My weirdest suggestion yet!

[Mr D]

Hi folks,

This is a pretty far out / weird suggestion / request, so please bear with me:

Picture this:

You have MXXX loaded up.

In the matrix, you have 5 instances of MPowerSynth loaded.

Each MPS has a different sound.

Now, play a 5 note chord on your keyboard.

Probably sounds like a big mess.

But imagine this:

MXXX receives that midi chord at it's input, but says: "I'm not going to pass this on until you release the lowest note of the chord".

Once you release the lowest note, it'll pass on the bottom midi note (the one you released) to MPS-1, the next note up to MPS-2, the next to MPS-3, then 4, and the top note to MPS-5.

Do you see what i'm getting at here? A way for a keyboard player to play live, per voice multi-timbral chords.

As far as i know, this has never been done before.

Thoughts?

[andrewernick]

would love that! Each powersynth can also play a chord with the 3 oscillators, so you could have multi timbral chord playing. also include the option to use a scale manipulator for midi notes!

[Mr D]

Sure, you could have each MPS play a chord, but that might start to sound weird. But some intervals will most likely sound good, or at least interesting, 4ths and 5th mostly, especially if they're subtle.

To have a scale manipulator starts to get very complicated and beyond the scope of what i had in mind!

What would be interesting would be to have different arpegiattors on each (or some) notes.

But do you see my point? The technique of playing a chord and immediately releasing the lowest note is quite easy to get used to.

This might sound like some esoteric request, but it opens up totally new sound possibilities that are otherwise impossible to realize in real time playing. You could start to get into an almost orchestral mind-set with different timbres for different harmonies. You could also have only portamento for some notes and not others. All interesting, unique sounds that would normally take lots of programming and could never be played in realtime.

There's the small issue of what happens when you only play a 3 note chord or whatever, but you could start off with some simple rules like bottom always goes to MPS1, top always goes to MPS-last etc. I used 5 MPSs as an example but often 3 or 4 would be enough.

I think 4 would be cool, as you could have:

lowest notes goes to MPS-1 & MPS-2 (with MPS-1 just being an octave lower sub and MPS-2 being a different bass sound with arp), middle notes (however many) going to MPS-3, top note going to MPS-4.

Just some ideas............

[wilx]

This is actually quite common in the world of orchestral virtual instruments - some kontakt libraries will spread a five note chord (for example) in real-time, amongst the different string sections so it's properly distributed, rather than having the basses and cellos play all five notes in the chord etc. So it's not an unusual request, if that helps!

[Mr D]

Great, do they also use the technique of not triggering until a note is released?

If not, how do they know when to trigger the chord (so, how do they know there are no more midi notes coming)?

As far as i know it's never been done with synthesizers, although i guess you could tweak those Kontakt instruments to do it.

EDIT: i guess you could also do it by building in a buffer, like 70ms, so that it'll wait for more midi notes after the first one before triggering. If the buffer was adjustable you could tweak it to be most comfortable.

Just thinking aloud...........

[MeldaProduction]

Now that one is superweird . I'm afraid it's so weird that I just cannot spare development time for that.
For the record, what NI does is probably just spreading the instruments based on what key you play and how many keys you are already holding. This low key release thing is basically your invention imho , and I doubt a bit that many people would find that too useful really.