Unison mode, with 2 voices selected I can't get more than 1 voice to play at a time

I've uploaded a bit of test MIDI from Cubase here.. had the same problem in Ableton too. Looking at the Cubase event list it looks fine ie. the notes are coming in on different channels so I don't know wtf is going on!

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?bbn3cj3u32jlbq8

I will take a look at that tomorrow, stepping away from the music system for tonight. First thing you might want to check though is that Cubase isn't filtering the MIDI data to a single channel. Make sure it says ALL rather than any number on the channel picker.

Guaranath · Post by **Guaranath** » Sun May 20, 2012 5:13 am

This may help you to understand what Midi signals Geo synth is spitting out:

http://rrr00bb.blogspot.com/2012/04/ide ... tocol.html

This is the blog of one of the key minds behind Geo synth and most certainly the mind behind its Midi protocol.

Edit: I just noticed the authors newest post mentions some Midi compatibilities.. and also offers a similar suggestions to those aforementioned in this post - setting up 4 instances...

present · Post by **present** » Sun May 20, 2012 8:38 pm

I gave up and used 6 instances of Synth1 in the end. If anyone can help me figure out why Poly-Ana and Imposcar aren't working as expected I'd appreciate it!

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Sun May 20, 2012 9:59 pm

present wrote:I gave up and used 6 instances of Synth1 in the end. If anyone can help me figure out why Poly-Ana and Imposcar aren't working as expected I'd appreciate it!

Sorry, been away from my music system so still haven't had a chance to take a look at the MIDI.

Did you verify that Cubase's channel setting on the MIDI track was set to ALL instead of a number? If there's a number there, it changes the incoming channel to that. ALL lets MIDI pass through on the original channel(s) it came in on.

Glad to hear the multiple instance thing is working for you. That trick works with virtually any instrument plug-in.

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Sun May 20, 2012 10:24 pm

present wrote:I gave up and used 6 instances of Synth1 in the end. If anyone can help me figure out why Poly-Ana and Imposcar aren't working as expected I'd appreciate it!

I was able to take a look at your MIDI just now in Reaper, and every event appears to be on Channel 1.

Again, make sure Cubase's channel filter is set to ALL instead of 1 for that track, and try it again.

And of course, your guitar controller has to be transmitting in MONO mode, not POLY mode where it puts everything on one channel. I assume that's not the issue as it's working for you with the multiple instance method.

Synth with per-channel pitch bend?