KVR Audio

Vaporizer 2 seems to ignore the 0 pitchbend message before the note on making it a little useless for MPE, unless I am doing something wrong?

I discovered a bug in Wavetable and reported it. Any preset stored with MPE on will have a wrong range, it will revert to the expected, once you switch MPE off and on again… Lets see if it gets fixed…

Current by Minimal Audio.

One of those multi-engine synths with loads of effects. Subscription based but I will probably try it for at least a month anyway to see what the audio quality is like and whether the MPE implementation is up to scratch. Plus the user interface looks nice and clean.

https://www.minimal.audio/products/current

Although the new Gforce OB-X doesnt seem to mention MPE in its marketing, there is an option in settings called 'Poly Pitch Bend'. With this enabled and MPE turned on in Bitwig, I do appear upon a brief test to have got both MPE pressure and pitch working with it (and pitch range can go up to 48 and be locked). A quick try in Ableton didnt yield the same results, but I'll need to try that again. So more testing/knowledge required but its such a great sounding synth that I'd advise people to try it with their own setups if interested.

Ah it does work in Ableton Live too, I must have done something wrong earlier.

Minimal audio suffered a predictable user backlash over their subscription model for Current and have changed their approach.

I've been demoing Current and it's MPE implementation is excellent. I would say a close second only to Equator.

It checks all the boxes pretty much in terms of where some synth implementations are not quite ideal. A few new noteworthy things about it:
-It includes curves for modulators with freely assignable start and end points. This is similar to Equator and quite rare. The curves are not freely drawable with multiple nodes as with equator, but i find that for most use cases it is great. So things like assigning modulation only to the higher values of the pressure/timbre range for example where you might have multiple pressure mods, etc. and having separate control.
-It has a bi-polar option for all mods, which is important for timbre expression if you chose to use it that way.
-It seems to cycle the voice independently of the channel used for each note, which is useful if you have a control surface that cycles channels but re-uses the first available one, or if it's set up where notes are all assigned different, but fixed channels. This one is a bit weird to explain. So for example the bitwig note grid on screen always triggers the lowest channel, and every successive note uses a different channel. So on some mpe synths, if you have a sound with a long release tail, and you play a note while a previous one is still playing, the bitwig note grid will use the same channel as was recently used for notes still playing, and doing some expression or pitch bend will actually get applied to the note still playing as well, which you don't want. This is less an issue with a control surface where it cycles every note and doesn't reuse the lowest, but depending on voice count, could even be an issue there. This issue doesn't seem to affect all synths though. Some, like Equator and Current, apply independent expression to new notes regardless of if the same channel is used for a new note. I don't totally understand technically the reason for this, however it's nice when it's implemented this way as in Current. There's no chance of applying expressions to long release notes that are still playing as you are doing expressions on new notes.
-It maintains independent note expression in mono and legato modes, meaning that you don't get conflicting data when using note expression in mono mode. This is a problem for many mpe synths where for example you might cut off a note with another note and glide the pitch, and then cut that off with another note, which wrongly has the other notes pitch bend assigned to it, or they glitch out or whatever. All good with Current.
-It has a variety of sound sources, not only the wavetable and granular, but also a nice simple sample source which has good quality time stretch. While there are several granular mpe synths now, there actually aren't really any mpe sample players with a basic stretch mode with separate pitch and duration, which is really useful.
-It has a wide variety of interesting filters as well. While I really like Equator's oscillators, the filters leave a bit to be desired. So Current has a lot of similar functionality but with some really interesting filter modes.

Overall a very nice mpe synth!

Thanks for taking the time to write up your experience with that synth so far. I still ahvent had a chance to try it properly yet but you have motivated me to do so.

Meanwhile I see UVI Falcon 3 is out. MPE improvements are on the new features list but detail is very sparse, on face value it doesnt appear to be a big leap forwards, more likely they have mostly corrected some flaws with prior implementation.

I'd be interested in what the Falcon mpe improvements are. I had it for a while and the problem was that it was that mpe had its own script so you couldn't use it with already scripted things like the real world instruments that had some scripting such as guitars and instruments with custom interfaces. Would be cool if they actually baked in mpe tonwork with anything.

Echoes in the Attic wrote: ↑Mon Oct 30, 2023 4:42 pm I'd be interested in what the Falcon mpe improvements are. I had it for a while and the problem was that it was that mpe had its own script so you couldn't use it with already scripted things like the real world instruments that had some scripting such as guitars and instruments with custom interfaces. Would be cool if they actually baked in mpe tonwork with anything.

I havent learnt Falcon properly at all yet but the MPE still looks script-based to me.

A bunch of u-he plugins now have official MPE support available via public beta versions : viewtopic.php?t=603439

Dune 3.6 recently got full MPE, too

PHY6 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 17, 2023 8:39 pm AAS virtual instruments scream to be mpe.

Indeed! I can't believe their instruments still don't support MPE. It's such a shame.

There are so many options at this point though...

Cheers!

Echoes in the Attic wrote: ↑Thu Oct 19, 2023 6:28 pm I've been demoing Current and it's MPE implementation is excellent. I would say a close second only to Equator.
......
-It includes curves for modulators with freely assignable start and end points. This is similar to Equator and quite rare. The curves are not freely drawable with multiple nodes as with equator, but i find that for most use cases it is great.

Current's MPE implementation is decent but I wouldn't say it's close to Equator's. I find Vital's implementation to be wayyyy better. Not only it features freely drawable modulation curves with multiple nodes (like Equator) but you can have different curves for each modulator on each destination. So, for example, if you assign pressure to the cutoff frequency, to unison detune and to the LFO speed you can have a different modulation curve for each of those three destinations. And this is an extremely powerful and useful feature in my opinion. Current doesn't have this, it has only one (simple, not multi-node/freely drawable) curve per modulator.

Hopefully SynthMaster 3 will also feature drawable modulation curves (but the implementation might not be so straightforward and elegant as in Vital, if I understood correctly).