Jittery ghost notes in MDA Piano plugin

BETA TESTING
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In casting about for some basic piano options (just something I hadn’t done before), I thought I’d dig into the MDA Piano option bundled with MG3. The sound seems perfectly suitable, but for whatever reason it seems like I just get a remarkable number of false/unplayed notes with it, that I don’t get in, say, Decent Sampler’s Basic Piano, or with piano samples in IK’s SampleTank.

In my MG3 patch (I’m currently testing in iOS JTBC), I’ve tried changing the tracker itself, between “MG3 Expressive” and “MG2 No Bends” and with the Gate at various levels, and I’ve tried playing with the options in the MIDI Out module too, but I haven’t yet found a combination that doesn’t give me unplayed notes in between the real ones.

Of course my first thought was, “Is it my playing?” but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t get any such issues for example with the SWAM woodwinds, even with everything set up to be gloriously, fantastically touch-sensitive. (This concept “there is MPE right there in your fingers” is absolutely mind-blowing, and the moreso the closer I get to it.)

And the direct contrast somehow seems telling. The aforementioned Decent Sampler and SampleTank pianos both seem happy with the tracker set at “MG3 Expressive” and with the gate set around 20-25, and with the MIDI Out module set at “MIDI 1.0 Multichannel” with channel pressure and no bends. I get a few false notes every now and then, but nothing that actually seems out of whack (with a little attention, I can nearly always “play around them” with careful muting). The MDA Piano, though, although it sounds good, just seems to throw a whole lot more falsies, no matter how I configure things.

Do others see false notes with MDA Piano?

As I write this (and of course I’m away from my gear as I write this), I realize I haven’t tried decoupling my Modulators to see if that has an effect. Lately I have been using Modulators to “expand” the sensitivity of Strike and Pressure on almost everything I use (“expand” meaning I use the Modulators’ handles to set a truly maximum range on both, and then map this directly into the MIDI Out module) as well. This change is like magic in the SWAM instruments, but might it have an effect here? I wouldn’t think so, but clearly something’s different here.

Anyway, any wisdom here would be much appreciated!

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the modulator setup could definitely be increasing the number of false notes.

also in this type of situation i would use a strike filter.

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Thank you kindly for the attention and for the idea, but I don’t think that’s it. When I got home to create a simple, atomic PoC test, I realized that my use of Modulators almost certainly wasn’t the problem–because the MDA Piano Instrument doesn’t expose any ability to tie into Strike and Pressure, like the MIDI Out module does for other Instruments, and I obviously wasn’t doing the “expand” thing in that patch. (I hadn’t visualized that patch correctly when I wrote my original question–my bad!)

I did try the Strike Filter module, but that just seemed to act, functionally, like a gate (maybe I’m missing something?), and didn’t seem to have an effect on my getting false notes. Even with the filter set high enough for me to really have to dig in to get any notes at all, I still got falsies. (And again, this phenomenon seems to be only with MDA Piano, not with other piano Instruments like Decent Sampler’s Basic Piano or any of SampleTank’s piano samples.)

(As to the Strike Filter, too, that seemed to be a little weird in that the “bypass switch” on that module doesn’t seem to click on and off like other modules, but it was certainly working in that I could dial up the filter’s value and have to Strike harder to get a note past it.)

Anyway I remain curious about this. It’s not a critical thing since both DS and ST are usable, but “I are a curious nerd” if nothing else. :nerd_face:

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the velocitiy knob in MDA piano compresses the velocity info, try to set it to a middle position. Even then it the curve not linear as far as I know. I disabled the velocity interpretation in my own code ( MDA Piano is open source), and that works way better.

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Thanks for that idea. Would that be the knob labeled “Velocity Sensitivity” that you mean there, the one which is default-valued to about 40%? (Some of those labels are awfully small BTW, not easy on middle-aged eyes!)

I admit to being a real n00b to MDA Piano in particular (and to modeled pianos in general), and haven’t really even tried to find or RTFM yet. (A quickie search didn’t seem to point to an obvious “definitive” manual–do you know if there is one, and if so where?)