Ableton Forum

Hi,

I just came up with this idea to control several parameters thru a row of pushs pads with aftertouch (each pad mapped to a parameter thru the expression plugin)
so f.ex. you could control filter cutoff with your middle fingers pressure on a pad, whilst your ring finger is controlling lfo, etc...
would that approach work somehow (drumrack with different expressionplugins, each listening to a different note)?? or do we need to wait for ableton to implement this??

this is an example of an application for which poly aftertouch would be really golden.

Its doable, in m4l, with a few externals, but it would be simpler if live didnt filter polyaftertouch automatically ;p

ableton if you're reading, let me reiterate: we dont need to automate it, we just need to access it. Stop filtering poly aftertouch.

lo.key wrote:
ableton if you're reading, let me reiterate: we dont need to automate it, we just need to access it. Stop filtering poly aftertouch.

+1 ... please!

just giving us access would blow open the number of M4L devices that could be used with push. currently, its impossible because although you can grab control of the pads with flocked's M4L objects, we can't receive aftertouch data from the pads. there is a workaround where you can use aftertouch data sent through a live midi channel from push, but you still can't identify which aftertouch is coming from which pad. this makes it so that you can't use aftertouch on more than one pad at one time to control a parameter.

How does ableton "filter" aftertouch? Is always the last pressed pad the one sending aftertouch?

thats mono (or channel aftertouch). Its a single value that each pad sends out. We're talking about true poly (or note) aftertouch, which is a separate value for each individual note. The former is a global value, each key pressed overrides the last. The latter allows you to have individual control over the sound of each note. But live tosses it, because they dont want to deal with recording another 128 continuous values, for some reason. Its a glaring omission.

I don’t use M4L, but discussed a potential solution to this with Machinate and lo.key in this thread (the discussion starts on page 27 and continues to page 28). In short, you can send/receive unfiltered MIDI data by using externals and can set the type of aftertouch to use via a SysEx message.

Alternatively, what about using Note Repeat to accomplish this? When that’s activated, the pads send streams of notes (at quantized rates) to MIDI tracks, where the velocity of each note is determined by the pressure applied to the associated pad. Couldn’t an M4L device receive this data and use the received velocity to control parameters? Of course, this would only provide quantized control instead of continuous control, but that could be quite useful.

Nice one, Stray!
The NoteRepeat approach works!
Sadly the arpeggiator doensn't cut it, cuz it does only read the velocity of the initial pressure of the pad.
But with a Noterepeat and a midirack with keyzones I can assign different m4l expression-control-plugins to certain notes/pads to control parameters of a synth.

yeah, that is a really good idea!

Can we deactivate Noterepeat for a certain keyrange?

lo.key wrote:thats mono (or channel aftertouch). Its a single value that each pad sends out. We're talking about true poly (or note) aftertouch, which is a separate value for each individual note. The former is a global value, each key pressed overrides the last. The latter allows you to have individual control over the sound of each note. But live tosses it, because they dont want to deal with recording another 128 continuous values, for some reason. Its a glaring omission.

indeed... a glaring omission...

#1thelark wrote:Can we deactivate Noterepeat for a certain keyrange?

I don’t think so. However, it should be possible to ignore it for certain ranges/pads.

When Note Repeat is on, the note off sent for each repeated note has a velocity of 64. When the associated pad is released, a note off is sent with a velocity of 0.

So, I would think that you could detect the first note on sent from a pad (this would serve as the on message) and ignore any further note ons from the pad until a note off was sent with a velocity of 0 (this would serve as the off message).

metastatik wrote:When Note Repeat is on, the note off sent for each repeated note has a velocity of 64. When the associated pad is released, a note off is sent with a velocity of 0.

Where are you seeing that? (what objects are you using? Can you post a code sample which captures this?)

I'm just monitoring the output of a MIDI track with a MIDI monitor.

In M4L, I would think that you'd use a print object connected to a midiin object and look at the Max window.