I’m beginning to think that MG3 may have a surprising use as an atomic utility plugin–to remap expression pedal curves for things like volume swells and wah-wah, which can benefit hugely from non-linear taper in the foot pedal. I recently asked how others were achieving non-linear curves in AUM on iOS, but in doing some experimenting I think there may be more conversation to have here, and not just for volume. (Hence the separate post. )
REMAPPING A PATCHBAY CURVE
MG3 has for a while now had the ability to configure a continuous controller’s curve in the Patchbay to be non-linear. You can set upper and lower bounds and vary significantly from the default linear curve.
AUDIO VOLUME PEDAL
In playing/tweaking things a little bit, I now have a usable, atomic MG3 preset that can act as an effective audio volume pedal plugin, with my expression pedal sending a curve similar to this into the MG3 Gain Module. Not only does it work, it’s far and away better than anything else I’ve tried thus far, and I’m actually pretty excited about it.
After proving the basic concept to myself, I started fiddling with the best way to get the expression pedal’s input to the instance of MG3 for this remapping. There are several ways to do it: I tried 1) having MG3 listen upstream, independently of AUM; 2) providing direct MIDI input to the plugin from AUM’s MIDI Routing table; and 3) mapping to one of the nine plugin container parameters that MG3 exposes to the DAW.
SEND A REMAPPED PEDAL ON MIDI OUTPUT
Somewhere along in there, I wondered if I could just dispense with the audio chain entirely, and actually use an instance of MG3 to do nothing but pass “control MIDI” downstream, as though it were another pedal device. And hot diggity, it works! Again after a little tweaking–this is still very new to me–I was able to configure the “wah pedal position” parameter of another audio plugin (IK’s Mixbox, in my case) to CC1, which was being provided not directly from my expression pedal, but instead from MG3, which received CC7 from the pedal, remapped it, and sent to CC1. I got a sort of “funhouse-mirror” wah sound, but the point was made!
For anyone curious to try it, the big keys seem to be:
- In your MG3 patch, connect the remapped curve from the Patchbay, to a node on the MIDI Output Module otherwise configured for as little overhead as possible (e.g. Legacy MIDI 1.0, Channel 1, No Pressure, No Bends)
- Make sure that if you want audio to “pass thru” the MG3 plugin to another in the same AUM Channel, you leave open an audio-only Chain for that purpose.
- In the AUM MIDI Routing table, make your utility instance of MG3 available to AUM’s “MIDI Control” endpoint, so you can use it to pass data into plugin parameters.
NEXT STEPS?
I sense this might be a big deal, at least for me. I never thought of using an instance of MG3 for “nothing more” than a utility function like, say, an audio volume pedal, or sending along a remapped, effectively “wrappered” expression pedal output. But now I’m starting to think about things like creating a small library of custom pedal curves, and then tweak MG3’s control options with Chains, MIDI Out Modules, etc., to be able to “stomp in” one or more output curves to send on to one or more other AUM plugins using the standard plugin parameter connection.
More concretely, one such application could be: I could use an MG3 instance to create an effective “volume/wah” stomp, sending either tapered audio volume or a tapered MIDI CC7 response with no audio, or turning that “side” off and instead sending MIDI CC11 to a wah plugin, with or without parallel (and untapered) audio.
Or, leaning on my use of IK’s MixBox plugin specifically, I could set up a rack of filter modules (e.g., Wah, Formant, etc.), each with its own optimized curve taper, and then just “stomp in” the one I want to use. It’s crazy to be thinking of using MG3 to control the plugin parameter data going into another plugin, but I’m starting to see that this is entirely possible!
And of course other ideas will certainly occur. If nothing else I am again looking forward to some T&E time!