I wanted to take a moment away from asking all the pedantic questions I usually do, and just offer the comment that I am seriously enjoying observing the effect that MG3 is having on my creative idea mill. When an advance in technology actually causes you to rethink not just the details but fundamental ideas and how everything should fit together, that’s a revolutionary advance, not just an evolutionary one.
Part of it, for me, is that MG3 is opening my eyes to how to think within the larger MIDI landscape. (I didn’t even think about MIDI at all, until a few years ago.) For example, when I first struggled to figure out how to work with first the Sustain module and then later the Looper module, it never occurred to me that those modules need to come before the instrument in the chain. In audio signal chains, I think of a sustainer or looper as coming after the sound is generated; but for a MIDI-note-driven instrument it obviously (duh, he says, rolling his eyes at himself) has to come before the sound is generated. This is probably self-evident to anyone who has been around MIDI instruments for a while, but this was quite a revelation to me.
And the creative use of the MG3 Modulators is truly mind-boggling to my thinking. The true “aha” moment for me, there, was just the simple case of using the Invert envelope as the mechanism for creating A/B logic for a single Patchbay mapping. Now, I don’t know what else may occur to me down the road because of this simple case, but now my eyes are open to it, and I suspect something interesting (at least to me) will follow.
Actually, the first of such ideas has already happened. On the way home from work one day this week, the question popped into my head: if the envelope handle on the simple Invert envelope can be used to create an A/B stomp, I wonder if I could get the ADSR envelope to behave like the Electro-Harmonix Attack Decay audio pedal (minus the fuzz of course, but still!). And holy cow, it works! Okay, I still need more testing as it seems a little fiddly thus far (hard to be really precise with a small UI), but I can definitely get the gist of what the EHX pedal does with autoswell and deliberately choked decay times. Methinks I will be able to find a use for that!
Anyway, again, I am seriously enjoying the MG3 beta, not only for the sensational improvement in liveliness that the MPE data brings (and I haven’t even scratched the surface of that, yet), but also for what the vast improvements in control are doing to my thinking. Thank you profusely, @JamO, for making this effort, and for managing all the questions. The result is already spectacular.
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