Ableton Forum

I am looking for a controller which offers a higher resolution than 7Bit MIDI CC for controlling synths in Ableton.
Especially I have a problem to get smooth filter sweeps with Roland Cloud JX-8P Zenology, but also fine tune nuances of pitch with bx_oberhausen etc..

I would prefer (large) knobs, but I guess there are much more 14Bit controllers with faders available out there...


(I would love to use my 1023 step knobs on the Prologue, but they only send plain 7Bit MIDI CC.. Roland Jupiter X sends only SysEx ..)

Any hints or experience reports please..?

Thanks for looking into this topic!

In the mean time, I have found this thread: viewtopic.php?t=226279
There it is explained that push2 cannot be used for absolute 14Bit (or at least 10Bit) absolute knob control.
Push2 in device mode let's you relatively control synth parameters, with SHIFT pressed also with finer resolution.
But in absolute mode, the push works as a classic 7Bit MIDI CC Controller.

Seigh, there are nice Synths with nice 10Bit Knobs (1024 values), but unless MIDI2 Standard is established, it seems that there is not a single solution to use these as a nice hardware controller for doing sound design or sweeps with softsynths.

pulpicon wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 16, 2020 10:15 am

I am looking for a controller which offers a higher resolution than 7Bit MIDI CC for controlling synths in Ableton.
Especially I have a problem to get smooth filter sweeps with Roland Cloud JX-8P Zenology, but also fine tune nuances of pitch with bx_oberhausen etc..

I would prefer (large) knobs, but I guess there are much more 14Bit controllers with faders available out there...


(I would love to use my 1023 step knobs on the Prologue, but they only send plain 7Bit MIDI CC.. Roland Jupiter X sends only SysEx ..)

Any hints or experience reports please..?

I wonder will Midi 2.0 bring an increase to high resolution controllers. (Now that you mention it, I think Roland has made the first Midi 2.0 controller. Problem is that there is no Midi 2.0 DAW yet, but I think it works with Midi 1.0 and you would think it should have some high resolution controls).

I imagine there will be more controllers with like 16 bits of resolution or so.

jlgrimes wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 1:52 pm

I wonder will Midi 2.0 bring an increase to high resolution controllers.

Live supports high resolution controllers, check the second entry here:
viewtopic.php?p=1778840#p1778840



I think that covers it.

Yep, Live can handle 14 bit MIDI, though not very elegantly as it separates the LSB and MSM out so it looks like two CC commands rather than one. Handling and displaying 14 bit MIDI the same way as pitch bend (which is what Sonar did/does) is much easier to work with.

The real problem is that there aren’t many synths, hardware or software, that speak 14 bit MIDI and if a synth only understands 7 bit CC values, 0-127, then the controller having finer graduation is redundant. No matter how many values the controller can send the synth’s filters etc. will still only have 128 steps.

TLW wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 17, 2020 7:55 pm

Yep, Live can handle 14 bit MIDI, though not very elegantly as it separates the LSB and MSM out so it looks like two CC commands rather than one.

Handling and displaying 14 bit MIDI the same way as pitch bend (which is what Sonar did/does) is much easier to work with.

The real problem is that there aren’t many synths, hardware or software, that speak 14 bit MIDI and if a synth only understands 7 bit CC values, 0-127, then the controller having finer graduation is redundant. No matter how many values the controller can send the synth’s filters etc. will still only have 128 steps.

great info, I'll quote you on that in my post in the Obscure Knowledge Thread.

The real problem is that there aren’t many synths, hardware or software, that speak 14 bit MIDI and if a synth only understands 7 bit CC values, 0-127, then the controller having finer graduation is redundant.

Yes, but at least VST Instruments (and the internal Ableton instruments) support high resolution parameter control (32 Bit float). Ableton just needs to "translate" high resolution MIDI (14 Bit) to VST parameters, and there you have it. That already works, but I don't have any high resolution hardware MIDI controller at home yet.

I couldn't get used to encoders yet which change to coarse/fine resolution depending on the knob turning speed - I think Push2 does that, for example - I would prefer a large knob with a resolution about at least 1000 steps. Korg Prologue, Roland System 8, Jupiter X have that, but they either send normal 7Bit CC or even SysEx, but not 14Bit CC.

No wonder modular systems and analog synths have a revival - they offer high(er) resolution on their knobs "by nature"... And maybe that's one reason why tweaking the Prologue is more fun than tweaking a softsynth with 7Bit MIDI CC.

Found this thread https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-c ... llers.html, but it is not much help and it seems the demand for high resolution knobs in controllers is quite low

In the mean time, I have found out that the Sequential Synths (Prophet 8 rev2, Pro 3, ...) do send and receive NRPN MIDI (2 data bytes, that means 14 Bit resolution). And they have many knobs. Anyone using these (or generally NRPN) to control parameters and softsynths in Ableton?

Hi, I created an open source project for 32 knobs midi controller. It is now supporting 10 bit resolution (1023 steps) and sending as 14 bit.

You will be able to buy a kit very soon or create your own from the open source projects.

shik.tech