KVR Audio

Valky River · Post by **Valky River** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:03 am

Hi, this is Valky River. I am new to Surge Synthesizer.
I would like to use Surge VST with my Lumatone Isomorphic Keyboard, but I have a problem. It seems like Surge doesn't support each octave having a different MIDI channel.

According to the Scala help, different MIDI channels should have separate .kbm files (ending with an underscore followed by the MIDI channel number). I did precisely that, but there are two problems.

Surge can only load up ONE keyboard mapping at a time.

Surge ignores the underscored number, and maps the same notes to every channel.

This means that all MIDI channels will play the same notes, when they should be an octave apart.
Can someone please fix this problem?

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:07 am

Then you should definitely check out Surge XT, which is currently in beta. We have added octave-per-channel mode, and in fact tested it with one of Lumatone users.

Valky River · Post by **Valky River** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:09 am

please delete this post

Valky River · Post by **Valky River** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:32 am

EvilDragon wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:07 am Then you should definitely check out Surge XT, which is currently in beta. We have added octave-per-channel mode, and in fact tested it with one of Lumatone users.

The option "Use MIDI channel for octave shift" doesn't seem to do anything.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:33 am

We haven't tested Max/MSP so unfortunately cannot help you there. Can you try it standalone? Also, I'm not entirely sure but I think the option "Tuning applied at MIDI input" has to be set too. And due to the nature of the option, it is not compatible with MPE of course.

For any further help, I recommend joining our Discord server, #microtuning channel.

Valky River · Post by **Valky River** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:40 am

Never mind, problem fixed. I realized I had to run the MIDI channel into the "midiformat" message.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:41 am

Oh good!

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Mon Dec 06, 2021 10:56 pm

Wouldn’t it make more sense to convince the Lumatone makers to do microtones just with MPE? It would solve all problems much easier as MPE is a standard and octave per channel a pretty bad hack unless you need more than 15 note polyphony… With the similar concept of the Tonal Plexus I could only make it usable via heavy Max patches to translate into Midi a normal VST would understand…

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Tue Dec 07, 2021 8:05 am

Don't think MPE would fix it, channel per octave exists because of tunings that have (way) more than 12 notes per repetition interval (formerly known as "octave"). It's way easier to handle such tunings like that (because you get the same pitch appearing on the same key regardless of repetition interval).

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Tue Dec 07, 2021 6:16 pm

MPE would still transport all necessary information. It is just composed out of a Note pitch plus a pitch bend value vs. a note pitch plus a channel. It can’t play more than a 15 note polyphony though, which could be a problem for very long release times. It has the even bigger advantage, that you can have 128*16384 discrete pitches vs. 128*16. If you use the default 48 semitone pitch bend range its still roughly 128*340…
So pushing all keys of such a devices isn’t possible but also not necessary…

Surge not supporting multichannel layouts for microtuning