Ableton Forum

I'm looking specifically at Ableton's built in Basic Tonewheel Organ. I know they were built as fixed velocity instruments, but I'm not concerned with it sounding "authentic" or historical. I want the sound I'm hearing in my head. (Sorry, but I needed to get that out of the way. Some people on other sites telling me "that's not how they are!" I get it....

The midi effect Velocity doesn't help. It affects the midi information going into a device. The Tonewheel Organ turns them all into the same velocity. I have gone into the device (looks like it was built in Sampler) and I don't know what to change. I'm not super confident in my tone shaping, device building, sound syntheses abilities.

I hope someone has an idea about what I can change to give the instrument velocity sensitivity. Thanks.

One way is to open up the Basic Tonewheel Organ's rack to see the Sampler instances used. "Show/hide devices" button on the macro box, then the same on the "components" plugin which lets you select each line in the chain. So Simpler is showing. In Simpler's filter/global tab there's a control for how much velocity affects volume. It's the second control down to the left of the amplitude envelope display. In the preset it's set to 0%, you need to drag it to where it has the effect you want. You may need to make the setting for each line in the chain depending on what you want to happen.

Hope that helps, it's easier to do than to describe.

I didn't get notified of this response. I'll check my email settings in case it went to Spam. Thanks for the idea, I'll try it out.

This worked, and I was surprised because I thought I had tried this before. Maybe I hadn't turned up the Vol<Vel on all the Devices in the Chains. There are 2 Lines, 2 Rotaries and 1 Percussion. Definitely the first 4 are needed, depending on how they're dialed in with the Macros. The Percussion one doesn't affect it as much, and I may even turn that device off. I'll see how the song shakes out.

Thanks for the suggestion! I don't know if I would have revisited that. I clearly wasn't thorough enough before.

Glad it worked.

If Live’s racks have a down-side it’s that their power means they can be very complicated with a lot of inter-action going on between devices and sometimes settings are buried away in them out of sight, making it very easy to miss things. I’ve certainly spent quite some time trying to find just what needs adjusting in some of them - including racks I’ve built myself - before now.

There is a right-click menu option, "Copy to Siblings", that speeds up copying values between devices in a Rack. It may need to be enabled with options.txt, not sure.

I recently saw that the copy to siblings is available to more parts of Racks by using -EnableMapToSiblings in the Option.txt. That level of tweaking is kind of new to me, so I was poking around all over.