On a keyboard plugged to this device, white keys will quantize to the scale and key while black keys will produce chords.
Sounds like it should be easy to emulate this in MODEP, using some of the MIDI modification plugins. My guess is that the simplest way to do this is to first split white and black keys through two MIDI filters, then apply scale quantization on the white keys and chords on the second. Sending knob CCs to both shouldn’t be too hard either.
I don’t know about doing it in MODEP, but I don’t think building a patch that would perform all these functions in pure data wouldn’t be too hard. Time consuming perhaps, but not super challenging… just a bit of a tedious process. Unfortunately I find myself wanting to use pure data and MODEP at the same time… which I think is going to require a second pisound.
Will probably go back to Pd for things like these, in the near future. But there really is something neat about MODEP for performance stuff. In a way, it feels even less like programming than Pd does. And it tends to work reliably.
Haven’t given this particular project so much thought, partly because it’s not exactly what would please me the most. But been dreaming about using MODEP for chording effects from monophonic sources.
(Will probably spend a bit of time trying stuff on the Axoloti Core. In this case, it’s similar to Pd without the benefit of a long history of patches and examples. To me, a key advantage is with polyphony itself. Rather convoluted in Pd, but trivial on Axo or on MODEP. Reaktor would be in between: not too hard to make things polyphonic, but it does require a bit of forethought. Also, a fun thing about the Axo is that it can work pretty well with MPE. It doesn’t sound like there’s any LV2 plugin which does MPE in MODEP and Pd doesn’t make it easy either. Max, Reaktor, and Axo are my best bets for use with MPE controllers.)
axoloti is easier than pd for polyphony/mpe for sure.
however, with PD 0.47 , using clone, polyphony is no where near as cumbersome/convoluted as it used to be in pure data.
MPE is also not that difficult to do either, though i admit there are quite a few ‘edge cases’.
if you look at patch storage you will find ‘brds mpe’ , which is an MPE version of my brds patch, which you could probably copy bits from.
(note: it doesn’t use clone/pd 0.47, since the Organelle (by default) has PD 0.46 on it)
at the end of the day, once you’ve got the structure for polyphony and mpe in a PD patch, its trivial to then change that for other patches, as the main dsp code sits in the voice sub patch which is unaffected by the voice architecture code.
Thanks for this! Will try to build on a Pi, but chances are that the MPE sections can help me grasp how Pd can process messages from my MPE controllers.
Thinking out loud about integrating with MODEP… @ThirdMountain made a good point about using two pisounds. Buying my second one was a pretty good idea, it sounds like.
Did have noticeable latency in my MODEP to Sonic Pi through MIDI setup, but maybe it won’t be a problem going from Pd to MODEP, especially if there’s no active sensing.
Another option might be to run the MPE from Axo to MODEP. Eventually tried @Abhoth objects and patches for Axo with a Lightpad Block and it works really well. In this case, using MODEP for output isn’t necessary (Axo synths work well). But there’s something fun about those virtual pedals you can control from another device through WiFi, while jamming. Still very portable and doesn’t require that many wires.
So many possibilities!
Might actually focus on Axo for a little bit. Although, the pure MODEP version of this “Key Control” could be fun.
Here is my attempt at recreating something like this device in Pd. I am relatively new to Pd so I am sure that there are plenty of redundancies that could be simplified, but sometimes it is helpful to take the long way around initially to better understand the merits of shortcuts. It was fun to put together regardless. I didn’t have a midi keyboard handy (saving up for a ‘MPE’ probably a ROLI seaboard… and a second pisound) so I used a qwerty keyboard with retrigger turned off. I settled on “c” through “/” for the white keys with the black keys being f, g, j, k, and l. The pattern I ended up using was ‘do, I, re, ii, mi, fa, IV, so, V, la, vi, ti, do.’ Anyways here is the patch… hopefully it is amusing if not interesting and useful. chord organ major minor transposition.pd (27.5 KB)
