Smooth Pitch Bends

Hi all! I’m a registered Renoise user, and love the program. But today I was trying to write music for my MT-32, which alas, does not support the MIDI CC to pop the synth into mono mode. This means that my only alternative is using pitch bend commands. Unfortunately, it’s time consuming to automate all the pitch bends, and the problem with the MIDI pitch bends in the pattern editor is that they’re instantaneous. With only per-row resolution, this is far too choppy. I’d like to see a pitch bend inertia setting so that I could set a pitch bend value and have Renoise automatically glide to the note, sending out the many pitch bend commands needed for a smooth glide to my MIDI device.

You can use the pitchbend option in the Midi Control device and automate that parameter. The values in the automation are more smoothly interpolated.

Hi vV, I would (and have), but it is time consuming to draw all of the pitch bends. I typically use pitch bends for detailed lead work, and for that it helps a lot to be able to specify the bend as part of the pattern data (as with the 2xx/1xx command). I’ve had limited success sampling a note and using those standard tracker commands, but ideally I’d be able to do something similar with MIDI commands. A pitch bend command that works like slide up/slide down would be great: slide up would move the wheel upwards, down downwards, and the pitch wheel would snap back to center on a new note.

I was about to say that you can cheat recording pitchbend automation by dumbly mapping the slider to your modwheel controller, but your modwheel does not jump back to the center automatically.

I know what you mean in the general idea, there is much to improve…

The XY Device has a spring mechanism (auto-reset), but it doesn’t seem to work with external MIDI mappings

i was just thinking about this too for my hardware. i think the best is just to sample it and use the pattern fx

Yes, there is MUCH MUCH MUCH to improve. WHEN is it going to be improved?

Come on guys, smooth pitch bends are a STANDARD for ANY software that handles midi. It seems that this is quite a wanted option–what’s the holdup?

+1

Thanks.

To be really clear too–just making 01xx and 02xx affect midi and vst instruments would be great–even if the values can’t be entered through midi, just the PLAIN ABILITY to do smooth pitch bends on vst instruments would be nice. One would simply have to type 0100 to reset the pitch back to normal.

Don’t know if it is that easy since I am not sure if all VSTi behave the same way… :unsure:

True, very true–however, that’s expected behavior, and it was always the case with midi as well, 0108 might mean much less or much more depending on the instrument, and in some cases, slides don’t do anything on some vst instruments, but at least the music software isn’t what’s stopping it from working. To not be able to do it AT ALL is horrible.

This hits me the most when I’m going through old songs with med and hearing all the great melody lines that are impossible to do in renoise and how I’ve pretty much refrained from using pitch bends since I started using Renoise in 2004–initially it was a good tradeoff, but now I really really miss being able to do pitch bends.

In all honesty, it’s actually more like a bug–that 01xx and 02xx aren’t working.

+1

This mapping 0Fxx (vibrato) to CC 1 (mod wheel) and 03xx (Set channel volume) to CC 7 (volume) would be pretty useful to.

This is how it was done on many Amiga trackers (like Protracker and Octamed).

See also here: Sliding Midi And Vst Parameters?

A full blatter but no toilet or tree near?

The slide speed “problem” can easily be solved by adding a “bend range” parameter to the instrument settings for Ext MIDI and plugins.
(the parameter is set to the bend range of the external instrument)

However I also agree that it doesn’t even need to be solved.

Just 01xx and 02xx with instrument dependent speed and some way to reset pitch worked well in the past and will do nicely for lead work.