MIDI confusion: Unmapping mod wheel/button
MozartVonRobot
SwedenPosts: 25
Okay, so this is probably gonna make me sound stupid. I am stupid, so I accept that. And I've spent all this time not learning all the ins and outs of the Deluge, so here we are.
First of all, I'm trying to use a Yamaha SHS-10 keytar as a midi controller. Because it has a DIN jack and also because I'm stupid, as previously mentioned. This is where we're at.
I managed to get the Deluge to receive note messages from the keytar, which is a great start, but the vibrato button (which this thing has instead of a mod wheel, I guess, and I've seen this on newer keyboards as well, such as the Korg nanoKey2, which I have but can't test because it's USB only) seems to have auto-mapped to...something. It cuts a lot of the treble off a lot of the synth patches whenever I don't hold it down, so my ears tell me it's the lowpass cutoff frequency, defaulting to...low. Except I looked up how to unlearn that, and a video told me it's shift+frequency and then shift+learn. That does nothing. So it's gotta be something else, right? I tried shift+treble then shift+learn. Still nothing. Then I tried shift+LPF and then shift+learn, and it says "CAnt". I also tried to map the button to another function. It did not fix it.
I'm running out of guesses here. It seems no matter what I do, everything's muffled unless I'm holding down the vibrato button. It could be some other parameter (could even be velocity and aftertouch, for all I know, since I don't know how the Deluge handles those things). A sensible person would probably give up because there's really not that much to gain from getting this to work except the learning experience, but if this is solvable, I wanna know how, because I'm determined to finally learn the ins and outs of this thing, and that includes MIDI mapping it to a toy.
Oh and bonus question: Can I set the pitch bend range on the Deluge? Pitch bending a whole octave is rarely of much use to me. One or two semitones tends to be my preferred bend range depending on what I'm doing, and pitch bend range is set on the receiving end, not on the controller (the keytar actually has a setting for pitch bend range, but it only affects the crappy internal FM synth of the keytar itself).
Comments
for the vibrato switch on the SHS-10, the best way to troubleshoot this issue is to figure out for sure what parameter it is affecting. ideally you could find a program that displays incoming midi of a device plugged into your computer, there might be a way to figure it out through trial and error on the deluge though. if you shift+frequency you'll be in the frequency sound editor adjusting from 0-50. the idea here is to enter every parameter this way, press your vibrato switch a few times and see if you notice the value change on the display, if it doesn't, then switch to another parameter. i would double check without the shs-10 if the sound is meant to normally be dull (so the vibrato is actually brightening things) too.
as for adjusting pitch bend range: enter the deluge menu -> defaults -> bend -> change from 12 to whatever semitone you prefer, like 1 or 2.
Okay, I've done some experimenting, and I don't see any numbers changing, but... my initial interpretation was definitely a bit off. It sounds like turning up the filter envelope sustain to the max really fast when I push the button, and then going back to whatever the gold knob is at (which is not necessarily the same value that's saved in the patch), and then it behaves really weird when I switch to a different patch. The lights seem to indicate that it's changed the cutoff to whatever that patch says it should be, but that's not what it sounds like. What I hear is the same cutoff I left the previous patch on, so it carries over. It's like it's re-reading the knob after disengaging this weird filter envelope sustain thing it's doing, and then re-reading the knob again when switching to the next patch.
So that's weird, right? Or is my brain just not working properly because I should be asleep?
Oh, and by stringing a couple USB cables together, I managed to try it with one different keyboard for comparison, and it appears to be the same behavior, except I have a bit more control, and it's definitely the filter sustain, somehow. I haven't familiarized myself enough with the deluge synth engines to know exactly how to get into every single possible parameter, and I haven't found one that's visibly affected, but that's what my ears are telling me (with the analog modeling synth, not with the FM, although it's affecting the brightness there too).
Thanks! That seems to have worked.