Hi, I'm trying to figure out how to get Aalto's/Kaivo's voicing to work naturally in the Linnstrument's 'channel-per-row' mode, which maps each controller row to a separate MIDI channel. I would like each row to be capable of legato gestures, and for each row to be totally independent of the others.
For example, this mode could naturally fit a 4-stringed instrument, where each string is capable of sudden pitch changes or strikes without triggering a new polyphonic voice.
I've tried to distill what I'm looking for with a test MIDI file and patch.
test MIDI file (should play on MIDI channel 2).
If I put Aalto 1.8.5 in MPE + unison mode with 1 voice, then this sounds right to me. But unison mode with 4 voices instead of 1 will cause all of them to be heard for the duration of the envelope. And disabling unison also disables legato.
I could do this with a separate Aalto instance for each Linnstrument row, but it'd be so much nicer not to. Perhaps a "MIDI MPE Legato" mode could accomplish this and disable the unison toggle. Or maybe there's some other way to do this I haven't considered!
cf. https://madronalabs.com/topics/5334-kaivo-aalto-voice-stealing-legato
I think you are going to have to use one Aalto in unison mode per "string" right now. Voices will want to reassign to new incoming notes and aside from the unison switch there are no switches on that algorithm.
I do appreciate your idea of the "MPE Legato" mode and I can see adding that at some point. I'll add it as a feature request.
Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for the response and such great instruments.
I was thinking about your question from a few years ago in the other thread I referenced, about "what legato would mean without unison on, in other words, what is a poly legato note triggering mode?"
So one answer could be: a mode where each voice is thought of as a vibrating object, rather than a finger.
I've discovered that the newer u-he synths can be played this way, just by switching them to legato. (In their implementation, "unison" would be an inner stack of voices that all follow the same channel.)
I'll have to take a listen to the u-he instruments. If a synth is doing poly legato without something like MPE to tell it which "vibrating object" a note is on, there's always a decision to be made about which note to connect to a new one. Without getting too much into it here, I'd say it gets tricky pretty quick. :-)
Yeah, the physical analogy only goes so far ... there are definitely things you can't do with, e.g., Bazille. They don't have full MPE support, but you can get this "one string per channel" sound if you put it in legato or "mono" mode, and then just send it multichannel MIDI.