Sequencing an Octave Pitch Bend

[ggm1960]

Have you ever creating an ascending pitch bend over the course of a measure or two? Just wondering what technique you might use.

I was recently doing this but it seemed kind of weird trying to get to where I wanted to be. First I went to my synth editor (Fantom X-edit in this case) and edited my patch to have an octave bend range. Then I figured in DP8 I'd just draw in a straight line pitch bend over the course of a measure at the bottom of the MIDI edit window, from 0 to 127. Where it got weird is that the pitch bend max's out before getting to 127 and then looking at the event list window the highest number is 8064 I believe. In order to spread the octave bend up over the course of the measure I could only go up to about 83-84 on the MIDI editor window.

It seems to work fine but it just makes me wonder about the strange relationship between the numbers in the event list and the MIDI edit window. Does any of this make any sense?

[mhschmieder]

The feature you are looking for is called Portamento. There is no clear delineation between the boundaries of Glissando, Portamento, and Pitch Bend, but more often than not, a large pitch transition is most easily handled by Portamento, and other approaches often are out of range.

Generally I do this case-by-case as the sound source often has its own way. For instance, Vienna Symphonic Library has a bunch of pre-recorded portamentos, whereas Sample Modeling requires some specific MIDI keyswitches, CC's, and note overlap and is quite precise in how these are handled based on overlap amount, timing offset of second note from first note in the range, etc.

There may be a more general way to achieve portamento (after all, it's a standard MIDI CC as well, and better implementations also support the additional Portamento Speed parameterization), via the graphical editing tools in DP, but I've never bothered since the handling is usually library-specific. When I did it in hardware on my Yamaha synths, that too was done on-board the synth via patch programming, and this is also true of my Voyager.

[doodles]

yep, you're right about going up to 8000 or whatever.

I do this quite a lot, and the way you're describing is mostly correct. Set the synth patch so pitch bend equals an octave. Then for me, I record myself with the pitch wheel live over a couple of bars. Then go into edit window and smooth over a bit with the tools from the toolbar. works great!

[Shooshie]

Ribbon Controller. Two octave range, zero center. (1 octave either direction)

[monkey man]

Set the synth patch so pitch bend equals an octave. Then for me, I record myself with the pitch wheel live over a couple of bars. Then go into edit window and smooth over a bit with the tools from the toolbar. works great!

Precisely what I do.

I suspect the patch on the Fantasm was programmed with the more-or-less-standard 2-semitone range.

[ggm1960]

Set the synth patch so pitch bend equals an octave. Then for me, I record myself with the pitch wheel live over a couple of bars. Then go into edit window and smooth over a bit with the tools from the toolbar. works great!

Precisely what I do.

I suspect the patch on the Fantasm was programmed with the more-or-less-standard 2-semitone range.

Yes most patches on the Fantom XR unit seem to have a default bend range of a whole step so the first thing I did was save the patch I chose to use into a user location where I could edit it and just simply changed the pitch bend range to be +/- 12 semitones. So I figured 'ok I just need to pencil in my pitch bend in a straight line up from 0 to the 127 max'. I suppose it might have made sense to think that 64 was the middle and one could bend up or down from there but that would have also been wrong.

After a few 'undos' it turned out that the MIDI edit window bend up number needed to be 83-84 in order to get the whole octave bend which in the event list is 8064.

It worked out fine that way but it just made me wonder if there's some kind of formula that allows one to calculate the relationship between the numbers used in the MIDI edit window and the larger expanse of numbers that appear in the event list.

[monkey man]

Oh, sure, there'd be a formula... somewhere. My money's on Shooshie if anyone's bothered to work one out at all; he seems to have spent an awful amount of energy over the years documenting aspects of MIDI usage most would simply ignore / pass by. He's got formulas for everything. I'll bet he's got a formula for formulas.

FWIW, the reason I didn't also suggest the portamento option is simple - most hardware only offers a "time" option, specified in seconds. You couldn't just choose a starting note that'd allow the desired pitch to be reached in that one measure; you wanted a full-octave sweep, no more, no less. I will say this, 'though: Over the years I've noticed that on average hardware units sweep portamento more smoothly than high-range pitch bends. My guess is that somehow the pitch-data input, whether generated by an on-board wheel or stick or by a sequence editor, is the weak link. One would have to approximate the internal resolution of the synth engine in order to match the smoothness of its portamento glide. I s'pose I'm saying that if you had, say, DP, generate every pitch-event step at the highest resolution possible and at consistent speed, you'd expect results equivalent to the porta generated by the synth.

All this seemed like overkill at any rate, hence the PB suggestion, albeit echoed as doodles beat me to the pitch... er... punch.

[mhschmieder]

Yes, it's been a big problem for me that most DAW's don't offer Portamento Time. More than any other reason, it's why I went backwards from the MOTIF series to the CS6x (that one also had better filters, by the guy who later did the ones for the XS/XF and earlier had done them for the EX5).

I felt a bit guilty when the XS Rack didn't seem to do as well as earlier racks (I think racks in general had started falling out of favour), as it had a Portamento Time knob at my urging (surely it wasn't just for me, but I stopped giving end user input after that as I felt it might be too heavily weighted vs. generic market research).

At any rate, I think the ribbon controller idea is the best, as you can buy the one Kurzweil makes and attach it to most keyboards (IIRC; I got out of live-oriented keys a few years ago when my 80's tribute band faded into the sunset). It's a very ergonomic solution. Kurzweil also made a controller unit for the ribbon strip, but I found it hard to work with so sold it.

Even the shorter-throw ribbons that come on many synths and DAW's are ergonomically easier to work with for such ranges than typical pitch bend or assignable expression pedals.

[Shooshie]

With all the VI stuff, I've been drifting away from my hardware setups, and it gets harder for me to go back and remember how I used all my settings. So, I opened some old files and dug into the Kurzweil to see how I set things up. I'd use Setup presets to store the settings for all the controllers I used for various songs, and I'd usually name the setup by the name of the song I was working on. With a few hundred slots, plus Unisyn, I never was in danger of running out. But Unisyn is long gone, at least on my current Mac, and I'll probably never see most of those setups again. But the ones that are still in my K2600 are useful.

Ribbons:
• Large - BendUp, PortTime, and sometimes others.
• Small - Expression, Breath Control, PortTime... others of course.

None of those are what I was looking for, though, and I don't remember how I used to do the octave-range portamentos on the ribbon. I could literally play a tune on the ribbon, like a cello or fretless bass. I just can't remember exactly how I set that up. NoteNum? (Relative, of course) Transposition? Those can do the job, but also get you in trouble. It probably is dependent on some element within the sound patch.

One thing for sure: ribbon controllers are expressive AND fun!

Shooshie