3/14/2023 0 Comments PolyphonicSeveral major DAWs, including Logic, Cubase, Waveform, Bitwig and, most recently, Live 11, now offer simple plug-and-play compatibility with MPE controllers. More importantly though, implementation has become far more mainstream. ROLI’s own Blocks and LUMI ranges are both available below £300, while other brands such as Joué, Sensel and Artiphon have their own unique takes on the ‘expressive’ controller concept that can be picked up around the same price point. So what’s changed? For one thing, expressive MIDI controllers are becoming more affordable. Similarly, when we first tried out ROLI’s affordable Blocks range, we were, in all honesty, fairly underwhelmed by the somewhat limited implementation. While the Seaboard Grand and Continuum made use of internal sound engines, the LinnStrument originally involved a fair amount of user setup, meaning potential users needed the ability to imagine precisely how they’d make use of it in their setup. The original Seaboard Grand from ROLI retailed at around $2,000, and the Haken Continuum goes for over double that.Įven as more affordable controllers began to appear, it wasn’t immediately obvious what to do with them. Why should you care?Įarly iterations of MPE controllers were fairly easy to write off as niche and often expensive oddities. In more recent times, alongside ROLI creator Roland Lamb, several other instrument designers have played a key role in the development and popularisation of MPE, including QuNexus creator Keith McMillen and Roger Linn, who launched his own MPE controller in the form of the LinnStrument. There was also the Eigenharp, a kind of space-age saxophone that arrived in 2009. The Continuum and its various offshoots are still available today, and although they work with the MPE protocol their creator still states that the Continuum fingerboard is more sensitive and faster than any other device on the market. Back in 1999 Dr Lippold Haken created the Continuum, a synthesiser focussed around a highly-sensitive touch fingerboard designed for advanced polyphonic expression. Just as the underlying tech isn’t entirely new, the concept of expressive controllers isn’t entirely unique to ROLI, either. Effectively, think of it like controlling separate instruments for each note, all from a single controller. MPE devices assign each note its own MIDI channel, with a further channel used for global messages such as program change. Traditionally, these multiple channels have been used for multitimbral control, or to allow musicians to chain multiple instruments from a single MIDI output - you could, for example, sequence a synth on channel 1, then make use of that synth’s MIDI thru port to send MIDI to a second synth assigned to channel 2. The MIDI protocol uses 16 channels, and standard MIDI gear usually requires the use of only one of these. MPE does this by using multiple MIDI channels simultaneously. With an MPE controller, sliding just a single finger in a chord shape to a new note will alter the pitch of just that note, leaving any other notes in the chord completely unaffected. When playing a chord with a traditional MIDI keyboard, using the pitch wheel will alter the pitch of every note in that chord simultaneously. What sets MPE controllers apart, however, is that they send each of these messages on a per-note basis.
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