Post
by xer4111 » Tue Oct 06, 2015 9:29 am
Just a little more on why this issue is important to performers:
1. iPads and newer "flat" keyboards that are readily available (and very inexpensive) support poly pressure or poly-aftertouch. There are LOTS of examples.
2. Pretty much all the Arturia soft synths support poly aftertouch - if you engage "AT" and you are setup to send poly AT, it works. Most people don't know about this because they don't try to use it that way. I use it to great advantage in Pro Tools and Mainstage.
3. Reaktor and Kontakt also support poly AT and it is easy to Mod instruments like Razor to receive poly AT, which is REALLY cool.
But here's the thing - ANYONE using Ableton Live will never know that these work even if they are using a hardware device supporting Poly AT because Live filters out all Poly AT messages and doesn't pass them to the software instruments.
So again, even if it's only pass through with no support to record the Poly AT information, people would be able to perform with it, and record audio if they wish to record clips. The musicality of poly AT when properly worked into a string patch, pad or polyphonic keyboard sound is really worth having. Doing wild filter sweeps on select notes, or activating vibrato or other LFO effects is totally worth having. There are other applications as well depending on how good one is at patching synths.
If you're only launching clips, then of course, this is all irrelevant I suppose, but if you are launching clips while also playing parts using instruments loaded into Live, where Live is the "host" for your sounds, then this becomes a very valuable feature.
So, Again Ableton team, please give this a new look. It can't be too hard to implement pass-through so that instruments can "hear" and "respond" to poly AT message. Okay - all for now. Thanks for listening.
Rex Perry
Perry Multimedia Inc.
Ableton user since version 2