strike seems pretty obvious, but is there a way for the player to influence pressure?
and could you elaborate on brightness? palm muting = less bright, but that’s kind of binary. higher strings = more brightness is mentioned in the video. are there any other input factors?
lastly i haven’t seen any mention of aftertouch. please describe how this is implemented in mg3.
Palm mutes are of course the most dramatic, but in general on guitars, higher frets usually have lower brightness… Open strings are most bright. So you actually have the same notes on different strings sounds different.
Similarly you get a different response if you pick nail vs thumb, picking position close to the bridge vs above the pickups.
Aftertouch is subsumed by pressure. I believe most modern synths will use “channel pressure”, rather than “aftertouch” midi messages. We could of course make it optional to use aftertouch instead, if there is a case for it.
on a keyboard, i can control aftertouch.
i cannot control pressure on a guitar.
for me, pressure is not going to be a substitute for aftertouch.
aftertouch may disappear in the future, but as of today there are literally millions of presets which employ it.
Good point.
Channel pressure and aftertouch is used for the same thing (pressing keys during the note sustain), and I guess I might be too biased towards the MIDI MPE/2.0 specs. Its been a while since I read them, but I believe that they always recommend using channel pressure instead of aftertouch messages for the same thing. I could be wrong.
But even then, you are right, because of compatibility. I’ll put a selector in MG3 to select among “channel pressure” and “aftertouch” messages.
i still don’t see how one is supposed to alter anything about the note after it has started to sound.
aside from pitch, that is.
on a keyboard, the key is pressed, the note sounds as long as it is held (literally could be minutes), and only is altered during that time if one increases the pressure. releasing the add’l pressure returns to sound to its original state.
(blue sky thinking alert): using mg3’s sustain, i no longer need to hold the note. can some sort of open string noise like sliding up or down right over the pickup be used to increase/decrease aftertouch?
(I’ll just avoid arguing about the fact that a guitar isn’t a keyboard - that’s another discussion)
You can connect a cable from any MIDI controller to the synths pressure knob. Then you have a keyboard-like behaviour (aside from its using channel pressure, rather than aftertouch, but I’ll fix that).
Yes, we thought about the sustain/freeze pedal too - Right now it just sustain without reacting to anything, but it could actually react to tracking changes in pressure and brightness for the held notes, when held. I think this could react to string noise/picking/scraping.
i did some reading up on aftertouch. there are two reasons i think it is important:
the sound designer has chosen the effect(s) they consider most important for that particular patch and assigned those to aftertouch.
there is no specific cc one can use to mimic aftertouch**.
for instance a sound designer may have chosen to assign aftertouch to both filter cutoff and lfo rate.
they may also have picked particular ranges for each.
handling this outside of aftertouch would require a fairly tedious amount of work.
this is why i think it is desirable for mg to transmit aftertouch.
but we still need a way to trigger it. in most cases, i guess users will choose an expression pedal for this.
i understand that the future will be different. but, today, a solution is required, and will provide increased playability on the million+ existing patches with aftertouch, on the antique yet common synths we all use.
please consider arranging a pedal pass through for aftertouch. this doesn’t seem simple, but i think it is a feature which would get regular use.
** please correct me if i’m wrong on this.
edit to add: i found an old vst64 which converts cc to aftertouch/channel pressure. i’ve tested it directly with hive, analog lab and several korg synths and it is very useful.
i do not have it passing directly through mg2 yet, but for me that’s secondary as i route the midi to synths instead of loading them in mg2.
the util is called ‘midiconverter3’ and it can be found here:
it certainly is the quickest way to wake up the types of presets i happen to use. typically the effect is more pronounced than you’d get by using the modwheel.
To complete this bundle you can also download “pizjuce”, which contains some excellent utilities.
All these plugins have a basic interface but are useful and effective.
I use a number of them regularly…
This link contains :
-pizmidi (for Mac+ Windows 32bit and 64bit).
-pizjuce (for Windows 32bit and 64bit only).
Select last versions of course.
Thank you for the research, kimyo.
I understand and as mentioned above I will add aftertouch in the next update:
If you select to send aftertouch on a synth, the pressure input becomes aftertouch instead. It will send the guitars pressure envelope by default, as MIDI aftertouch messages, and you can override it with a cable to any kind of pedal or LFO.