Amazing way to do expressive manual vibrato! MUST TRY!

[JO512]

I have always found it nearly impossible to get a decent natural-sounding manual vibrato with a pitch wheel or strip like on my Komplete Kontrol S61 MK1.

I recently stumbled on an amazingly good and simple way to do it, using a cheap contact microphone plugged into my audio interface! I have a couple of those ultra-cheap, pre-wired, red and black contact mics you can get on Amazon that already have the TRS jack. You can get a couple for a few dollars. Plug one into your audio interface. I use the instrument input on my Scarlett Solo. If you then simply push on the mic with a bit of finger pressure, or squeeze it, or tap it, you get a signal. Press and release slowly and repeatedly and you get a nice low frequency wave. Faster and you get a higher frequency wave.

What makes it perfect for vibrato is that you can't produce a DC offset by pressing and holding. It returns to zero, which is exactly what we want for pitch bending for vibrato. This keeps you from sounding out of tune. The bend always cycles around zero. You can get very low frequencies though, like 1 cycle per second.

Once you have this signal, you need a way to turn it into a pitch-bend MIDI signal or a CC that you can use to modulate a master tuning knob or something. The best way I found to do this is to make a simple Reaktor patch that takes the input signal into a "multiply" module with a knob attached to adjust the amplitude, send that signal to an A/E (audio to event) module, and send that straight to a pitchbend-out module. My DAW is Reaper. I put this contact mic input and the Reaktor patch on a separate track, turn off the master send so I don't hear the contact mic signal, and then route a send from this track to my target instrument track, this send being stripped of audio, only sending MIDI. Keep in mind that with this setup, if you record, you must record the audio on this mic track. That's your pitch bend information. You could set up differently to record it to CC or the automation lane. But I kind of like the flexibility of keeping it as audio. Then I can process that signal as I please in post.

I hate to lose a hand from my controller to do something like vibrato, so I put the contact mic under my MIDI controller. Toward the back of the controller, underneath, I have two of those pad things that I think are meant to go under furniture legs. I set those in such a place that my MIDI controller will rock a bit forward if I put pressure on the keys. Then I have the contact mic taped underneath in the front middle part of the controller, such that there is a an air gap between it and the desk top. Then I put a cloth pad in between to fill that gap. Now, I can play as I normally would with both hands on the keys and just perform the vibrato by pressing down slightly and with alternating pressure. It works much better than aftertouch! And you can vary the sensitivity by how soft of a pad you fill the gap with. It can be very sensitive if you want, or very insensitive.

If you don't want it under your controller, you could put it on the floor or under a pedal. Or hold it in your hand and squeeze it. Or bite it (might have toxic stuff on it). Use your imagination!

You wouldn't believe how perfectly it works! And so cheap!

And of course, you are not limited to only using a contact mic for vibrato! You could modulate anything with it. And you can filter the signal however you like to get only low frequencies, only high, or whatever. And since contact mics don't respond to pressure waves in air much, there is no feedback.

[JO512]

By the way, since the contact mic is here attached to the controller, when you hit a key, the key impact itself will generate a signal which will modulate your pitchbend a bit. You can filter this, since it is mostly high frequency, or in Reaktor, you can use an envelope generator to kill this signal for a short duration after a key-on. Clearly though, this will be mono and will affect all notes being played. You might also just mount the mic on the desk rather than the controller. Personally, I kind of like a bit of a bend right on the attack of the note. Such things happen naturally with acoustic instruments. You can determine if this bend is up or down by inverting the phase of the signal.

[leeleema]

YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT!

[whyterabbyt]

Piezos can produce voltages higher than your mic input expects. You might want to check how much voltage your piezo produces at maximum pressure so you dont wreck your audio inputs. IMO it might be safer to do this via an Arduino or something that generates the MIDI, a Uno is a lot cheaper than a new soundcard.

https://arduino.stackexchange.com/quest ... th-arduino