Vember Audio Surge is now open-source

[Tj Shredder]

Even MPE is plain old Midi 1.0 from 1984 or so… We can abuse it to our liking…
The only thing I never understood, is why there are so little registered parameters. Most synths have oscillators, filters and envelopes. If those common parameters would be standardized, one could easily make universal synth controllers…

[martiu]

A smart sound designer would modulate a given parameter with both, then it would work with MPE as well as with PA…

This too.

Hi Evil, i was wondering if there is any progress in the Shortcircuit development?
Thanks

[FrogsInPants]

It's about making expressive playing as painless and approachable as possible, not about following specs blindly...

It does make practical sense to me, from the user's perspective, to present a single aftertouch modulation source that responds to either poly AT or channel AT. I don't think the Surge team is following the specs blindly, though. What I've read from them generally seems carefully considered. There may be architectural or historical reasons to keep them separate, but I could only speculate as to what.

[EvilDragon]

Hi Evil, i was wondering if there is any progress in the Shortcircuit development?
Thanks

Join our Discord server and you can then keep abreast of how things are going.

[EvilDragon]

There may be architectural or historical reasons to keep them separate, but I could only speculate as to what.

Well, originally there was no MPE in Surge, but there was polyphonic aftertouch modulator available. So in order not to break old patches MPE Pressure was deemed its own modulation source.

[baconpaul]

So practically, if you have an MPE patch which uses channel at and you want to use it on poly at device, you can right mouse on the channel at modulator, choose copy modulation, right mouse on the poly modulation, and paste the routings.

One of the reasons to separate the modulators is: outside of MPE mode channel at is not a voice level modulator so we know we can route it to fx and the like and poly at is only a voice level modulator.

[baconpaul]

not about following specs blindly...

The nice thing about specs, and following them, is it makes the product predictable. Surge has a philosophy of being very “transparent” in its midi. Channel at and poly at are different messages so they are different modulators.

You can argue whether this is good or bad. In one sense it makes the synth easy to use if you understand how stuff works. On the other hand it means the synth adds the cognitive burden of knowing how things work.

I am sure there are synths that don’t make this distinction and only have aftertouch as a voice level modulator. And they would have lower cognitive burden until they don’t, and when they don’t would be their own spec. That’s fine!

But as tj said above midi has been with us since 1984 and has worked ok. Show that to the user and let them do what they want is one design response to it and the one surge has.

Oh and “the one trick” with mpe that worked for me is to realize it isn’t polyphonic at all. It’s 15 stacked monosynths. Totally different than the true polyohony hinted at in poly at (which has 128 voice addressable single values) and clap (which has infinite voice addressable infinite values). (Ok where 2^31 = infinity)

[ThomasHelzle]

Sure, I get all that. I just repeatedly run into the issue to explain things to "normal people" and musicians who are totally baffled by these concepts and it doesn't make any sense to them and I fully get why.

Technically all you say is true and valid and correct, but if you have a controller (like many drum controllers) that can send PolyAT, you may sit there totally out of your depth why it does not work with an MPE synth/preset when MPE is all about polyphonic expression down where it counts for humans.

I understand it, I have the technical background, but for a normal human being, it's total gobledydok from the dark side of nerdistan...

I don't have a solution, I personally just tend more to the side of making things approachable than I care about specs.
One option may be, to have a toggle in preferences between "correct" and "easy" mode for AT/Pressure to be able to use MPE patches without modification with PolyAT controllers.
But that is not even a feature request, more of an idea how this could be approached - and of course it would make things even more complex

That is what we humans are all about, make simple things complicated!

Cheers!

Tom

[FrogsInPants]

Oh and “the one trick” with mpe that worked for me is to realize it isn’t polyphonic at all. It’s 15 stacked monosynths.

Does that mean it's running separate instances of the effects chain, or are the outputs still summed and run through a single instance of the effects chain? I notice the Channel AT/MPE Pressure modulator can still target effects parameters in MPE mode.

[baconpaul]

Yeah it is one effect chain still. The analogy isn’t perfect

It’s a shortcoming in surge that you can see the Chan to fx assignment in MPE mode. (Strictly there should be 3 modulators and Chan being reused is sucky). Maybe we will fix thst form 1.3 so it doesn’t show up. And also make sure it is suppressed.

[baconpaul]

One option may be, to have a toggle in preferences between "correct" and "easy" mode for AT/Pressure to be able to use MPE patches without modification with PolyAT controllers.

Yeah if there’s one conclusion I have from decades of using technology it is that we as humans aren’t very good at making technology. Chuckle

I rather like this idea though and will think about it. Could be an easy option

[EvilDragon]

I think we already have too many options, tbh. ^_^;

[AlexTtrmnmdd]

Hello everyone, I'm a new user here. I have a question, but I'm not sure if I should create a topic for it.

Is it possible to change the cutoff parameter only for the noise generator? I want the cutoff not to affect the rest of the oscillators, just the noise. I know that I can use a second scene for this purpose. But is it possible to do this only within one scene?

[aMUSEd]

How do I load presets from the Bitwig browser for the CLAP version?

[Mutant]

Hello everyone, I'm a new user here. I have a question, but I'm not sure if I should create a topic for it.

Is it possible to change the cutoff parameter only for the noise generator? I want the cutoff not to affect the rest of the oscillators, just the noise. I know that I can use a second scene for this purpose. But is it possible to do this only within one scene?

Hello
I am fairly sure the answer to your question is no.
Assuming you already tried the noise color slider ?
You could also try to change oscillator type to S&H noise and tweak some parameters for filter-like effect.