MPE support in Ableton Live 11 beta

[adamj]

I've been testing the new MPE support in Ableton Live 11 beta. Here's what I found:
The expected u-he plugins (Hive, Diva, Repro, Bazille, and ACE) work fine with polyphonic pitch bend, polyphonic aftertouch ("pressure"), and polyphonic CC74 ("slide") via Control A or B.

As you may be aware, the mod wheel doesn't work. Neither CC1 from my hardware controller nor from Ableton's automation work. I'm guessing this is because it's expecting per note/channel CC1 messages rather than handled "globally". Strangely, CC1 messages on channel 1 are causing the mod wheel in the plugin UI to update, but it has no effect on the sound. If I click and drag the wheel in the UI, then it works.

I have compared this behavior to several other MPE plugins, including Arturia Pigments, Madrona Labs Alto, Newfangled Audio Generate, UVI Falcon, and Xfer Records Serums. In all of these plugins, pitch, pressure, slide, and mod wheel all work as expected. So I view the current u-he mod wheel behavior as a bug. I will be happy to test out any changes in behavior here in upcoming u-he releases.

Other than that, MPE support seems to be working great in Live 11 and I'm very excited to explore the new sound design possibilities in my DAW of choice!

[Viktor [TUC]]

Hi Adam, our plugins are not fully MPE compatible, I should point that out. You can find the details on our "Multichannel MIDI" implementation in each plugin's user guide.
In your example: With our plugins, CC1 messages on channel 1 only have an effect on notes played on channel 1, so if your note happens to play on another channel, then there's no effect.

Viktor

[adamj]

Thanks for the explanation, Viktor. Makes sense. It sounds like everything is behaving as expected in Live 11.

Urs said MPE support is coming in a Zebra 3 feature request thread. Is there a chance we'll see it in other plugins sooner? You have to test it in Repro or Hive first, right?

Adam

[benburling]

Hi - per note pitch bend doesnt work without right clicking ENABLE MPE mode on the plugin box and then setting pitch bend to plus 48 and minus 48 - for anyone those wondering... (unrelated to above)

[jbone1313]

I enabled MPE mode on the plugin box and set pitch bend to 48 +/-. But, I am not getting good results. The tuning is all weird, and the pitch is, like, wobbly, when sending per-note pitch bend.

When I send the same exact data to Serum, it works perfectly.

Am I missing something?

Many thanks in advance.

[Yorrrrrr]

This is one of the main reasons TAL's plugins have taken the place of u-he as my favorite synth plugins. I hope full MPE is implemented in u-he's lineup, specially RePro (along with Apple Silicon/Big Sur support).

[jbone1313]

After some discussion on the Ableton beta forum, we think this might be an Ableton bug. A bug report was submitted.

[zerocrossing]

I sometimes think about moving back to Live, but then I think about Bitwig’s Grid.

[jbone1313]

I sometimes think about moving back to Live, but then I think about Bitwig’s Grid.

I sometimes think about moving to Bitwig. Then I think about Ableton Push (am aware of the Bitwig Push scripts, but I’m old and don’t want to fiddle as much). And all the crazy devices I have built.

I wish Ableton would do PDC as well as Bitwig and some other QOL improvements that have been needing attention for like 15 years.

[MitchK1989]

honestly you just install the driven by moss extensions and then the push more or less "just works" the same way it does in ableton at least for the push 1 (I don't think the screen works as well on the push 2)

source: I have a push 1 and switched to bitwig a few months ago

[octaveup]

My Push (2) has tied me in to Ableton, which whilst I love 99% of it, there's 1% that drives me absolutely nuts

Finally comping - let's see if Live 11 helps elsewhere too, or if we then suffer another 2 years without major updates before being hit with another costly version upgrade

-

Edit: 10.1 came out in May 2019, so I guess it's more like a year and half, to be precise